From techno-scientific grammar to organizational syntax. New production insights on the nature of the firm

The paper aims at providing the conceptual building blocks of a theory of the firm which addresses its "ontological questions" (existence,boundaries and organization) by placing production at its core. We draw on engineering for a more accurate description of the production process itself, highlighting its inner complexity and potentially chaotic nature, and on computational linguistics for a production-based account of the nature of economic agents and of the mechanisms through which they build ordered production sets. In so doing, we give a "more appropriate" production basis to the crucial issues of how firm's boundaries are set, how its organisational structure is defined, and how it changes over time. In particular, we show how economic agents select some tasks to be performed internally, while leaving some other to external suppliers, on the basis of criteria based on both the different degrees of internal congruence of the tasks to be performed (i.e. the internal environment), and on the outer relationships carried out with other agents (i.e. the external environment)

Disability-aware adaptive and personalised learning for students with multiple disabilities

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address how virtual learning environments (VLEs) can be designed to include the needs of learners with multiple disabilities. Specifically, it employs AI to show how specific learning materials from a huge repository of learning materials can be recommended to learners with various disabilities. This is made possible through employing semantic web technology to model the learner and their needs. Design/methodology/approach The paper reviews personalised learning for students with disabilities, revealing the shortcomings of existing e-learning environments with respect to students with multiple disabilities. It then proceeds to show how the needs of a student with multiple disabilities can be analysed and then simple logical operators and knowledge-based rules used to personalise learning materials in order to meet the needs of such students. Findings It has been acknowledged in literature that designing for cases of multiple disabilities is difficult. This paper shows that existing learning environments do not consider the needs of students with multiple disabilities. As they are not flexibly designed and hence not adaptable, they cannot meet the needs of such students. Nevertheless, it is possible to anticipate that students with multiple disabilities would use learning environments, and then design learning environments to meet their needs. Practical implications This paper, by presenting various combination rules to present specific learning materials to students with multiple disabilities, lays the foundation for the design and development of learning environments that are inclusive of all learners, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. This could potentially stimulate designers of such systems to produce such inclusive environments. Hopefully, future learning environments will be adaptive enough to meet the needs of learners with multiple disabilities. Social implications This paper, by proposing a solution towards developing inclusive learning environments, is a step towards inclusion of students with multiple disabilities in VLEs. When these students are able to access these environments with little or no barrier, they will be included in the learning community and also make valuable contributions. Originality/value So far, no study has proposed a solution to the difficulties faced by students with multiple disabilities in existing learning environments. This study is the first to raise this issue and propose a solution to designing for multiple disabilities. This will hopefully encourage other researchers to delve into researching the educational needs of students with multiple disabilities

A review of information flow diagrammatic models for product-service systems

A product-service system (PSS) is a combination of products and services to create value for both customers and manufacturers. Modelling a PSS based on function orientation offers a useful way to distinguish system inputs and outputs with regards to how data are consumed and information is used, i.e. information flow. This article presents a review of diagrammatic information flow tools, which are designed to describe a system through its functions. The origin, concept and applications of these tools are investigated, followed by an analysis of information flow modelling with regards to key PSS properties. A case study of selection laser melting technology implemented as PSS will then be used to show the application of information flow modelling for PSS design. A discussion based on the usefulness of the tools in modelling the key elements of PSS and possible future research directions are also presented

Engineering failure analysis and design optimisation with HiP-HOPS

The scale and complexity of computer-based safety critical systems, like those used in the transport and manufacturing industries, pose significant challenges for failure analysis. Over the last decade, research has focused on automating this task. In one approach, predictive models of system failure are constructed from the topology of the system and local component failure models using a process of composition. An alternative approach employs model-checking of state automata to study the effects of failure and verify system safety properties. In this paper, we discuss these two approaches to failure analysis. We then focus on Hierarchically Performed Hazard Origin & Propagation Studies (HiP-HOPS) - one of the more advanced compositional approaches - and discuss its capabilities for automatic synthesis of fault trees, combinatorial Failure Modes and Effects Analyses, and reliability versus cost optimisation of systems via application of automatic model transformations. We summarise these contributions and demonstrate the application of HiP-HOPS on a simplified fuel oil system for a ship engine. In light of this example, we discuss strengths and limitations of the method in relation to other state-of-the-art techniques. In particular, because HiP-HOPS is deductive in nature, relating system failures back to their causes, it is less prone to combinatorial explosion and can more readily be iterated. For this reason, it enables exhaustive assessment of combinations of failures and design optimisation using computationally expensive meta-heuristics. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Problem-Solving Behaviours, Organisational Forms and the Complexity of Tasks

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Application of Generic CAD Models for Supporting Feature Based Assembly Process Planning

The paper discusses a novel geometric reasoning method that supports the definition of assembly sequence planning models departing from the CAD models of the parts involved. Specifically, by means of the presented algorithms that use a so-called collision point cloud approach one can determine the precise disassembly directions of parts having complex polygon mesh models. This information can be applied when defining assembly planning models both for suggesting precedence constraints as well as parameters for assembly operations. The presented heuristic algorithm was able to overcome certain shortcomings of earlier methods working with polygon mesh representations, and proved to be successful both in handling abstract and real-life industrial use cases. Working examples from both categories are presented in the paper

FixMiner: Mining Relevant Fix Patterns for Automated Program Repair

Patching is a common activity in software development. It is generally performed on a source code base to address bugs or add new functionalities. In this context, given the recurrence of bugs across projects, the associated similar patches can be leveraged to extract generic fix actions. While the literature includes various approaches leveraging similarity among patches to guide program repair, these approaches often do not yield fix patterns that are tractable and reusable as actionable input to APR systems. In this paper, we propose a systematic and automated approach to mining relevant and actionable fix patterns based on an iterative clustering strategy applied to atomic changes within patches. The goal of FixMiner is thus to infer separate and reusable fix patterns that can be leveraged in other patch generation systems. Our technique, FixMiner, leverages Rich Edit Script which is a specialized tree structure of the edit scripts that captures the AST-level context of the code changes. FixMiner uses different tree representations of Rich Edit Scripts for each round of clustering to identify similar changes. These are abstract syntax trees, edit actions trees, and code context trees. We have evaluated FixMiner on thousands of software patches collected from open source projects. Preliminary results show that we are able to mine accurate patterns, efficiently exploiting change information in Rich Edit Scripts. We further integrated the mined patterns to an automated program repair prototype, PARFixMiner, with which we are able to correctly fix 26 bugs of the Defects4J benchmark. Beyond this quantitative performance, we show that the mined fix patterns are sufficiently relevant to produce patches with a high probability of correctness: 81% of PARFixMiner's generated plausible patches are correct.Comment: 31 pages, 11 figure