The Future of Product Design and Life-Cycle Management?
April 24, 2009
Computer support to Product Design and Life-Cycle Management is currently dominated by PLM systems, and industry is not very happy with the support provided. Industrial design methodologies and PLM systems create many disjoint, pre-typed product structures. This approach belongs to the era of communicating product knowledge as engineering drawings. In this post, we discuss the need for replacing these static structures by a single federated product model, from which any structure or aspect can be derived. The federated product model is managed as a family of configurable system and component models, as part of an active knowledge architecture (AKA). With the advent of AKA we see completely new approaches, concepts, operational methodologies, visual modeling methods, enterprise architectures and design solutions emerging. Read the rest of this entry »
Methodologies for Active Knowledge Architectures
April 23, 2009
Innovative design is the most important competitive factor for global engineering and manufacturing. Critical challenges include cutting lead times for new products, increasing stakeholder involvement, facilitating life-cycle knowledge sharing, service provisioning, and support. Current IT solutions for product lifecycle management fail to meet these challenges because they are built to perform routine information processing, rather than support agile creative work.
Active knowledge modeling is a family of methodologies that address this situation, utilizing model-driven application platforms. This post presents an overview of different methodologies applied to implement pragmatic and powerful design platforms, by building and utilizing active knowledge architectures (AKA).
Types and Extents in Microsoft’s M
April 20, 2009
My first impression of Microsoft Oslo and the M modeling language was quite positive. In particular, their approach seemed to take better care of instances than e.g. UML does, and I applauded the use of extents (instance collections) rather than types to represent repository database tables.
Upon closer examination, however, some doubts appeared. The syntax seems unneccesarily complex, and the repository and M representations goes out of synch with regard to such basic functions as subtyping and the identity of the instances. This post proposes some adjustments to simplify M and better align the visual, textual and repository representations of Oslo. Read the rest of this entry »
Frank Lillehagen
Håvard Jørgensen
Active Knowledge Modeling 