Constantin-Bala Zamfirescu

Goal Programming as a Decision Model for Performance-Based Budgeting☆

Abstract The spreadsheet applications are becoming a widely used tool for processing quantitative data and developing analytical solutions. The ability to build decision support systems (DSS) based on these spreadsheet solutions can facilitate knowledge management and increase information utilization within an organization. The paper describes the use of a spreadsheet solution to partially implement the performance-based budgeting (PB) principles for a public body. The solution builds on the goal programming optimization method and is exemplified for some real data.

A Stigmergic Guiding System to Facilitate the Group Decision Process

The paper presents a stigmergic approach to engineer a guiding system to facilitate the complex problem of designing the group decision processes. The system aims to provide contextual, actionable recommendations based on the knowledge and past experience of its users as recorded in a collaborative working environment implemented around the concept of stigmergic systems. Through an agent-based socio-simulation experiment we have demonstrated already the feasibility of this approach. The paper illustrates how the simulation results are transferred into a guiding system that facilitates the group decision process design through iterative queries reformulations for the identification, representation and manipulation of the relevant knowledge.

Planning in collaborative stigmergic workspaces

The paper investigates how the engineered capabilities of structuring the knowledge encoded in collaborative workspaces affect the collective intelligence of its users. The investigation is made for the particular case of collaborative planning and is grounded on the theoretical framework of stigmergic systems. The knowledge structure encoded in collaborative workspaces in the form of a conceptual hierarchical task network is analysed by building a multi-agent simulation to evaluate the performance of different planning strategies. The results show that different representational complexities of collaborative planning knowledge have a great impact over the collective intelligence when the users are interacting directly or indirectly.

Smart factory in the context of 4th industrial revolution: challenges and opportunities for Romania

Manufacturing companies, independent of operation sector and size, must be able to produce lot size one products, just-in-time at a competitive cost. Coping with this high adaptability and short reaction times proves to be very challenging. New approaches must be taken into consideration for designing modular, intelligent and cooperative production systems which are easy to integrate with the entire factory. The coined term for this network of intelligent interacting artefacts system is cyber-physical systems (CPS). CPS is often used in the context of Industry 4.0 – or what many consider the forth industrial revolution. The paper presents an overview of key technological and social requirements to map the Smart Factory vision into reality. Finally, global and Romanian specific challenges hindering the vision of a true Smart Factory to become reality are presented.

A stigmergic approach for social interaction design in collaboration engineering

The increasing number of available collaborative tools and their extensive use in many organizational activities has constantly raised the complexity of collaboration engineering. It presumes the design of group decision processes, supported by a wide-range of groupware tools, in an ill-structured, dynamic, and open environment. As many of these processes are recurring by nature, the development of a shared repository to store the collective knowledge and experiences of group decision process designs became a core research topic of collaboration engineering in last few years. The paper presents a human-computer interaction engineering approach to design a software prototype that provides personalized, contextual and actionable recommendations for this problem. The approach emphasizes the computational aspects of collective intelligence, inspired from the stigmergic system designs, to structure these recommendations based on the collective knowledge that reflects not only the design space per se, but the collective experience in exploiting it as well. It is demonstrated by (1) detailing the engineering issues of an implemented prototype for the group decision process design; and (2) explaining its functionalities through a representative set of interaction scenarios. The paper covers the methodological, theoretical and practical aspects of engineering the above mentioned issues.

On Interacting with Collective Knowledge of Group Facilitation

Group decision process design is a well-known class of ill-structured, dynamic, and going-concerns problem. The paper presents a human-computer interaction engineering approach to design a software prototype that provides personalized, contextual and actionable recommendations for this problem. The approach emphasizes the computational aspects of collective intelligence to structure these recommendations based on the collective knowledge that reflects not only the design space per se, but the collective experience in exploiting it as well. It is demonstrated by: 1) detailing the engineering issues of an implemented prototype for the group decision process design; and 2) explaining its functionalities through a representative set of interaction scenarios.