Didier Van Den Abeele

Modelling and Architecture of a Workspace for Tacit Knowledge Management in Railway Transport

Current economical context and industrialization accelerate product development and put forward automation. Still, product development requires also human intervention in a number of activities which cannot be entirely achieved by machines. It is the case of product development for railway markets, where the design of railway systems is guided by the evolving needs of the customers. Therefore, there is a need to locate and find ways of fostering tacit knowledge involved in these activities in order to improve, in time, railway product development. A study carried out in the company A revealed there was a need to support system design during Tendering (an early phase of product development). In this context, we think the problem of tacit knowledge loss is a concern of organizational learning and we want to build a dedicated workspace to overcome these drawbacks. In this paper we present the modeling and the architecture of the proposed workspace.

Support for Collaborative Building of a Railway Technical Solution during Tendering

As systems become more and more complex, more complex processes, organization and division of work are needed to achieve their conception and realization. The growing difficulty consists in the number and distribution of collaborators in disparate regions on the globe, the multifaceted communities that need to be coordinated in order to assure integration and coherence of their work. It is also the case of building railway technical solutions. The heterogeneity of customer market adds a supplementary challenge: adapt the solution to the customer background, context and real needs. In this context the authors propose a workspace to support collaboration when building customer technical solutions. The authors think that adequate collaboration support needs to be provided for each community and that a common backbone is needed between these communities to assure integration and coherence of their work. This paper gives a model and implementation of a dedicated workspace that can handle collaboration during complex processes like the construction of a railway technical solution.

Introduction to sassur 2012

Safety assurance and certification are amongst the most expensive and time-consuming tasks in the development of safety-critical systems. The increasing complexity and size of these systems combined with their growing market demand requires the industry to implement a coherent reuse strategy. A key difficulty appears when trying to reuse products from one application domain in another, because different domains are subject to different safety regulations. Subsequently, for a reused product, the full safety assurance and certification process has to be applied, just as for a new product. This reduces the return on investment of such reuse. Further, market trends strongly suggest that many future safety-critical systems will be comprised of heterogeneous, dynamic coalitions of systems of systems. For this type of systems, it is crucial to develop sound strategies that would allow safety assurance and certification to be done compositionally.

Apport des ontologies à la gestion des connaissances au cours du cycle de vie des systèmes de transport ferroviaire

Product lifecycle activities of railway transport systems are accomplished by a considerable number of stakeholders. These actors hold multidisciplinary knowledge and they need to cooperate in order to accomplish their tasks, to exchange results and therefore a common reference is needed in order to provide mutual understanding and support them in their work. In this paper we describe our work on creating a common reference through ontologies for the purpose of supporting technical analysis in Tendering phase. By its generality, the model we constructed could be applied to other stages of product lifecycle development.

Semantics and knowledge management to improve construction of customer railway systems

Customer railway system construction during Tendering is challenged by numerous factors: the heterogeneity of customer background (diversity of culture, context, preferences etc.), the complexity of the system to construct and the coordination of several teams with expertise on diverse areas of system development which need to share a common understanding and coherence of the system to deliver.In this paper we show how semantics can contribute to the knowledge management and thus the improvement of the Tendering process. A first study carried out in the company led us to the conclusion that ontologies are a suitable means to overcome the shortcomings that appear during this process and we explain through a model and a first implementation how this can be achieved.

A Workspace to Manage Tacit Knowledge Contributing to Railway Product Development during Tendering

Railway products development during the Tendering phase is very challenging and tacit knowledge of experts remains the key of its success. Therefore, there is a need to capture and preserve tacit knowledge used during Tendering in order to improve, in time, railway products development. In this context, we think that tacit knowledge management and organizational learning need to be intertwined and supported by a dedicated workspace. In this paper, we propose the model and the implementation of such a workspace.

A global integrated architecture for intelligent mobility

We present a software architecture to simplify the design and the development of applications dedicated to intelligent mobility.