The development of a fuzzy wavelet neural network (FWNN) for the prediction of electricity consumption is presented. The fuzzy rules that contain wavelets are constructed. Based on these rules, the structure of FWNN-based system is described. The FWNN system is applied for modeling and prediction of complex time series. The gradient algorithm and genetic algorithm are used for learning of FWNN parameters. The developed FWNN is applied for prediction of electricity consumption. This process has high-order nonlinearity. The statistical data for the last 10 years are used for the development of FWNN prediction model. The effectiveness of the proposed system is evaluated with the results obtained from the simulation of FWNN-based prediction system and with the comparative simulation results of previous related models.

Traditional failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) methods lack sufficient semantics and structure to provide full traceability between the failure modes and the effects of the complex system. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a formal failure knowledge representation model combined with the structural decomposition of the complex system. The model defines the failure modes as the inherent properties of the physical entities at different hierarchical levels, and employs the individual color, unified color, and Boolean matrix of the polychromatic sets to represent the failure modes in terms of their interrelationships and their relations to the physical system. This method is a structure-based modeling technique that provides a simple, yet comprehensive framework to organize the failure modes and their causes and effects more systematically and completely. Using the iterative search process operated on the reasoning matrices, the end effects on the entire system can be achieved automatically, which allows for the consideration of both the single and multiple failures. An example is embedded in the description of the methodology for better understanding. Because of the powerful mathematical modeling capability of the polychromatic sets, the approach presented in this paper makes significant progress in FMEA formalization.

Tangible interaction is a growing area of human–computer interaction research that has become popular in recent years. Yet designers and researchers are still trying to comprehend and clarify its nature, characteristics, and implications. One approach has been to create frameworks that help us look back at and categorize past tangible interaction systems, and look forward at the possibilities and opportunities for developing new systems. To date, a number of different frameworks have been proposed that each provide different perspectives on the tangible interaction design space, and which can guide designers of new systems in different ways. In this paper, we map the space of tangible interaction frameworks. We order existing frameworks by their general type, and by the facets of tangible interaction design they address. One of our main conclusions is that most frameworks focus predominantly on the conceptual design of tangible systems, whereas fewer frameworks abstract the knowledge gained from previous systems, and hardly any framework provides concrete steps or tools for building new tangible systems. In addition, the facets most represented in existing frameworks are those that address the interactions with or the physicality of the designed systems. Other facets, such as domain-specific technology and experience, are rare. This focus on design, interaction, and physicality is interesting, as the origins of the field are rooted in engineering methods and have only recently started to incorporate more design-inspired approaches. As such, we expected more frameworks to focus on technologies and to provide concrete building suggestions for new tangible interaction systems.

In this paper we present a formal characterization of the engineering concepts of behavior and function of technical artifacts. We capture the meanings that engineers attach to these concepts by formalizing, within the formal ontology DOLCE, the five meanings of artifact behavior and the two meanings of function that Chandrasekaran and Josephson identified in 2000 within the functional representation approach. We begin our formalization by reserving the term “behavior” of a technical artifact as “the specific way in which the artifact occurs in an event.” This general notion is characterized formally, and used to provide definitions of actual behaviors of artifacts, and the physically possible and physically impossible behaviors that rational agents believe that artifacts have. We also define several other notions, for example, input and output behaviors of artifacts, and then show that these ontologically characterized concepts give a general framework in which Chandrasekaran and Josephson's meanings of behavior can be explicitly formalized. Finally we show how Chandrasekaran and Josephson's two meanings of artifact functions, namely, device-centric and environment-centric functions, can be captured in DOLCE via the concepts of behavioral constraint and mode of deployment of an artifact. A more general goal of this work is to show that foundational ontologies are suited to the engineering domain: they can facilitate information sharing and exchange in the various engineering domains by providing concept structures and clarifications that make explicit and precise important engineering notions. The meanings of the terms “behavior” and “function” in domains like designing, redesigning, reverse engineering, product architecture, and engineering knowledge bases are often ambiguous or overloaded. Our results show that foundational ontologies can accommodate the variety of denotations these terms have and can explain their relationships.

