Bishnu Prasad Das

Sharing Manufacturing Information and Knowledge in Design Decision and Support

The integration of product design and manufacture has been pursued and advanced for over 20 years. Further advances continue to be pursued in the knowledge that success can lead to significant competitive advantage. This paper provides a contribution to the view that integration through information and knowledge sharing has the potential to offer designers and manufacturing engineers improved decision support based on the provision of high quality information. Our current research into both the definition of manufacturing information and knowledge models and knowledge sharing techniques is explained. Further, the potential for process specification languages to provide improved knowledge sharing is discussed.

A framework for collaboration moderator services to support knowledge based collaboration

Knowledge sharing is a major challenge for collaborative networks and is essential to improve the productivity and quality of decisions taken by both collaborative networks and their member organisations. A critical aspect of effective knowledge sharing within virtual organizations (VOs) is the identification of the most appropriate knowledge for reuse or exploitation in a particular context, as this requires efficient tools and mechanisms for its identification, sharing or transfer. Additionally, partners need to be aware of when knowledge needs to be shared, the implications of doing so and when their decisions are likely to affect other partners within the collaboration. Therefore, tools and methods are needed for identification, acquisition, maintenance and evolution of knowledge and to support effective knowledge sharing which includes awareness of possible consequences of actions and increased awareness of other partner’s needs during the collaboration. The Collaboration Moderator Services (CMS) are designed to address these issues relating to knowledge based collaboration by providing a set of functionalities to raise users’ awareness of opportunities, problem areas and lessons learnt from and during collaborations. This paper presents the system architecture and specifications of the CMS within the context of the SYNERGY system, whose purpose is to offer interoperable service utilities to help enterprises plan, setup and run complex knowledge collaborations. The CMS are designed to support both individual organizations and collaborations as a whole throughout the VO lifecycle and the different functionalities provided by CMS to achieve this are discussed in this paper.

BUILDING SUPPLY CHAIN COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS : A REVIEW OF METHODS AND TECHNIQUES

With the increasing importance of computer-based communication technologies, communication networks are becoming crucial in supply chain management. Given the objectives of the supply chain, supply chain management is situated at the intersection of different professional sectors, each of them with its own vocabulary, its own knowledge and rules. This paper provides a review of the main approaches to supply chain communications through the analysis of different ways of modelling a supply chain and the presentation of new semantic-based approaches that have been and are being developed to improve the quality of the information exchanges within the supply chain.

Towards the understanding of the requirements of a communication language to support process interoperation in cross-disciplinary supply chains

Many manufacturing organizations while doing business either directly or indirectly with other industrial sectors often encounter interoperability problems among software systems. This increases the business cost and reduces the efficiency. Research communities are exploring ways to reduce this cost. Incompatibility amongst the syntaxes and the semantics of the languages of application systems is the most common cause to this problem. The process specification language (PSL), an ISO standard (18629), has the potential to overcome some of these difficulties by acting as a neutral communication language. The current paper has therefore focused on exploring this aspect of the PSL within a cross-disciplinary supply chain environment.  The paper explores a specific cross-disciplinary supply chain scenario in order to understand the mechanisms of communications within the system. Interoperability of processes supporting those communications are analysed against PSL. A strategy is proposed for sharing process information amongst the supply chain nodes using the ‘PSL 20 questions wizard and it is concluded that, although there is a need to develop more effective methods for mapping systems to PSL, it can still be seen as a powerful tool to aid the communications between processes in the supply chain. The paper uses a supply chain scenario that cuts across the construction and manufacturing business sectors in order to provide a breadth to the types of disciplines involved in communication.

Generating rules from data mining for collaboration moderator services

A Moderator is a knowledge based system that supports collaborative working by raising awareness of the priorities and requirements of other team members. However, the amount of advice a Moderator can provide is limited by the knowledge it contains on team members. The use of data mining techniques can contribute towards automating the process of knowledge acquisition for a Moderator and enable hidden data patterns and relationships to be discovered to facilitate the moderation process. A novel approach is presented, consisting of a knowledge discovery framework which provides a semi-automatic methodology to generate rules by inserting relationships discovered as a result of data mining into a generic template. To demonstrate the knowledge discovery framework methodology an application case is described. The application case acquires knowledge for a Moderator to make project partners aware of how to best formulate a proposal for a European research project by data mining summaries of successful past projects. Findings from the application case are presented.

Application of Collaboration Moderator Service in Pharmaceutical Industry: A Collaborative Drug Discovery Use Case

Knowledge intensive industries benefit immensely from collaborative projects in virtual organisations. However the complexities of the business processes increase with the interdependencies. Successful operations of virtual organisations depends heavily on knowledge sharing among the partners as this is essential for improving the quality of decisions taken by the participating members. Collaboration moderators are specialist applications designed to address issues related to knowledge sharing and to provide functionality to raise awareness. This paper describes such a collaboration moderator service to aid collaborative drug discovery in a pharmaceutical virtual organisation.

- Information exchanges in a cross-disciplinary supply chain: Formal strategy and application

Abstract A supply chain is often considered as a network of facilities and distribution options provided by industrial companies. Many industrial organisations encounter interoperability problems amongst their software systems, particularly when the organisations belong to different industrial sectors, such as manufacturing and construction. Incompatibility amongst syntax and semantics of the languages used is the most common cause of this problem. The Process Specification Language (PSL), now ISO 18629 standard, has the potential to overcome some of these difficulties by acting as a neutral communication language. The aim of this paper is to propose a formal strategy facilitating those exchanges.

Learning Collaboration Moderator Services: Supporting Knowledge Based Collaboration

Collaboration Moderator Services (CMS) as an evolution of earlier Moderator research has emerged to address the issues relating to knowledge based collaboration by providing a set of functionalities such as raising awareness of business opportunities, problems areas, conflicts, change in the item of interests and lessons learned from collaboration. This paper presents a framework for learning CMS within the context of SYNERGY project. It has been shown that knowledge miners of CMS can be used to learn from the databases of the collaborative networked organizations (CNO) and semi-automatically update the CMS Knowledge Base. A case study from construction project has been used to show that the knowledge miner of CMS can “learn” by extracting various kinds of knowledge from Post Project Reports (PPRs) using different text mining techniques. The discovered knowledge in the form of rules relates to improving the processes, identifying recurring problems, good and bad practices, improving customer relationships and enhancing the coordination between members of CNO.

Prioritising Tendering Activities for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

The tendering process involves high costs, in terms of time and effort and therefore it is not desirable or sustainable to tender for projects unless the chances of winning are good. Small to medium sized companies do not have enough human resources to enable staff to be dedicated to the job of tending and monitoring market opportunities, and hence company officials have to fit in this job around their usual duties. This paper proposes a knowledge discovery and mining approach to assist the tender offer selection process. Knowledge discovery and mining assures identification and matching of the areas of interest and other criteria of selection of the tender offers, while multi-criteria decision making supports the consideration of other relevant factors for selection.