Workshop on

Knowledge-Based Systems for
Model-Based Engineering

22.08.2000

Introduction

The ever increasing complexity of products and systems, reduced time-to-market and sheer world-wide competition for "faster, better and cheaper" products pushes industry to restructure internal processes and to search for new engineering concepts. Moreover, the increasing industry awareness of the benefits of specification-driven design and model-based solutions on the one hand, and the advances in the fields of knowledge modelling, representation and reasoning on the other, call for a critical evaluation of the state-of-the-art and the future of these AI technologies with respect to applications in engineering.

It is our belief that in order to achieve large-scale industrial applications of knowledge-based systems, the knowledge bases should be “assembled” in a similar way to product assembly. Model-based solutions promise to offer a sound basis for achieving compositionality and reusability of knowledge-bases in engineering applications.

Technical issues addressed

The workshop addresses the road-map from basic AI technologies, such as:

Model-based reasoning and constraint satisfaction,
Knowledge modelling, management and interchange,
Ontologies and problem-solving methods,

to applications in engineering, such as:

Requirements engineering,
Specification-driven design,
Early design-to-X (modularity, reusability, life-cycle-cost),
RAMS-engineering (reliability, availability, maintainability, safety),
Design-based control and diagnostics development,
Engineering knowledge management for products and production processes.

The workshop should contribute to assessing the state-of-the-art, the bottlenecks and the future role that knowledge-based technologies will play in engineering processes.
Besides case studies of practical problems and theoretical contributions relevant to applications in engineering, we also welcome descriptions of implemented systems for knowledge-based engineering. We hope this will stimulate the co-operation between research and industry and the technology transfer into industry. We encourage the authors to address the following issues:

Engineering tasks addressed and requirements for knowledge representation and reasoning;
Arguments for the AI technologies used, experiences and best-practices;
Key strategies used in order to face complexity, scalability, maintainability;
Costs and benefits of the solutions, limitations and bottlenecks;
Process integration aspects, including: knowledge acquisition and maintenance, relation with the currently used engineering tools such as CAD/CAE, PDM, etc;
The envisioned engineering process of the future and realistic ways to achieve it.

The workshop will consist of presentations of selected papers and discussions. A limited number of papers will be selected after being revised by the Program Committee to be presented during the workshop.

Tool descriptions accepted for presentation may be supplemented by a tool demonstration in an extra session at the end of the workshop.

Related ECAI 2000 workshops

Authors of overlapping papers are encouraged to submit their papers to both workshops.

Attendance

All workshop participants MUST register also for the main ECAI 2000 conference. Workshop attendance will be limited to at most 40 people who are asked to submit a paper and / or a 1 page statement of interest.

Publication

The abstracts of all submitted papers will be available on the workshop page. The accepted papers and the statements of interest will be published in the workshop notes. The accepted papers will also be available from the workshop page.

Submissions

Submit an electronic abstract and your paper before May 1, 2000. Sent the abstract of your paper by email to Mugur.Tatar@DaimlerChrysler.com. It is recommended to submit papers using the final camera-ready formatting style of the ECAI 2000 except for the blind reviewing and submission procedure instructions. Papers must not exceed six pages in camera-ready format, statements of interest must not exceed one page. Guidelines on the ECAI-2000 Style are available on the WWW ECAI2000 page. Papers should be sent electronically as PDF (preferred) or Postscript, or in printed form to:

ADDRESS FOR SUBMISSION

Mugur Tatar
DaimlerChrysler AG
Research and Technology
Alt-Moabit 96A
10559 Berlin, Germany
Mugur.Tatar@DaimlerChrysler.com

Important dates

IMPORTANT DATES
May 1, 2000		Submission of electronic abstracts and of workshop papers
May 1, 2000		Submission of statement of interest by workshop attendees
May 20, 2000		Notification of acceptance / rejection
June 8, 2000		Camera-ready copies of papers
August 22, 2000		Workshop in conjunction with ECAI 2000 in Berlin, Germany

Workshop organizing committee

Markus Stumptner,
Institut für Informationssysteme,
Technical University of Wien,
Favoritenstrasse 9, A-1040 Wien, Austria
Phone: +43-1-58801-18433 Fax: +43-1-58801-18492 Email: mst@dbai.tuwien.ac.at

Mugur Tatar
DaimlerChrysler AG
Research and Technology
Alt-Moabit 96A
10559 Berlin, Germany
Phone: +49-30-39982212 Fax: +49-30-39982107 Email: Mugur.Tatar@DaimlerChrysler.com

Zdenek Zdrahal
Knowledge Media Institute,
The Open University
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK
Phone: +44 (1908) 654512, Fax: +44 (1908) 653169 Email: Z.Zdrahal@open.ac.uk

Contact