KWM: Knowledge-based Workflow Model for agile organization

The workflow management system (WFMS) in an agile organization should be highly adaptable to the frequent organizational changes. To increase the adaptability of contemporary WFMSs, a mechanism for managing changes within the organizational structure and changes in business rules needs to be reinforced. In this paper, a knowledge-based approach for workflow modeling is proposed, in which a workflow is defined as a set of business rules. Knowledge on the organizational structure and special workflow, such as role/actor mappings and complex routing rules, can be explicitly modeled in KWM (Knowledge-based Workflow Model). Using knowledge representation scheme and dependency management facility, a change propagation mechanism is provided to adapt to the frequent changes in the organizational structure, business rules, and procedures

An expert system that performs a satellite station keepimg maneuver

The development and characteristics of a prototype expert system, Expert System for Satellite Orbit Control (ESSOC), capable of providing real-time spacecraft system analysis and command generation for a geostationary satellite are described. The ESSOC recommends appropriate commands that reflect both the changing spacecraft condition and previous procedural action. An internal knowledge base stores satellite status information and is updated with processed spacecraft telemetry. Procedural structure data are encoded in production rules. Structural methods of knowledge acquisition and the design and performance-enhancing techniques that enable ESSOC to operate in real time are also considered

ATS displays: A reasoning visualization tool for expert systems

Reasoning visualization is a useful tool that can help users better understand the inherently non-sequential logic of an expert system. While this is desirable in most all expert system applications, it is especially so for such critical systems as those destined for space-based operations. A hierarchical view of the expert system reasoning process and some characteristics of these various levels is presented. Also presented are Abstract Time Slice (ATS) displays, a tool to visualize the plethora of interrelated information available at the host inferencing language level of reasoning. The usefulness of this tool is illustrated with some examples from a prototype potable water expert system for possible use aboard Space Station Freedom

Knowledge based approach to flexible workflow management systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).Today's business environments are characterized by dynamic and uncertain environments. In order to effectively support business processes in such contexts, workflow management systems must be able to adapt themselves effectively. In this dissertation, the workflow is redefined in concept and represented with a set of business rules. Business rules play a central role in organizational workflows in context of cooperation among actors. To achieve business goals, they constrain the flow of works, use of resources, and responsibility mapping between tasks and actors using role concept. Business rules are explicitly modeled in the Knowledge-based Workflow Model (KWM) using frames. To increase the adaptability of workflow management system, KWM has several distinctive features. First, it increases expressiveness of workflow model so that exception handling rules and responsibility mapping rules between tasks and actors as well as task scheduling rules are explicitly modeled. Secondly, formal definition of KWM enables one to define and to analyze correctness of workflow schema. Knowledge-based approach enables more powerful analysis on workflow schema including checking consistency and compactness of routing rules as well as terminality of a workflow. Thirdly, providing change propagation mechanism which assures correctness of workflow after the modification of workflow schema increases adaptability. Change propagation rules for the modification primitives are provided to manage workflow evolution. On the other hand, metarules that control rules in KWM are used to handle exceptions that occur in a running workflow instance. Workflow participants can easily change workflow schema of a workflow instance with the support of extra rules and a metarule. Based on KWM, K-WFMS (Knowledge-based WorkFlow Management System) has been implemented in client/server architecture. Inference shell of knowledge-based systems is employed for enactment of business rules and integrated with database systems. From a real application based on the KWM architecture, it has been shown that system performance can increase notably by reducing the number of rules and facts that are used in the course of workflow enactment

Predicting and explaining the movement of mesoscale oceanographic features using CLIPS

The Naval Research Laboratory has developed an oceanographic expert system that describes the evolution of mesoscale features in the Gulf Stream region of the northwest Atlantic Ocean. These features include the Gulf Stream current and the warm and cold core eddies associated with the Gulf Stream. An explanation capability was added to the eddy prediction component of the expert system in order to allow the system to justify the reasoning process it uses to make predictions. The eddy prediction and explanation components of the system have recently been redesigned and translated from OPS83 to C and CLIPS and the new system is called WATE (Where Are Those Eddies). The new design has improved the system's readability, understandability and maintainability and will also allow the system to be incorporated into the Semi-Automated Mesoscale Analysis System which will eventually be embedded into the Navy's Tactical Environmental Support System, Third Generation, TESS(3)

