Modeling and Analyzing Systemic Risk in Complex Sociotechnical Systems The Role of Teleology, Feedback, and Emergence

Recent systemic failures such as the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Global Financial Crisis, and Northeast Blackout have reminded us, once again, of the fragility of complex sociotechnical systems. Although the failures occurred in very different domains and were triggered by different events, there are, however, certain common underlying mechanisms of abnormalities driving these systemic failures. Understanding these mechanisms is essential to avoid such disasters in the future. Moreover, these disasters happened in sociotechnical systems, where both social and technical elements can interact with each other and with the environment. The nonlinear interactions among these components can lead to an “emergent” behavior – i.e., the behavior of the whole is more than the sum of its parts – that can be difficult to anticipate and control. Abnormalities can propagate through the systems to cause systemic failures. To ensure the safe operation and production of such complex systems, we need to understand and model the associated systemic risk. Traditional emphasis of chemical engineering risk modeling is on the technical components of a chemical plant, such as equipment and processes. However, a chemical plant is more than a set of equipment and processes, with the human elements playing a critical role in decision-making. Industrial statistics show that about 70% of the accidents are caused by human errors. So, new modeling techniques that go beyond the classical equipment/process-oriented approaches to include the human elements (i.e., the “socio” part of the sociotechnical systems) are needed for analyzing systemic risk of complex sociotechnical systems. This thesis presents such an approach. This thesis presents a new knowledge modeling paradigm for systemic risk analysis that goes beyond chemical plants by unifying different perspectives. First, we develop a unifying teleological, control theoretic framework to model decision-making knowledge in a complex system. The framework allows us to identify systematically the common failure mechanisms behind systemic failures in different domains. We show how cause-and-effect knowledge can be incorporated into this framework by using signed directed graphs. We also develop an ontology-driven knowledge modeling component and show how this can support decision-making by using a case study in public health emergency. This is the first such attempt to develop an ontology for public health documents. Lastly, from a control-theoretic perspective, we address the question, “how do simple individual components of a system interact to produce a system behavior that cannot be explained by the behavior of just the individual components alone?” Through this effort, we attempt to bridge the knowledge gap between control theory and complexity science

Exploring the role of E-maintenance for value creation in service provision

Technological innovations has always played an important role in economic growth and industrial productivity, but they have also potential to influence service industry. In particular, they can offer support to the process of servitization in manufacturing companies. This article presents a study regarding the prospective value that different technological innovations can offer to maintenance service provision. A review of different baseline technologies and a categorization of several types of E-maintenance tools and applications has been carried out in order to understand the new functionalities that can potentially bring to the provision of smart maintenance services. Moreover, a value analysis method for representing the contribution of tool categories to several value dimensions is presented here. This method can be used for identifying the best technological solution, matching both customer value and provider value, i.e. conforming a win-win situation for the parties involved in the service provision. Some preliminary results based on a survey are eventually given as a first test of its applicability

AI models for recommendation

Ponencia presentada en EMAI2021, West Bengal, India, 4/4/2021[EN]Today, the industries of all European countries face common challenges: improving resource efficiency, becoming more environmentally friendly, mitigating climate change, improving the digitization in all segments of the value chain and improving transparency and safety, providing consumers with detailed information and ensuring the safety and quality of the final product. Growing concerns about environmental and social issues are pushing the demands of stakeholders (customers, workers, shareholders, consumers, etc.) and the public towards more sustainable processes and products. Sustainability is closely linked to climate change: the introduction of sustainable measures, both by consumers and producers, is inherently a measure against climate change

Recommendation AI models: case studies

Seminario presentado en EMAI2021, West Bengal, India, 4/4/2021[EN] The targeted consumers can be not only individuals sensitive to environmental and sustainable consumption issues, but also communities, small businesses (e.g., local coffee shop, school, sports club) that share the same concerns as their customers or are just trying to better address their needs. In addition, this tool is designed to assist decision-makers in companies (e.g., supply chain and purchasing managers) as well as policy makers in assessing the overall sustainability of products. Likewise, the tool can provide valuable information to manufacturers who, based on the "sustainable market momentum" gained, could innovate their products and their approach to improving sustainability, thus differentiating themselves from the competitio

SCS: 60 years and counting! A time to reflect on the Society's scholarly contribution to M&S from the turn of the millennium.

The Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS) is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. Since its inception, the Society has widely disseminated the advancements in the field of modeling and simulation (M&S) through its peer-reviewed journals. In this paper we profile research that has been published in the journal SIMULATION: Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International from the turn of the millennium to 2010; the objective is to acknowledge the contribution of the authors and their seminal research papers, their respective universities/departments and the geographical diversity of the authors' affiliations. Yet another objective is to contribute towards the understanding of the overall evolution of the discipline of M&S; this is achieved through the classification of M&S techniques and its frequency of use, analysis of the sectors that have seen the predomination application of M&S and the context of its application. It is expected that this paper will lead to further appreciation of the contribution of the Society in influencing the growth of M&S as a discipline and, indeed, in steering its future direction

Intelligent models for recommendation

Seminario presentado en EMAI2021, West Bengal, India, 4/4/2021[EN]Information tools are one of the types of tools available in an effort to change consumers' perceptions, motivations, knowledge and standards. Accordingly, it is increasingly important for consumers to be able to make informed choices about the products they buy, especially in terms of sustainability. Together with the commitment of businesses and organizations to more responsible and sustainable processes and production, the implementation of the European Green Deal and the Sustainable Development Goals is an urgent challenge to all actors in society to contribute to changing the way we meet our needs

Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security

Ontologies for Industry 4.0

The current fourth industrial revolution, or ‘Industry 4.0’ (I4.0), is driven by digital data, connectivity, and cyber systems, and it has the potential to create impressive/new business opportunities. With the arrival of I4.0, the scenario of various intelligent systems interacting reliably and securely with each other becomes a reality which technical systems need to address. One major aspect of I4.0 is to adopt a coherent approach for the semantic communication in between multiple intelligent systems, which include human and artificial (software or hardware) agents. For this purpose, ontologies can provide the solution by formalizing the smart manufacturing knowledge in an interoperable way. Hence, this paper presents the few existing ontologies for I4.0, along with the current state of the standardization effort in the factory 4.0 domain and examples of real-world scenarios for I4.0.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version