Eyck Jentzsch

Holonic Simulation of a Design System for Performance Analysis

In this paper, we present our approach to assess the performance of an engineering design system in the field of microelectronics using a holonic simulation. Instead of measuring some input and output parameters of the system and applying some metrics to them as common performance assessment approaches do, we build a model of the entire system and simulate the course of the design process using a multi agent system. The performance metrics are then applied to the detailed results of this simulation. The main focus of this paper thereby lies in the simulation part of the approach which we designed to have two parts: a planning phase and an execution phase.

Modeling dynamic engineering design processes in PSI

One way to make engineering design effective and efficient is to make its processes flexible – i.e. self-adjusting, self-configuring, and self-optimizing at run time. This paper presents the descriptive part of the Dynamic Engineering Design Process (DEDP) modeling framework developed in the PSI project. The project aims to build a software tool to assist managers to analyze and enhance the productivity of the DEDPs through process simulations. The framework incorporates the models of teams and actors, tasks and activities as well as design artifacts as the major interrelated parts. DEDPs are modeled as weakly defined flows of tasks and atomic activities which may only “become apparent” at run time because of several presented dynamic factors. The processes are self-formed through the mechanisms of collaboration in the dynamic team of actors. These mechanisms are based on several types of contracting negotiations. DEDP productivity is assessed by the Units of Welfare collected by the multi-agent system which models the design team. The models of the framework are formalized in the family of DEDP ontologies.

Multi-agent Software Tool for Management of Design Process in Microelectronics

The paper presents a software tool to support the management of design process in microelectronics. It is developed as a multi-agent prototype intended for automated project planning, scheduling and simulation as well as project tracking and control while managing cooperative work of a design team.

Articulation and Sharing of Distributed Design Project and Process Knowledge

The paper reports on the work in the case study of the ACTIVE project on the use of the combination of knowledge process learning, articulation and sharing technologies for increasing the performance and decreasing the ramp-up efforts in engineering design projects. This knowledge is mined from distributed heterogeneous datasets, fused, and further used for visualizing design project plan information in a way that suggests optimized project plans and fosters collaboration on these knowledge structures in development teams. Software demonstrator architecture, implementation and validation are presented. Validation results indicate that the solution is effective in providing expert assistance to design project managers in performing their typical planning tasks.

On Industrial Strength Bio-design Automation

Bio-Design Automation (BDA) denotes the nascent domain-specific Information and Communication Technology (ICT) discipline for synthetic biology, which constitutes the core technology of the Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE). Ultimately, the success or failure of synthetic biology and the emerging KBBE equates to the progress or lack of progress in establishing an industrial strength BDA discipline. In this paper, we seek answers to the question “What does it take for BDA to become an industrial strength discipline?” Our goal is to stimulate a broad community discussion including Business Managers, Computer Scientists, ICT professionals, Synthetic Biologists, etc. around this question. To jump-start the debate, we will provide four core hypotheses covering what we believe are the most important aspects to be considered. Given that industrial strength is a composite aggregate of several technical and managerial variables, we have chosen to take a holistic approach and not restrict ourselves a priori to any particular viewpoints. Last, but not least, we will apply our findings and provide a prototypical industrial implementation of a BDA platform.

Modeling Actions in Dynamic Engineering Design Processes

The paper presents the approach for modeling actions in the dynamic processes of engineering design in microelectronics and integrated circuits domain. It elaborates the formal framework for representing processes, the states of these processes and process environments, the actions being the constituents of the processes. Presented framework is implemented as the part of PSI suite of ontologies and is evaluated using three different methods: user evaluation, formal evaluation, and commonsense evaluation following PSI shaker modeling methodology. The suite of PSI ontologies is used for representing dynamic engineering design processes in Cadence Project Planning Expert System software prototype.

Tutorial 6: modeling and simulation of dynamic engineering design processes

Design – a signature of human intelligence – was always a great challenge for researches in various disciplines. For example, observations of how humans act in design produced several fundamental ideas in AI and DAI – automated problem solving and reasoning [3]. In return, the researchers as the broad community attacked the problems of design domain by attempting to engineer systems and infrastructures that are capable of supporting humans in accomplishing tasks that require intelligence. Quite a big piece of this stake is of course the challenge of designing the concepts and the models of different aspects in design. Moreover, from data and knowledge engineering perspective the problems of Conceptual Modeling are design problems per se: the problem of designing intelligent artifacts [3], or exploring the design space of intelligence [1][4].