I was among those who proposed problem solving methods (PSMs) in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a knowledge-level description of strategies useful in building knowledge-based systems. This paper summarizes the evolution of my ideas in the last two decades. I start with a review of the original ideas. From an artificial intelligence (AI) point of view, it is not PSMs as such, which are essentially high-level design strategies for computation, that are interesting, but PSMs associated with tasks that have a relation to AI and cognition. They are also interesting with respect to cognitive architecture proposals such as Soar and ACT-R: PSMs are observed regularities in the use of knowledge that an exclusive focus on the architecture level might miss, the latter providing no vocabulary to talk about these regularities. PSMs in the original conception are closely connected to a specific view of knowledge: symbolic expressions represented in a repository and retrieved as needed. I join critics of this view, and maintain with them that most often knowledge is not retrieved from a base as much as constructed as needed. This criticism, however, raises the question of what is in memory that is not knowledge as traditionally conceived in AI, but can support the construction of knowledge in predicate–symbolic form. My recent proposal about cognition and multimodality offers a possible answer. In this view, much of memory consists of perceptual and kinesthetic images, which can be recalled during deliberation and from which internal perception can generate linguistic–symbolic knowledge. For example, from a mental image of a configuration of objects, numerous sentences can be constructed describing spatial relations between the objects. My work on diagrammatic reasoning is an implemented example of how this might work. These internal perceptions on imagistic representations are a new kind of PSM.

Designers are interacting with an increasing number of digital tools in their design process; however, these are usually in addition to the traditional and ubiquitous paper-based design journals. This paper explores the medium of informal design information and its relationships with sketching behavior over three stages of the design process: preliminary investigation and user needs analyses, concept generation and development, and prototyping and testing. Our test bed consists of tangible, digital, and hybrid design journals collected from four semesters of UC Berkeley's graduate level, multidisciplinary course titled “Managing the New Product Development Process: Design Theory and Methods.” We developed protocols for two categories of analysis: one that codes for the media type of each journal and its content, and another one that characterizes the content within the journal. We found a trend toward hybrid digital–tangible journals for the engineering students over the 4-year period. These hybrid journals exhibited a higher degree of detail over advancing design stages, which has been shown to correlate with improved project performance. We also present several case studies of unusual design journals that illustrate the range of designers' interpretations of design journals as a medium. Based on this descriptive research, features for interactive hybrid tangible–digital design journals are recommended.

Teleological modeling is fundamental to understanding and explaining many complex systems, especially engineered systems. Research on engineering design and problem solving has developed several ontologies for expressing teleology, for example, functional representation, function–behavior–structure, and structure–behavior–function (SBF). In this paper, we view SBF as a programming language. SBF models of engineering systems have been used in several computer programs for automated design and problem solving. The SBF language captures the expressive power of the earlier programs and provides a basis for interactive construction of SBF models. We provide a precise specification of the SBF language. We also describe an interactive model construction tool called SBFAuthor.

Problem solving methods (PSMs) are software components that represent and encode reusable algorithms. They can be combined with representations of domain knowledge to produce intelligent application systems. A goal of research on PSMs is to provide principled methods and tools for composing and reusing algorithms in knowledge-based systems. The ultimate objective is to produce libraries of methods that can be easily adapted for use in these systems. Despite the intuitive appeal of PSMs as conceptual building blocks, in practice, these goals are largely unmet. There are no widely available tools for building applications using PSMs and no public libraries of PSMs available for reuse. This paper analyzes some of the reasons for the lack of widespread adoptions of PSM techniques and illustrate our analysis by describing our experiences developing a complex, high-throughput software system based on PSM principles. We conclude that many fundamental principles in PSM research are useful for building knowledge-based systems. In particular, the task–method decomposition process, which provides a means for structuring knowledge-based tasks, is a powerful abstraction for building systems of analytic methods. However, despite the power of PSMs in the conceptual modeling of knowledge-based systems, software engineering challenges have been seriously underestimated. The complexity of integrating control knowledge modeled by developers using PSMs with the domain knowledge that they model using ontologies creates a barrier to widespread use of PSM-based systems. Nevertheless, the surge of recent interest in ontologies has led to the production of comprehensive domain ontologies and of robust ontology-authoring tools. These developments present new opportunities to leverage the PSM approach.

