Wolf-Ekkehard Matzke

Towards Industrial Strength Business Performance Management

Business performance management today does not possess a rigorous and grounded engineering methodology capable of delivering reliably measured values to backing up decision making. Much more it is the art of executive gurus who listen to their backbone experience and take their decisions using intuitive and heuristic approaches. This vagueness appears to be one of the main reasons for current dissatisfaction in industry. In this paper we express our vision of how a rigorous engineering methodology for business performance management in engineering design may look like. Our research work in PSI and PRODUKTIV+ projects strongly suggests that the underlying modeling framework has to be holonic. We consider that the solution has to: (i) be based on a sound Domain ontology of performance; (ii) use dynamic distributed planning technique and simulations to predict the performance of a design system; (iii) use the methodology which is sensitive to the specificities of a particular design system.

An Ontology of Environments, Events, and Happenings

The paper presents our intermediate results in ontologizing a refined formal representation of environments, events, and happenings elaborated in PSI project. This ontology is used for agent-based modeling of engineering design systems and processes. Our formal approach is inspired by discrete event calculus (DEC). In difference to DEC based on discrete linear time representation, it uses fuzzy time intervals. Our framework also refines classic event calculi approaches by introducing explicit formal representations for environments and happenings as well as drawing a clear distinction between events and atomic actions. A reduced version of PSI environment, event, and happening ontology based on crisp representation of time intervals has been implemented as an OWL-DL ontology and is used in PSI design process simulation software. Fuzzy time interval based ontology is also implemented in OWL-DL and will be used in the future software versions.

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.

Fuzzy Time Intervals for Simulating Actions

The paper presents time-related part of PSI1 theoretical framework. In comparison to other theories of time based on interval logics our approach presents the advancement by introducing fuzziness of time intervals as transition periods at beginnings and endings. It is argued that, though quite simple (discrete, linear, and anisotropic), our theoretical model is expressive enough to be used as a logical formalism for reasoning about stochastic, unpredictable, weakly defined action and process flows. A metric and a rich set of axiomatic relationships among time intervals are introduced for that. Further on, a means for modeling and reasoning about singular, repeated, regular events and actions having phases and vague durations is elaborated. Presented theory of time is used for modeling and reasoning about events, environmental influences, happenings, and actions while planning and scheduling in our simulations of dynamic engineering design processes.

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.

Evaluation of Semi-automated Ontology Instance Migration

Ontology instance migration is one of the challenges in knowledge management. It becomes even more complex in distributed settings when, for example, several autonomous agents use partial assertional knowledge in a domain that is formalized by different though semantically overlapping descriptive theories. Agents exchange instances of their ontologies when cooperate. Such an exchange is essentially the migration of the assertional part of an ontology to other ontologies owned by different agents. The paper presents our method and tool support for migrating instances between different semantically overlapping ontologies. The method is based on the use of manually coded formal rules describing the changes between the input and the output ontologies. The tool to support the process is implemented as a plug-in to Cadence ProjectNavigator software. The main contribution of the paper is in presenting the results of the evaluation of this tool. It reports about the setup for our evaluation experiments, the metrics used for measuring the quality of instance migration, the ontologies that have been chosen as the experimental data, and the evaluation results. Evaluation results are satisfactory and suggest some directions for the future work.

Quantifying Ontology Fitness in OntoElect Using Saturation- and Vote-Based Metrics

This paper presents the details of the OntoElect methodology for ontology engineering. These details comprise: (i) the presentation of the objectives with the emphasis on the problems arising when the domain knowledge stakeholder requirements to the developed ontology are elicited; (ii) the elaboration of the ontology engineering workflow and software tools; (iii) the proposal of the formal metrics for the representativeness of the used document corpus based on saturation and the fitness of different ontology elements to those requirements based on the computation of the stakeholder votes. The paper also reports on the set-up and results of our experiment with the document corpus of the ICTERI conference series papers and the ICTERI scope ontology. The available results of this ongoing experiment confirm that the methodological approach of OntoElect is valid.

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.

Performance in Industrial Holonic Systems

We are glad to present the papers of the special session on Performance in Industrial Holonic Systems (Pi-HolS 2007) at the 3dInternational Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems (HoloMAS 2007). The session brought together researchers and practitioners in the areas of holonic and multi-agent systems, knowledge engineering, and performance management to share their views and experience in design, development, deployment, and application of technologies for measuring, assessing and optimizing the performance of industrial systems based on holonic principles.