Re: "Intelligent" Workflow Technology Research?

From: Austin Tate (bat@aiai.edinburgh.ac.uk)
Reply to: bat@aiai.edinburgh.ac.uk & iceimt@tools.org forum
Wed, 12 May 93 09:07:47 BST


Mark, to give some input relating to your query on intelligent flow management based on rationale, you may know that we are working on a number of task planning systems (based on Nonlin, O-Plan and O-Plan2) including work with the the US government as part of the Planning Initiative. These all use goal structure/rationale capture as their underlying process and plan representation. in work with Japan, we have done scheduling applications of the same architecture (a variant called TOSCA - The Open SCheduling Architecture) in manufacturing.

We have put considerable thought into how the work we have done can be used to link levels of business process modelling and strategic decision making, tactical plan elaboration, and operational dispatch through intelligent work flow management with explanation and rescheduling aids based on process and plan rationale.

We have just won a large (2.4 milion pounds) project in the UK with government support as part of the UK Itelligent Systems Integration porgramme. Our consortium involves 4 other groups to explore this further. We have explored our thinking with flow manager product companies as we are sure that flow managers are the way to deliver the benefits of the work we are doing. This project is called ENTERPRISE. Two user sites are involved in tnbe project. AIAI is one of the main technology providers. This is effectively one of the large scale enterprise integration pilots called for in the working sessions if the First Conference on Enterprise Integration Modelling.

We have a number of projects internally and with clients which instantiate parts of the overall ideas and are in productive use for them. Our HARDY diagramming aid (in C++) already allows for capture of processes and defintion of processes, output of quality manuals and the like.

I thought this brief overview of our interests and news of ENTERPRISE (announced a week ago) may be of interest to all-iceimt. I would be pleased to talk in more detail directly to you about this.

Prof. Austin Tate Technical Director AI Applications Institute University of Edinburgh 80 South Bridge Edinburgh EH1 1HN United Kingdom

email A.Tate@ed.ac.uk

tel UK +31 650 2732 fax UK +31 650 6513



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Last Updated: Fri Feb 10 05:00:02 2012