Towards a Semiotic Metrics Suite for Product Ontology Evaluation

In recent years, product ontology has been proposed for solving integration problems in product-related information systems such as e-commerce and supply chain management applications. A product ontology provides consensual definitions of concepts and inter-relationships being relevant in a product domain of interest. Adopting such an ontology requires means for assessing their suitability and selecting the “right” product ontology. In this article, the authors (1) propose a metrics suite for product ontology evaluation based on semiotic theory, and (2) demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the metrics suite using a supply chain model. The contribution of our research is the comprehensive metrics suite that takes into account the various quality dimensions of product ontology.

Genetic Algorithm to Solve Multi-Period, Multi-Product, Bi-Echelon Supply Chain Network Design Problem

In many multi-stage manufacturing supply chains, transportation related costs are a significant portion of final product costs. It is often crucial for successful decision making approaches in multi-stage manufacturing supply chains to explicitly account for non-linear transportation costs. In this article, we have explored this problem by considering a Two-Stage Production-Transportation (TSPT). A twostage supply chain that faces a deterministic stream of external demands for a single product is considered. A finite supply of raw materials, and finite production at stage one has been assumed. Items are manufactured at stage one and transported to stage two, where the storage capacity of the warehouses is limited. Packaging is completed at stage two (that is, value is added to each item, but no new items are created), and the finished goods inventories are stored which is used to meet the final demand of customers. During each period, the optimized production levels in stage one, as well as transportation levels between stage one and stage two and routing structure from the production plant to warehouses and then to customers, must be determined. The authors consider “different cost structures,” for both manufacturing and transportation. This TSPT model with capacity constraint at both stages is optimized using Genetic Algorithms (GA) and the results obtained are compared with the results of other optimization techniques of complete enumeration, LINDO, and CPLEX.

Using Simulation Systems for Decision Support

This chapter describes the use of simulation systems for decision support in support of real operations, which is the most challenging application domain in the discipline of modeling and simulation. To this end, the systems must be integrated as services into the operational infrastructure. To support discovery, selection, and composition of services, they need to be annotated regarding technical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, dynamic, and conceptual categories. The systems themselves must be complete and validated. The data must be obtainable, preferably via common protocols shared with the operational infrastructure. Agents and automated forces must produce situation adequate behavior. If these requirements for simulation systems and their annotations are fulfilled, decision support simulation can contribute significantly to the situational awareness up to cognitive levels of the decision maker.

Applying Dynamic Causal Mining in Health Service Management

This article describes an application that illustrates the role of data mining technology in identifying hidden causal knoledge from health and medical data repositories. Across the health care and medical enterprises, a wide variety of data is being generated at a rapid rate. Current information technologies tends to focus on a more statical side of causal knowledge and do not address the dynamic causal knowledge. This article shows that the dynamic causal relation data can be captured for treatment, payment, operations purposes and administrative directed insights. Accessing this currently unrealized knowledge potential would enable the delivery of actionable knowledge to medical practitioners, healthcare system managers, policy planners and even patients to make a significant difference in overall healthcare.

Data Mining in Decision Support for Bioenergy Production

Deliberate exploitation of natural resources and excessive use of environmentally abhorrent materials have resulted in environmental disruptions threatening the life support systems. A human centric approach of development has already damaged nature to a large extent. This has attracted the attention of environmental specialists and policy makers. It has also led to discussions at various national and international conventions. The objective of protecting natural resources cannot be achieved without the involvement of professionals from multidisciplinary areas. This chapter recommends a model for the creation of knowledge-based systems for natural resources management. Further, it describes making use of unique capabilities of remote sensing satellites for conserving natural resources and managing natural disasters. It is exclusively for the people who are not familiar with the technology and who are given the task of framing policies.

Developing a Collaborative Supply Chain Management Platform

Service-oriented computing is becoming increasingly popular. It allows designing flexible and adaptable software systems that can be easily adopted on demand by software customers. Those benefits are from primary importance in the context of supply chain management; that is why this paper proposes to apply ProDAOSS, a process for developing adaptable and open service systems to an industrial case study in outbound logistics. ProDAOSS is conceived as a plug-in for I-Tropos - a broader development methodology - so that it covers the whole software development life cycle. At analysis level, flexible business processes are generically modelled with different complementary views. First of all, an aggregate services view of the whole applicative package is offered; then services are split using an agent ontology - through the i* framework - to represent it as an organization of agents. A dynamic view completes the documentation by offering the service realization paths. At design stage, the service center architecture proposes a reference architectural pattern for services realization in an adaptable and open manner. The paper finally presents the implemented platform for a particular service – manage transport – so that the reader can realize how the developments have been achieved.

Mathematical Models for Optimizing the Global Mining Supply Chain

The present chapter discusses the application of intelligent decision-support systems – mathematical programming-based in particular – to operations management within the mining industry. The underlying production and distribution planning and scheduling problems have often been addressed individually, in disregard of upstream and downstream operations. A supply chain approach to mining operations, however, requires an integrated perspective which takes into account mine, railway and port operations, as well as domestic and international supply stations served by appropriate logistics channels. Three main topics are discussed here: recent operations research developments in the mining industry; integrated approaches towards the development of decision-support systems to address a global mining supply chain; and possible solution approaches to the integrated problems. The main thread is oriented to mathematical programming approaches, but relevant applications of simulation and artificial intelligence techniques are also discussed.

SAT and Planning

This chapter firstly reviews the importance of the Satisfiability Problem (SAT) for a wide range of applications, including applications in Operation Management such as planning. A review of methods nowadays employed by modern SAT-solvers is then presented. The authors then use Classical Planning as an illustrative example of how a significant problem can be translated into SAT. They point out important results and studies concerning reductions of planning into SAT, and explain how to construct a SAT instance which is satisfiable if and only if an instance of a bounded version of the classic blocks-world problem is solvable.

Employing Intelligent Decision Systems to Aid in Information Technology Project Status Decisions

When a firm initiates and invests into an information technology (IT) project, it is usually with the intention of realizing benefits in the informational, strategic, transactional, and infrastructure objective areas of its IT portfolio (Weill & Broadbent, 1998). From the project management perspective, it is critical to know how the project is performing from the viewpoint of scope, schedule, cost, and other constraints. Lewis (2008) reports that 70% of IT-related projects do not meet their objective. This chapter examines the use of a case-based reasoning decision support architecture that provides a collaborative intelligent agent system to aid in recommending the status of a project using color indicators (Red, Yellow, Green) derived from the progress and condition of the project-related constraints.

A 3D Vision-Based Solution for Product Picking In Industrial Applications

Computer vision is nowadays a key factor in many manufacturing processes. Among all possible applications like quality control, assembly verification and component tracking, the robot guidance for pick and place operations can assume an important role in increasing the automation level of production lines. While 3D vision systems are now emerging as valid solutions in bin-picking applications, where objects are randomly placed inside a box, 2D vision systems are widely and successfully adopted when objects are placed on a conveyor belt and the robot manipulator can grasp the object by exploiting only the 2D information. On the other hand, there are many real-world applications where the 3rd dimension is required by the picking system. For example, the objects can differ in their height or they can be manually placed in front of the camera without any constraint on the distance between the object and the camera itself. Although a 3D vision system could represent a possible solution, 3D systems are more complex, more expensive and less compact than 2D vision systems. This chapter describes a monocular system useful for picking applications. It can estimate the 3D position of a single marker attached to the target object assuming that the orientation of the object is approximately known.