A new and efficient intelligent collaboration scheme for fashion design

Technology-mediated collaboration process has been extensively studied for over a decade. Most applications with collaboration concepts reported in the literature focus on enhancing efficiency and effectiveness of the decision-making processes in objective and well-structured workflows. However, relatively few previous studies have investigated the applications of collaboration schemes to problems with subjective and unstructured nature. In this paper, we explore a new intelligent collaboration scheme for fashion design which, by nature, relies heavily on human judgment and creativity. Techniques such as multicriteria decision making, fuzzy logic, and artificial neural network (ANN) models are employed. Industrial data sets are used for the analysis. Our experimental results suggest that the proposed scheme exhibits significant improvement over the traditional method in terms of the time–cost effectiveness, and a company interview with design professionals has confirmed its effectiveness and significance

The safety case and the lessons learned for the reliability and maintainability case

This paper examine the safety case and the lessons learned for the reliability and maintainability case

Assessing system architectures: the Canonical Decomposition Fuzzy Comparative methodology

The impacts of decisions made during the selection of the system architecture propagate throughout the entire system lifecycle. The challenge for system architects is to perform a realistic assessment of an inherently ambiguous system concept. Subject matter expert interpretations, intuition, and heuristics are performed quickly and guide system development in the right overall direction, but these methods are subjective and unrepeatable. Traditional analytical assessments dismiss complexity in a system by assuming severability between system components and are intolerant of ambiguity. To be defensible, a suitable methodology must be repeatable, analytically rigorous, and yet tolerant of ambiguity. The hypothesis for this research is that an architecture assessment methodology capable of achieving these objectives is possible by drawing on the strengths of existing approaches while addressing their collective weaknesses. The proposed methodology is the Canonical Decomposition Fuzzy Comparative approach. The theoretical foundations of this methodology are developed and tested through the assessment of three physical architectures for a peer-to-peer wireless network. An extensible modeling framework is established to decompose high-level system attributes into technical performance measures suitable for analysis via computational modeling. Canonical design primitives are used to assess antenna performance in the form of a comparative analysis between the baseline free space gain patterns and the installed gain patterns. Finally, a fuzzy inference system is used to interpret the comparative feature set and offer a numerical assessment. The results of this experiment support the hypothesis that the proposed methodology is well suited for exposing integration sensitivity and assessing coupled performance in physical architecture concepts --Abstract, page iii

Intelligent systems in manufacturing: current developments and future prospects

Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements are demanding increasing changes in manufacturing environments. Enterprises are required to constantly redesign their products and continuously reconfigure their manufacturing systems. Traditional approaches to manufacturing systems do not fully satisfy this new situation. Many authors have proposed that artificial intelligence will bring the flexibility and efficiency needed by manufacturing systems. This paper is a review of artificial intelligence techniques used in manufacturing systems. The paper first defines the components of a simplified intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS), the different Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to be considered and then shows how these AI techniques are used for the components of IMS

On the role of pre and post-processing in environmental data mining

The quality of discovered knowledge is highly depending on data quality. Unfortunately real data use to contain noise, uncertainty, errors, redundancies or even irrelevant information. The more complex is the reality to be analyzed, the higher the risk of getting low quality data. Knowledge Discovery from Databases (KDD) offers a global framework to prepare data in the right form to perform correct analyses. On the other hand, the quality of decisions taken upon KDD results, depend not only on the quality of the results themselves, but on the capacity of the system to communicate those results in an understandable form. Environmental systems are particularly complex and environmental users particularly require clarity in their results. In this paper some details about how this can be achieved are provided. The role of the pre and post processing in the whole process of Knowledge Discovery in environmental systems is discussed

AI and OR in management of operations: history and trends

The last decade has seen a considerable growth in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for operations management with the aim of finding solutions to problems that are increasing in complexity and scale. This paper begins by setting the context for the survey through a historical perspective of OR and AI. An extensive survey of applications of AI techniques for operations management, covering a total of over 1200 papers published from 1995 to 2004 is then presented. The survey utilizes Elsevier's ScienceDirect database as a source. Hence, the survey may not cover all the relevant journals but includes a sufficiently wide range of publications to make it representative of the research in the field. The papers are categorized into four areas of operations management: (a) design, (b) scheduling, (c) process planning and control and (d) quality, maintenance and fault diagnosis. Each of the four areas is categorized in terms of the AI techniques used: genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning, knowledge-based systems, fuzzy logic and hybrid techniques. The trends over the last decade are identified, discussed with respect to expected trends and directions for future work suggested