The two critical issues related to product design exploration are addressed: the balance between stylistic consistency and innovation, and the control of design process under a great diversity of requirements. To address these two issues, the view of understanding product design exploration is first sought. In this view, the exploration of designs is not only categorized as a problem-solving activity but also as a problem-finding activity. A computational framework is developed based on this view, and it encompasses the belief that these two activities go hand in hand to accomplish the design tasks in an interactive design environment. The framework adopts an integration approach of two key computational techniques, shape grammars and evolutionary computing, for addressing the above two critical issues. For the issues of stylistic consistency, this paper focuses on the computational techniques in balancing the conflicts of stylistic consistency and innovation with shape grammars. For the issues of controlling design process, the practical concerns of monitoring the design process through various activities starting from the preparation works to the implementation of shape grammars have been emphasized in the development of this framework. To evaluate the effectiveness of the framework, the experiments have been set up to reflect the practical situations with which the designers have to deal. The system generates a number of models from scratch with numerical analysis that can be evaluated effectively by the designers. This reduces the designers' time and allows the designers to concentrate their efforts on performing higher level of design activities such as evaluation of designs and making design decisions.

Tangible interaction is an emerging field of human–computer interaction that links the digital and the physical worlds by embedding computation in physical artifacts and environments. This paper shares our experience teaching tangible interaction over the past 4 years in an interdisciplinary, project-based laboratory course at Tufts University. Although the course is offered through the Computer Science Department, it reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the field, merging product engineering practices with a design studio approach. With a diverse mix of students, this approach has fostered creativity and hands-on learning. Throughout the course students have created innovative interfaces that not only capture fundamental concepts of tangible interaction but also contribute novel techniques for supporting collaborative design. We discuss examples of student-created interfaces and illustrate the relationship between the methods employed in the course and the artifacts created. We also share our recommendations for implementing such a course in institutions with constraints similar to ours including a limited budget and minimal laboratory space.

This research proposes a procedure for solving the multiresponse problem in the Taguchi method utilizing two data envelopment analysis (DEA) approaches, including comparisons of efficiency between different systems (CEBDS) and bilateral comparisons. In this procedure, each experiment in Taguchi's orthogonal array (OA) is treated as a decision-making unit (DMU) with the multiresponses as the inputs and outputs for all DMUs. For each factor of OA, the DMUs are divided into groups, each at the same factor level. Then, DMU's efficiency is separately evaluated by the CEBDS approach and the bilateral comparisons approach for each factor. The level efficiency, or the average of the efficiencies obtained by the CEBDS and the bilateral comparisons approaches for that factor level, is then used to determine the optimal factor levels for multiresponses. Three case studies are provided for illustration; in all, the proposed procedure provides the largest total anticipated improvements. Hence, it should be considered the most effective among all approaches applied in the case studies, including principal component analysis, DEA-based ranking approach, and others. In addition, the proposed procedure is more effective and requires less computational effort when the DMU's efficiency is evaluated by the bilateral comparisons approach instead of the CEBDS approach. In conclusion, the proposed procedure will provide great assistance to practitioners for solving the multiresponse problems in manufacturing applications on the Taguchi method.

When engineering content is created and applied during the product life cycle, it is often stored and forgotten. Current information retrieval approaches based on statistical methods and keyword matching are not effective in understanding the context of engineering content. They are not designed to be directly applicable to the engineering domain. Therefore, engineers have very limited means to harness and reuse past designs. The overall objective of our research is to develop an engineering ontology (EO)-based computational framework to structure unstructured engineering documents and achieve more effective information retrieval. This paper focuses on the method and process to acquire and validate the EO. The main contributions include a new, systematic, and more structured ontology development method assisted by a semiautomatic acquisition tool. This tool is integrated with Protégé ontology editing environment; an engineering lexicon (EL) that represents the associated lexical knowledge of the EO to bridge the gap between the concept space of the ontology and the word space of engineering documents and queries; the first large-scale EO and EL acquired from established knowledge resources for engineering information retrieval; and a comprehensive validation strategy and its implementations to justify the quality of the acquired EO. A search system based on the EO and EL has been developed and tested. The retrieval performance test further justifies the effectiveness of the EO and EL as well as the ontology development method.

