How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems.

The Study of Man. By Michael Polanyi. Price, $1.75. Pp. 102. University of Chicago Press, 5750 Ellis Ave., Chicago 37, 1959. One subtitle to Polanyi's challenging and fascinating book might be The Evolution and Natural History of Error , for Polanyi is at pains to expunge what he believes to be the false notion contained in the contemporary view of science which treats it as an object and basically impersonal discipline. According to Polanyi not only is this a radical and important error, but it is harmful to the objectives of science itself. Another subtitle could be Farewell to Detachment , for in place of cold objectivity he develops the idea that science is necessarily intensely personal. It is a human endeavor and human point of view which cannot be divorced from nor uprooted out of the human matrix from which it arises and in which it works. For a good while

Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy

On the truck dispatching problem

Multiagent Systems is the title of a collection of papers dedicated to surveying specific themes of Multiagent Systems (MAS) and Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI). All of them authored by leading researchers of this dynamic multidisciplinary field.

/pdf/multiagent-systems-a-modern-approach-to-distributed-5fon0donq1.pdf

Multiagent systems: a modern approach to distributed artificial intelligence

Holonic multiagent systems (HMAS) offer a promising software engineering approach for developing complex open software systems. However the process of building Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and HMAS is mostly different from the process of building more traditional software systems as it introduces new design and development challenges. This paper introduces an agent-oriented software process for engineering complex systems called ASPECS. ASPECS is based on a holonic organisational metamodel and provides a step-by-step guide from requirements to code allowing the modelling of a system at different levels of details using a set of refinement methods. This paper details the entire ASPECS development process and provides a set of methodological guidelines for each process activity. A complete case study is also used to illustrate the design process and the associated notations. ASPECS uses UML as a modelling language. Because of the specific needs of agents and holonic organisational design, the UML semantics and notation are used as reference points, but they have been extended by introducing new specific profiles.

/pdf/aspecs-an-agent-oriented-software-process-for-engineering-35qdg637oe.pdf

ASPECS: an agent-oriented software process for engineering complex systems

http://perso.citi-lab.fr/osimonin/OSimonin/travaux/article_simulation.pdf

Simulation and Evaluation of Urban Bus Networks Using a Multiagent Approach

janus is a new multiagent platform that was specifically designed to deal with the implementation and deployment of holonic and multiagent systems. It is based on an organisational approach and its key focus is that it supports the implementation of the concepts of role and organisation as first-class entities. This consideration has a significant impact on agent implementation and allows an agent to easily and dynamically change its behaviour. The platform also natively manages the concept of holon to facilitate the deployment of holonic multiagent systems and thus contributes to fill the gap between conception and implementation phases in this domain. This article draws a complete description of janus and its main characteristics. A small example of a market-like community is also provided with the associated code review to illustrate the impact of a full organisational approach in terms of code modularity and reusability.

An Organisational Platform for Holonic and Multiagent Systems

Holonic Multi-Agent Systems (HMAS) are a convenient way to engineer complex and open systems. HMAS are based upon self-similar entities, called holons, which define an organizational structure called holarchy. An open issue of HMAS is to give holons means of self-organization to satisfy their goals. Our works focus on modeling and engineering of complex systems using a holonic organizational approach. This paper introduces the concept of capacity as the description of agents know-how. This concept allows the representation and reasoning about agents know-hows. Even more, it encourages a reusable modeling and provides agents with means to self-organize.

An analysis and design concept for self-organization in holonic multi-agent systems

Holonic multiagent systems ( hmas ) offers a promising software engineering approach for developing applications in complex domains characterized by a hierarchical structure. However the process of building mas s and hmas s is mostly different from the process of building more traditional software systems and it introduces new design and development issues. Against this background, this paper introduces organization-oriented abstractions for agent-oriented software engineering. We propose a complete organizational meta-model as the basis of a future complete methodology that will spread from requirements analysis to code production. In addition to dealing with this last aspect, we introduce our platform, called Janus, that we specifically designed to implement and deploy holonic multiagent systems by adopting concepts like role and organization as the leading issues of the analysis-development process.

/pdf/a-holonic-metamodel-for-agent-oriented-analysis-and-design-41jxxi5a3z.pdf

A. Koukam

Papers

ASPECS: an agent-oriented software process for engineering complex systems

Simulation and Evaluation of Urban Bus Networks Using a Multiagent Approach

An Organisational Platform for Holonic and Multiagent Systems

An analysis and design concept for self-organization in holonic multi-agent systems

A Holonic Metamodel for Agent-Oriented Analysis and Design