AIAI Technical Focus

AIAI's technical expertise is in the capture, analysis and use of knowledge.

This expertise is being applied to:

Knowledge Capture

The first stages in the development of any business solution entail understanding the problem, determining the requirements of the organisation and capturing its corporate knowledge - these are critically important elements of knowledge engineering. AIAI specialises in knowledge engineering methods and has considerable experience of using and testing these methods on industrial applications. This work involves requirements capture and knowledge acquisition, together with the design, implementation, validation and maintenance of systems.

HARDY is a hypermedia diagramming tool designed for requirements capture and model visualisation. HARDY works with, and supports, structured analytical methodologies.

SPIRIT, a decision support system, embodies a computer-based model of human expertise in which the concepts and task knowledge of domain specialists are directly represented. The system concentrates on a specific type of petroleum reservoir test and was sponsored by Shell, Amoco, Enterprise, Elf-Enterprise, Bow Valley and the Petroleum Science and Technology Institute.

Knowledge Analysis

For knowledge to be usefully applied it must be analysed and systematically organised. Through its work on planning systems, AIAI has developed rich models of process plans and schedules. These models enable complex associations such as temporal relationships and causal dependencies between activities to be maintained throughout problem solving. In its work on decision support systems, AIAI has applied leading edge technologies for handling uncertainty in data and knowledge - real applications commonly involve uncertainty.

AIAI has significant expertise in the analysis of business problems using methodological approaches, such as KADS.

AUSDA, a strategic research project funded under the UK government's Safety Critical Systems Programme, is developing a framework for integrating approaches to the development of safety critical software. AUSDA will identify the root causes of incidents in which the use of computer software is involved.

Knowledge Synthesis and Use

Once knowledge has been captured and analysed it must be applied to benefit the organisation. AIAI has developed knowledge-based systems which cooperate with human users, and also systems which work autonomously, without human involvement.

SDBA, the Smart DataBase Access system, is an intelligent decision support tool developed to provide users with powerful and flexible data manipulation capabilities without them requiring knowledge of the underlying database technology.

O-Plan, a strategic research programme, is part of the United States government's Planning Initiative to develop a practical computer based environment to support specification, generation, interaction with and execution of activity plans for military logistics. O-Plan is a domain independent planning and control framework, which allows detailed knowledge to be embedded in an application. It is suitable for tasks such as: planning control of supply and distribution logistics; project management for product introduction, systems engineering and construction.

TOSCA, for the manufacturing sector, was commissioned by Hitachi and focuses on the scheduling of job-shops. The system enables resource demand to be dynamically monitored throughout the scheduling process and provides a means of avoiding the growth of resource bottlenecks.

Integrated Systems

AIAI is leading a collaborative project which is undertaking strategic research and development in the field of enterprise and business process modelling. This project, called Enterprise, is bringing together work from AIAI's areas of technical expertise: requirements and knowledge capture, knowledge analysis and knowledge use. A major activity is the development of tools to assist in modelling the structure and processes of an organisation. Enterprise is a major initiative supporting the management of change within organisations. The consortium is led by AIAI and includes IBM UK, Lloyd's Register, Logica and Unilever. The project is part funded under the UK government's Intelligent Systems Integration Programme.

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