Sylvia C. Wong

Knowledge engineering from frontline support to preliminary design

The design and maintenance of complex engineering systems such as a jet engine generates a significant amount of documentation. Increasingly, aerospace manufacturers are shifting their focus from selling products to providing services. As a result, when designing new engines, engineers must increasingly consider the life-cycle requirements in addition to design parameters. To identify possible areas of concern, engineers must obtain knowledge gained from the entire life of an engine. However, because of the size and distributed nature of a companys operation, engineers often do not have access to front-line maintenance data. In addition, the large number of documents accrued makes it impossible to examine thoroughly. This paper presents a prototype knowledge-based document repository for such an application. It searches and analyzes distributed document resources, and provides engineers with a summary view of the underlying knowledge. The aim is to aid engineers in creating design requirement documents that incorporate aftermarket issues. Unlike existing document repositories and digital libraries, our approach is knowledge-based, where users browse summary reports instead of following suggested links. To test the validity of our proposed architecture, we have developed and deployed a working prototype. The prototype has been demonstrated to engineers and received positive reviews.

Knowledge Transfer : From Maintenance to Engine Design

As manufacturers shift their focus from selling products to providing services, designers must therefore increasingly consider the life-cycle requirements in addition to conventional design parameters. To identify possible areas of concern, engineers must consider knowledge gained through the life cycle of a related product. However, because of the size and distributed nature of a company’s operation, engineers often do not have access to front-line maintenance data. Additionally, the large number of documents generated during the design and operation of a product makes it impractical to manually review all documents thoroughly during a design task. This paper presents a prototype knowledge-based document repository for an aeroengine manufacturer. The developed system searches and analyzes distributed document resources, and provides engineers with a summary view of the underlying knowledge. The aim is to aid engineers in creating design requirements that incorporate maintenance issues. Unlike existing document repositories and digital libraries, our approach is knowledge based, where users browse summary reports instead of following suggested links. To test the validity of our architecture, we have developed and deployed a prototype of our knowledge-based document repository. The repository has been demonstrated to and validated by the engine design community

On a service-oriented approach for an engineering knowledge desktop

Increasingly, manufacturing companies are shifting their focus from selling products to providing services. As a result, when designing new products, engineers must increasingly consider the life cycle costs in addition to any design requirements. To identify possible areas of concern, designers are required to consult existing maintenance information from identical products. However, in a large engineering company, the amount of information available is significant and in wide range of formats. This paper presents a prototype knowledge desktop suitable for the design engineer. The Engineering Knowledge Desktop analyses and suggests relevant information from ontologically marked-up heterogeneous web resources. It is designed using a Service-Oriented Architecture, with an ontology to mediate between Web Services. It has been delivered to the user community for evaluation.

An agile hypertext design methodology

Customers are driving down lead times for software, especially for Web applications, to only a few months. While a number of hypertext design models exist, they do not address the issue of the requirements and analysis process that normally feeds the design process. In this paper we present an agile approach to developing hypertext applications, which focuses on the requirements and analysis stages, something that is largely ignored in current methodologies.

NAVIGATION OVER A LARGE ONTOLOGY FOR INDUSTRIAL WEB APPLICATIONS

Ontologies for industrial semantic web applications are often very large. This is especially true in scientific and engineering applications where there exists a large pool of technical terminology necessary for operation within the domain. In this paper we look at the problem of presenting this domain ontology to users for navigation within web applications. The conventional tree view can be considered to be cumbersome and awkward to navigate for ontologies that have a very large breadth and/or depth. We present three approaches to this ontology presentation problem—content dependent filtering, autocompletion text box and partial segments using drop-down lists. All the approaches attempt to limit the ontology presented to users at one time. We implemented two of the proposed methods of ontology presentation in our demonstrators, and have received positive and valuable feedback from engineers.

