No abstract

Abstract. One way to make engineering design effective and efficient is to make its processes flexible -i.e. self-adjusting, self-configuring, and selfoptimizing at run time. The paper presents the descriptive part of the Dynamic Engineering Design Process (DEDP) modeling framework developed in PSI 1 project. The project aims to build a software tool assisting 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, 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.

Abstract. 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 1 and PRODUKTIV+ 2 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.

Abstract:The paper presents PSI 1 Meta-Ontology -an upper level lightweight descriptive model for the set of the Core ontologies of PSI Suite. While PSI Suite is an interlinked modular library of ontologies describing the domain of engineering design performance in microelectronics, PSI Meta-Ontology is more domain-independent. It is an upper-level model of stateful creative dynamic processes, pro-active agents, and objects situated in nested dynamic environments based on formal representation of time, events, and happenings. It may be used as an upper-level theory for domain ontologies in different application domains having common features. PSI Meta-Ontology is designed as a semantic bridge facilitating to mapping PSI Domain ontologies to abstract ontological foundations and common sense. It is also used as semantic "glue" for bridging PSI ontologies with other theories, widely accepted in the domains where processes, states, and participating objects are the major entities. These mappings and semantic bridges are supposed to ease the commitment of potential users to PSI Suite. PSI Meta-Ontology is also used as a "proxy" for different kinds of evaluation of PSI ontologies in frame of our "shaker modeling" methodology for ontology refinement.

No abstract