During the 1980s, a community of artificial intelligence researchers became interested in formalizing problem solving methods (PSMs) as part of an effort called “second-generation expert systems.” We provide an example of how we are applying second-generation expert systems concepts in an agent-based system for space flight operations, the orbital communications adapter mirroring system (OCAMS), which was developed in the Brahms multiagent framework. Brahms modeling language provides an ontology for simulating work practices, including groups, agents, activities, communications, movements, and geographic areas. Activities are a behavioral unit of analysis to be contrasted with tasks, a functional unit of analysis. Problem solving occurs in the context of activities in the service of tasks; appropriate PSMs depend on the context: which people/roles are participating, what tools are available, how the results will be evaluated, and so forth. A work practice simulation facilitates designing workflow tools that appropriately interact with the physical and organizational context in which work occurs. OCAMS was developed using a simulation-to-implementation methodology, in which a prototype workflow tool was embedded in a Brahms simulation of how people would use the tool. The reusable components in a workflow system like OCAMS include entire “problem solvers” (e.g., a planning subsystem), interoperability frameworks, and agents that inspect and change the world. Thus, a tool kit for building workflow tools requires more than a library of PSMs, which play a relatively small role in the overall multiagent, systems-integration architecture. Our research concern has shifted to situations that may arise that are outside the OCAMS' capability. In practical decision making, people must reflect on the validity of their models. As programs becoming actors in the workplace, we need to develop systems that help people to understand the limitations of the models that drive the automated operations, which means in part detecting when the formalizations in the system are inadequate.

This paper presents the development and application of a software tool for modeling knowledge to be used in knowledge-based systems or the Semantic Web. The inferential modeling technique, which is a technique for modeling the static and dynamic knowledge elements of a problem domain, provided the basis for the tool. A survey of existing knowledge modeling tools revealed they typically failed to provide support in four main areas: support for an ontological engineering methodology or technique, support for dynamic knowledge modeling, support for dynamic knowledge testing, and support for ontology management. Dyna, a Protégé plug-in, has been developed, which supports the Inferential Modeling Technique, dynamic knowledge modeling, and dynamic knowledge testing. Protégé and Dyna are applied for constructing an ontological model in the domain of selecting a remediation technology for petroleum contaminated sites. Dynamic knowledge testing in Dyna enabled creation of a more complete knowledge model.

We believe that the future for problem solving method (PSM) derived work is very promising. In short, PSMs provide a solid foundation for creating a semantic layer supporting planetary-scale networks. Moreover, within a world-scale network where billions services are used and created by billions of parties in ad hoc dynamic fashion we believe that PSM-based mechanisms provide the only viable approach to dealing the sheer scale systematically. Our current experiments in this area are based upon a generic ontology for describing Web services derived from earlier work on PSMs. We outline how platforms based on our ontology can support large-scale networked interactivity in three main areas. Within a large European project we are able to map business level process descriptions to semantic Web service descriptions, to enable business experts to manage and use enterprise processes running in corporate information technology systems. Although highly successful, Web service-based applications predominately run behind corporate firewalls and are far less pervasive on the general Web. Within a second large European project we are extending our semantic service work using the principles underlying the Web and Web 2.0 to transform the Web from a Web of data to one where services are managed and used at large scale. Significant initiatives are now underway in North America, Asia, and Europe to design a new Internet using a “clean-slate” approach to fulfill the demands created by new modes of use and the additional 3 billion users linked to mobile phones. Our investigations within the European-based Future Internet program indicate that a significant opportunity exists for our PSM-derived work to address the key challenges currently identified: scalability, trust, interoperability, pervasive usability, and mobility. We outline one PSM-derived approach as an exemplar.

Modern design embraces digital augmentation, especially in the interplay of digital media content and the physical dispersion and handling of information. Based on the observation that small paper memos with sticky backs (such as Post-Its™) are a powerful and frequently used design tool, we have created Post-Bits, a new interface device with a physical embodiment that can be handled as naturally as paper sticky notes by designers, yet add digital information affordances as well. A Post-Bit is a design prototype of a small electronic paper device for handling multimedia content, with interaction control and display in one thin flexible sheet. Tangible properties of paper such as flipping, flexing, scattering, and rubbing are mapped to controlling aspects of the multimedia content such as scrubbing, sorting, or up- or downloading dynamic media (images, video, text). In this paper we discuss both the design process involved in building a prototype of a tangible interface using new technologies, and how the use of Post-Bits as a tangible design tool can impact two common design tasks: design ideation or brainstorming, and storyboarding for interactive systems or devices.

Embodiment design (ED) is an early phase of product development. ED problems consist of finding solution principles that satisfy product requirements such as physics behaviors and interactions between components. Constraint satisfaction techniques are useful to solve constraint-based models that are often partial, heterogeneous, and uncertain in ED. This paper proposes new constraint satisfaction techniques to tackle piecewise-defined physics phenomena or skill-based rules and multiple categories of variables arising in design applications. New search heuristics and a global piecewise constraint are introduced in the branch and prune framework. The capabilities of these techniques are illustrated with both academic and real-world problems. Complete models of the latter are presented.