Making diagnosis explicit

What is good diagnostic practice? The answer is elusive for many medical students and equally puzzling for those trying to build effective medical decision support systems. Much of the problem lies in the difficult of 'getting at' diagnosis. Expert diagnosticians find it difficult to introspect on their own strategies, thus making it difficult to pass on their expertise.Traditional knowledge acquisition methods are designed for gathering static domain knowledge and are inappropriate for the acquisition of knowledge about the diagnos¬ tic 'task'. More advanced knowledge acquisition methodologies, particularly those which focus on the modelling of problem-solving knowledge seem to hold more promise, but are not sufficiently practicable to allow anyone other than a knowledge engineer to operate directly. Given the difficulty experts have in accessing their own diagnostic strategies what is needed is a tool which would enable diagnosticians themselves to directly formu¬ late and experiment with their own methods of diagnosis.This research describes the development of a knowledge acquisition methodology geared specifically towards the exposition of medical diagnosis. The methodology is implemented as a toolkit enabling exploration and construction of medical diagnostic models and production of model-based medical diagnostic support systems. The toolkit allows someone skilled in diagnosis to articulate their diagnostic strategy so that it can be used by those with less experience

Story understanding in Genesis : exploring automatic plot construction through commonsense reasoning

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 72).Whether through anecdotes, folklore, or formal history, humans learn the lessons and expectations of life from stories. If we are to build intelligent programs that learn as humans do, such programs must understand stories as well. Casting narrative text in an information-rich representation affords Al research platforms, such as the Genesis system, the capacity to understand the events of stories individually. To understand a story, however, a program must understand not just events, but also how events cause and motivate one another. In order to understand the relationships between these events, stories must be saturated with implicit details, connecting given events into coherent plot arcs. In my research, my first step was to analyze a range of story summaries in detail. Using nearly 50 rules, applicable to brief summaries of stories taken from international politics, group dynamics, and basic human emotion, I demonstrate how a rendition of Frank Herbert's Dune can be automatically understood so as to produce an interconnected story network of over one hundred events. My second step was to explore the nuances of rule construction, finding which rules are needed to create story networks reflective of proper implicit understanding and how we, as architects, must shape those rules to be understood. In particular, I develop a method that constructs new rules using the rules already embedded in stories, a representation of higher-order thinking that enables us to speak of our ideas as objects.by Harold William Capen Low, IV.M.Eng

Administrative Sabotage

Government can sabotage itself. From the president’s choice of agency heads to agency budgets, regulations, and litigating positions, presidents and their appointees have undermined the very programs they administer. But why would an agency try to put itself out of business? And how can agencies that are subject to an array of political and legal checks sabotage statutory programs? This Article offers an account of the “what, why, and how” of administrative sabotage that answers those questions. It contends that sabotage reflects a distinct mode of agency action that is more permanent, more destructive, and more democratically illegitimate than more-studied forms of maladministration. In contrast to an agency that shirks its statutory duties or drifts away from Congress’s policy goals, one engaged in sabotage aims deliberately to kill or nullify a program it administers. Agencies sabotage because presidents ask them to. Facing pressure to dismantle statutory programs in an environment where securing legislation from Congress is difficult and politically costly, presidents pursue retrenchment through the administrative state. Building on this positive theory of administrative sabotage, this Article considers legal responses. The best response, this Article contends, is not reforms to the cross-cutting body of administrative law that structures most agency action. Rather, the risk of sabotage is better managed through changes to how statutory programs are designed. Congress’s choices about agency leadership, the concentration or dispersal of authority to implement statutory programs, the breadth of statutory delegations, and other matters influence the likelihood that sabotage will succeed or fail. When lawmakers create or modify federal programs, they should design them to be less vulnerable to sabotage by the very agencies that administer them

A knowledge-based flight status monitor for real-time application in digital avionics systems

The Dryden Flight Research Facility of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Center (Ames-Dryden) is the principal NASA facility for the flight testing and evaluation of new and complex avionics systems. To aid in the interpretation of system health and status data, a knowledge-based flight status monitor was designed. The monitor was designed to use fault indicators from the onboard system which are telemetered to the ground and processed by a rule-based model of the aircraft failure management system to give timely advice and recommendations in the mission control room. One of the important constraints on the flight status monitor is the need to operate in real time, and to pursue this aspect, a joint research activity between NASA Ames-Dryden and the Royal Aerospace Establishment (RAE) on real-time knowledge-based systems was established. Under this agreement, the original LISP knowledge base for the flight status monitor was reimplemented using the intelligent knowledge-based system toolkit, MUSE, which was developed under RAE sponsorship. Details of the flight status monitor and the MUSE implementation are presented