Lesson learnt from a large-scale industrial semantic web application

The design and maintenance of an aero-engine generates a significant amount of documentation. When designing new engines, engineers must obtain knowledge gained from maintenance of existing engines to identify possible areas of concern. We developed a Semantic Web based document repository for transferring front-line maintenance knowledge to design. The Semantic Web is an ideal candidate for this application because of the size and distributed nature of an aerospace manufacturers operation. The Semantic Web allows us to dynamically cross reference documents with the use of an ontology. However, during the design and implementation of this project, we found deficiencies in the W3C1 recommended Semantic Web query language SPARQL. It is difficult to answer questions our users sought from the document repository using SPARQL. The problem is that SPARQL is designed for handling textual queries. In industrial applications, many common textual and semantic questions also contain a numerical element, be it data summarization or arithmetic operations. In this paper, we generalize the problems we found with SPARQL, and extend it to cover web applications in non-aerospace domains. Based on this analysis, we recommend that SQL-styled grouping, aggregation and variable operations be added to SPARQL, as they are necessary for industrial applications of the Semantic Web. At the moment, to answer the non-textual questions we identified with an RDF store, custom written software is needed to process the results returned by SPARQL. We incorporated the suggested numerical functionalities from SQL for an example query, and achieved a 21.7% improvement to the speed of execution. More importantly, we eliminate the need of extra processing in software, and thus make it easier and quicker to develop Semantic Web applications.

Knowledge management for a large service-oriented corporation

The design and maintenance of complex engineering systems such as a jet engine generates a significant amount of documentation. Increasingly, aerospace manufacturers are shifting their focus from selling products to providing services. As a result, when designing new products, engineers must increasingly consider the engines complete life-cycle as part of the design process. To identify possible areas of concern, engineers must obtain knowledge gained from the entire life of similar engines. However, because of the size and distributed nature of the companys operation, engineers often do not have access to front-line maintenance data. In addition, the large number of documents accrued makes it impossible for them to be examined thoroughly. This paper presents a prototype knowledge-based document repository for such an application. It searches and analyzes distributed document resources, and provides engineers with a summary view of the underlying knowledge. The aim is to allow engineers to incorporate maintenance issues into the initial design. Unlike existing document repositories and digital libraries, our approach is knowledge-based, where users browse summary reports instead of following suggested links. To test the validity of our proposed architecture, we have developed and deployed a working prototype.

A distributed approach to musical composition

Current techniques for automated composition use a single algorithm, focusing on one aspect of musical generation. In our system we make use of several algorithms, distributed using an agent oriented middleware, with each specialising on a separate aspect of composition. This paper describes the architecture and algorithms behind this system, with a focus on the agent framework used for implementation. We show early results which encourage a future application of this framework in automated music composition and analysis.

A middleware for a large array of cameras

Large arrays of cameras are increasingly being employed for producing high quality image sequences needed for motion analysis research. This leads to the logistical problem with coordination and control of a large number of cameras. In this paper, we used a lightweight multi-agent system for coordinating such camera arrays. The agent framework provides more than a remote sensor access API. It allows reconfigurable and transparent access to cameras, as well as software agents capable of intelligent processing. Furthermore, it eases maintenance by encouraging code reuse. Additionally, our agent system includes an automatic discovery mechanism at startup, and multiple language bindings. Performance tests showed the lightweight nature of the framework while validating its correctness and scalability. Two different camera agents were implemented to provide access to a large array of distributed cameras. Correct operation of these camera agents was confirmed via several image processing agents.

Knowledge-based repository to support engineering design

Manufacturers are currently shifting their focus from selling products to providing services, hence the products designers must increasingly consider life-cycle requirements, in addition to conventional design parameters. To identify possible areas of concern, engineers must consider knowledge gained through the life cycle of similar or related product. However, because of the size and distributed nature of a companys operation, engineers often do not have access to front-line maintenance data. In addition, the large number of documents generated during the design and operation of a product makes it impractical to manually review all documents thoroughly during a task. This paper presents a knowledge-based document repository demonstrator that is capable of providing such support for the maintainers and designers of jet engines.