An architecture for organisational decision support

The Decision Support (DS) topic of the Network Enabled Capability for Through Life Systems Engineering (NECTISE) project aims to provide organisational through-life decision support for the products and services that BAE Systems deliver. The topic consists of five streams that cover resource capability management, decision management, collaboration, change prediction and integration. A proposed architecture is presented for an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) that combines the streams to provide a structured approach to addressing a number of issues that have been identified by BAE Systems business units as being relevant to DS: uncertainty and risk, shared situational awareness, types of decision making, decision tempo, triggering of decisions, and support for autonomous decision making. The proposed architecture will identify how either individuals or groups of decision makers (including autonomous agents) would be utilised on the basis of their capability within the requirements of the scenario to collaboratively solve the decision problem. Features of the scenario such as time criticality, required experience level, the need for justification, and conflict management, will be addressed within the architecture to ensure that the most appropriate decision management support (system/naturalistic/hybrid) is provided. In addition to being reliant on a number of human factors issues, the decision making process is also reliant on a number of information issues: overload, consistency, completeness, uncertainty and evolution, which will be discussed within the context of the architecture

Evolving Models From Observed Human Performance

To create a realistic environment, many simulations require simulated agents with human behavior patterns. Manually creating such agents with realistic behavior is often a tedious and time-consuming task. This dissertation describes a new approach that automatically builds human behavior models for simulated agents by observing human performance. The research described in this dissertation synergistically combines Context-Based Reasoning, a paradigm especially developed to model tactical human performance within simulated agents, with Genetic Programming, a machine learning algorithm to construct the behavior knowledge in accordance to the paradigm. This synergistic combination of well-documented AI methodologies has resulted in a new algorithm that effectively and automatically builds simulated agents with human behavior. This algorithm was tested extensively with five different simulated agents created by observing the performance of five humans driving an automobile simulator. The agents show not only the ability/capability to automatically learn and generalize the behavior of the human observed, but they also capture some of the personal behavior patterns observed among the five humans. Furthermore, the agents exhibited a performance that was at least as good as agents developed manually by a knowledgeable engineer

Innovating Toward Excellence: Education Entrepreneurs and the Transformation of Public Education

Summarizes discussions among education entrepreneurs, funders, policy makers, and experts at a May 2009 summit on innovations in ideas, processes, and products for reform. Includes a case study review of a successful turnaround of a failing school

Decision Taking for Selling Thread Startup

Decision Taking is discussed in the context of the role it may play for a selling agent in a search market, in particular for agents involved in the sale of valuable and relatively unique items, such as a dwelling, a second hand car, or a second hand recreational vessel. Detailed connections are made between the architecture of decision making processes and a sample of software technology based concepts including instruction sequences, multi-threading, and thread algebra. Ample attention is paid to the initialization or startup of a thread dedicated to achieving a given objective, and to corresponding decision taking. As an application, the selling of an item is taken as an objective to be achieved by running a thread that was designed for that purpose

Business Architecture Tool (BAT) : development and assessment of a systems framework to guide organisations from concept to delivery, in terms of creating deeper and meaningful integration across processes and functions

This thesis is based upon a prolonged research period, wherein a practical systems based tool (prototype), was researched, developed and tested, so as to gain outputs of integration improvements for service delivery in South Africa (SA) specifically, and in general for developmental economies. The research question can be summarised as: "to develop a systems-based intervention tool, able to provide practical integration improvements from concept to delivery". Existing systems methods and approaches were accessed, and based upon their utility for the local context, were used to varying degrees, in "building" the prototype, which was tested across a number of interventions, categorised under "world of the client"; and "world of the designer" (firm created for this purpose). Being aware of local and international implementation challenges by virtue of experience as consultant for a number of governments, whereby national planning and implementation techniques tend to be embed mechanistic models of thinking directly affecting how agents and agencies: understand the problem; plan to resolve the problem; and implement the designed solutions. The research sought to recover key systems insights in order to build a practical tool that could reduce negative outcomes, perpetrated by well-intended reforms, having limited integrative thinking, planning and delivery. The research required long-term observation, reflection, and extensive literature review. A distinctive feature of the research is the account of the author's exploration of his learning and development, within University of Cape Town PhD: Business Architecture embedded in complexity and systems theory

A Multi-Objective Approach to Tactical Maneuvering Within Real Time Strategy Games

The real time strategy (RTS) environment is a strong platform for simulating complex tactical problems. The overall research goal is to develop artificial intelligence (AI) RTS planning agents for military critical decision making education. These agents should have the ability to perform at an expert level as well as to assess a players critical decision-making ability or skill-level. The nature of the time sensitivity within the RTS environment creates very complex situations. Each situation must be analyzed and orders must be given to each tactical unit before the scenario on the battlefield changes and makes the decisions no longer relevant. This particular research effort of RTS AI development focuses on constructing a unique approach for tactical unit positioning within an RTS environment. By utilizing multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) for finding an \optimal positioning solution, an AI agent can quickly determine an effective unit positioning solution with a fast, rapid response. The development of such an RTS AI agent goes through three distinctive phases. The first of which is mathematically describing the problem space of the tactical positioning of units within a combat scenario. Such a definition allows for the development of a generic MOEA search algorithm that is applicable to nearly every scenario. The next major phase requires the development and integration of this algorithm into the Air Force Institute of Technology RTS AI agent. Finally, the last phase involves experimenting with the positioning agent in order to determine the effectiveness and efficiency when placed against various other tactical options. Experimental results validate that controlling the position of the units within a tactical situation is an effective alternative for an RTS AI agent to win a battle

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history