CBR and MBR techniques: review for an application in the emergencies domain

The purpose of this document is to provide an in-depth analysis of current reasoning engine practice and the integration strategies of Case Based Reasoning and Model Based Reasoning that will be used in the design and development of the RIMSAT system. RIMSAT (Remote Intelligent Management Support and Training) is a European Commission funded project designed to: a.. Provide an innovative, 'intelligent', knowledge based solution aimed at improving the quality of critical decisions b.. Enhance the competencies and responsiveness of individuals and organisations involved in highly complex, safety critical incidents - irrespective of their location. In other words, RIMSAT aims to design and implement a decision support system that using Case Base Reasoning as well as Model Base Reasoning technology is applied in the management of emergency situations. This document is part of a deliverable for RIMSAT project, and although it has been done in close contact with the requirements of the project, it provides an overview wide enough for providing a state of the art in integration strategies between CBR and MBR technologies.Postprint (published version

An Advanced Computational Approach to System of Systems Analysis & Architecting Using Agent-Based Behavioral Model

A major challenge to the successful planning and evolution of an acknowledged System of Systems (SoS) is the current lack of understanding of the impact that the presence or absence of a set of constituent systems has on the overall SoS capability. Since the candidate elements of a SoS are fully functioning, stand-alone Systems in their own right, they have goals and objectives of their own to satisfy, some of which may compete with those of the overarching SoS. These system-level concerns drive decisions to participate (or not) in the SoS. Individual systems typically must be requested to join the SoS construct, and persuaded to interface and cooperate with other Systems to create the “new” capability of the proposed SoS. Current SoS evolution strategies lack a means for modeling the impact of decisions concerning participation or non-participation of any given set of systems on the overall capability of the SoS construct. Without this capability, it is difficult to optimize the SoS design. The goal of this research is to model the evolution of the architecture of an acknowledged SoS that accounts for the ability and willingness of constituent systems to support the SoS capability development. Since DoD Systems of Systems (SoS) development efforts do not typically follow the normal program acquisition process described in DoDI 5000.02, the Wave Model proposed by Dahmann and Rebovich is used as the basis for this research on SoS capability evolution. The Wave Process Model provides a framework for an agent-based modeling methodology, which is used to abstract the nonutopian behavioral aspects of the constituent systems and their interactions with the SoS. In particular, the research focuses on the impact of individual system behavior on the SoS capability and architecture evolution processes. A generic agent-based model (ABM) skeleton structure is developed to provide an Acknowledged SoS manager a decision making tool in negotiating of SOS architectures during the wave model cycles. The model provides an environment to plug in multiple SoS meta-architecture generation multiple criteria optimization models based on both gradient and non-gradient descent optimization procedures. Three types of individual system optimization models represent different behaviors of systems agents, namely; selfish, opportunistic and cooperative, are developed as plug in models. ABM has a plug in capability to incorporate domain-specific negotiation modes and a fuzzy associative memory (FAM) to evaluate candidate architectures for simulating SoS creation and evolution. The model evaluates the capability of the evolving SoS architecture with respect to four attributes: performance, affordability, flexibility and robustness. In the second phase of the project, the team will continue with the development of an evolutionary strategies-based multi-objective mathematical model for creating an initial SoS meta architecture to start the negotiation at each wave. A basic generic structure will be defined for the fuzzy assessor math model that will be used to evaluate SoS meta architectures and domain dependent parameters pertaining to system of systems analysis and architecting through Agent Based Modeling. The work will be conducted in consideration of the national priorities, funding and threat assessment being provided by the environment developed for delivery at end of December 2013

Combining Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) Methods with Building Information Modelling (BIM): A Review

Integrating building information to support decision-making has been a key challenge in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. The synergy of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is expected to improve information integration and decision-making. The aim of this paper is to identify strategies to improve the synergy between MCDM and BIM. From the earliest literature (2009) to the present, this study examines 45 articles combining MCDM with BIM. We find that the five major application domains are sustainability, retrofit, supplier selection, safety, and constructability. Five established strategies for improving the synergy between MCDM and BIM were discussed and can be used as a benchmark for evaluating the application of decision techniques in practice. This study points out gaps of combining MCDM and BIM in the current literature. It also sheds new light into combining MCDM with BIM for practitioners, as to promote integrated decision-making