Cognitive engineering

Artificial intelligence: Engineering

Quality and innovation are two main issues involved in product development. When faced with increasingly intense competition from both national and international competitors, organisations usually consider quality and innovation as sources of competitive advantage. Customer satisfaction can be met and exceeded by providing customers with innovative products of high quality. Focusing on the early phases of product development, this paper suggests the combined use of quality function deployment and Kano's model. A case example is presented by employing the proposed method in a World Wide Web page design process. Customer requirements on Web pages were clearly recognised and deeply analysed. Also, further technical features were identified for delivering attractive Web pages. The results from the case example support the proposed framework as a means of innovative product development and attractive quality creation.

Development of innovative products using kano's model and quality function deployment

In a multi-agent system, how agents accomplish a goal task is usually specified by multi-agent plans built from basic actions (e.g. operators) of which the agents are capable. A critical problem with such an approach is how can the designer make sure the plans are reliable. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a formal approach for modeling and analyzing multi-agent behaviors using Predicate/Transition (PrT) nets, a high-level formalism of Petri nets. We construct a multi-agent model by representing agent capabilities as transitions. To verify a multi-agent PrT model, we adapt the planning graphs as a compact structure for the reachability analysis. We also demonstrate that, based on the PrT model, whether parallel actions specified in multi-agent plans can be executed in parallel and whether the plans guarantee the achievement of the goal can be verified by analyzing the dependency relations among the transitions.

Modeling and verifying multi-agent behaviors using predicate/transition nets

This paper presents an application of the steady-state network equivalents and an expert system for voltage and reactive power (VAr) control in large-scale power systems. A steady-state network equivalencing technique is used to construct the "three-tier" subsystem which is adequate to solve voltage violation problems. An expert system utilises the sensitivity tree method to select the optimal set of control actions to alleviate the voltage problem. The expert system was developed using the VP-EXPERT system shell. VP-EXPERT interacts with the power system analysis software providing analysis of the network sensitivity matrix and data for the knowledge base. Practical application of the developed expert system is demonstrated on the example of the Hydro-Electric Commission (HEC) power system of Tasmania, however the proposed approach is not limited by the system size.

Network equivalents and expert system application for voltage and VAR control in large-scale power systems

The World Wide Web is an increasingly popular tool for accessing information via the Internet. It derives from many individuals and organisations making information available using the medium of hypertext. The pages they create are sometimes wonderful, informative and entertaining but more often haphazard, confusing and difficult to navigate. Yet there exists a body of work and experience in the areas of hypertext design and human-computer interaction (HCI) which should be influencing Web page design. This paper examines some of the main issues from these fields and how they apply to the Web. It proposes a set of guidelines for Web page design. Does your page satisfy these guidelines?

Better page design for the world wide web

The paper describes an approach to resource management in uncertain domains, which is based on the concept of temporal influence. The Distributed Interactive Scheduling with Abstractions Project is aimed at building a scheduling system designed to address the uncertainties of real-world domains. The system has two main features; it is distributed, taking a multi-agent view, and it uses a solution method that employs temporal abstractions to aid decision-making. The multi-agent view is a novel architecture based on a hierarchical representation of time and a dynamic heterogenetic structure for problem-solving agents. Temporal abstractions in the form of summarisations and generalisations are used for problem reduction and conflict resolution, providing a second novel idea. An additional goal of this project is to provide the user with the environment and information necessary to allow useful and intelligent interaction with the problem-solving process. Temporal abstractions also play an important role in the satisfaction of this goal.

Distributed approach to dynamic resource management based on temporal influence

Complex systems can be managed by object oriented notions incorporating abstractions and encapsulation in the context of conccurency. This paper presents a specification of a multi-agent system for resource allocation problems using CO-OPN (Concurrent Object Oriented Petri Nets) specifications. CO-OPN is a specification language for describing concurrent aspects and the data structure aspects of computer programs in an abstract way. The multi-agent architecture proposed for the DISA (Distributed Interactive Scheduling with Abstractions) system is based on a hierachical representation of time and a dynamic, heterogenetic structure for problem solving agents. Agents are elegantly described as objects which behavior is modeled by an algebraic Petri net representation.

Pauline M. Berry

Papers

Better page design for the world wide web

Distributed approach to dynamic resource management based on temporal influence

Multi-agents system specification using CO-OPN