Through Life Management
- Providing decision support for the management of NEC-ready systems
- Exploring Service Supply Chain Network Enabled Capabilities that Support E2E Integration - Findings from a Multi-nodal Complex Supply Chain
- Incremental Knowledge Update for Through-Life Change Models using Bayesian Methods
- Knowledge re-use for decision support
Providing decision support for the management of NEC-ready systems
Iain Boyle, Alex Duffy, Ian Whitfield, and Shaofeng Liu
Decision-making across the military capability lifecycle phases can vary considerably in terms of the types of decisions made and the manner in which they are made. Although decision-making has received considerable attention within the research community, much work has concentrated on providing decision support for particular styles of decision-making. However, within capability delivery there is a need to develop means to map styles of decision-making to particular decision problems and provide decision support at an executable level of detail. This paper presents a number of mechanisms for providing decision support (DecisioMs) during capability delivery. The mechanisms are used to refine a generic model of decision-making to an executable level of detail. Refinement is primarily controlled using analogical reasoning to ensure that the model is refined in accordance with the needs of the decision problem at hand. Future work will involve testing the effectiveness of the mechanisms
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Exploring Service Supply Chain Network Enabled Capabilities that Support E2E Integration - Findings from a Multi-nodal Complex Supply Chain
Antigoni Iakovaki, Dr. Jagjit Singh Srai
The contractual nature of service delivery in complex equipment environments has resulted in enduring “availability” contracts of significant value and scale rather than one-off transactional ones; imposing the transition towards a service and support orientated environment. This concept is particularly evident in the defence Aerospace sector where the transformation towards a more efficient integrated service offering for complex engineering assets has resulted in enduring “availability” contractual agreements. In an increasingly new, complex and service- orientated network environment, superior service supply chain (SSC) capabilities are critical to success. Performance measurement can be used as a solid platform to build on these superior service supply chain capabilities. Thus, there is an industrial requirement for a consistent, integrated and multi-attributed assessment approach to service capabilities and performance measurement. Achieving “end-to-end” (E2E) integration can be seen as a suitable method to achieve coherency and align different business priorities across the different network members.
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Incremental Knowledge Update for Through-Life Change Models using Bayesian Methods
Rene Keller, P John Clarkson
Delivering products for NEC (Network Enabled Capability) environments puts high pressure on defence contractors since they have to fulfil sometimes contradicting requirements such as agility, interoperability and affordability for systems with long life-cycles. Being able to predict effects of changes throughout the life-cycle of a system before the change has been carried out can solve some of the problems designers are faced with by allowing for faster delivery time. However, through-life change prediction requires the underlying models used for change prediction to be updated according to new information. This paper introduces an automatic way to update change models based on Bayesian statistics and applies this method to a Type 45 destroyer example.
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Knowledge re-use for decision support
Shaofeng Liu, Alex H.B. Duffy, Iain M. Boyle and Robert Ian Whitfield
Effective decision support has already been identified as a fundamental requirement for the realisation of Network Enabled Capability. Decision making itself is a knowledge-intensive process, and it is known that right decisions can only be reached based on decision maker’s good judgement, which in turn is based on sufficient knowledge. It is not unusual for decision makers to make incorrect decisions because of insufficient knowledge. However, it is not always possible for decision makers to have all the knowledge needed for making decisions in complex situations without external support. The re-use of knowledge has been identified as providing an important contribution to such support, and this paper considers one, hitherto unexplored, aspect of how this may be achieved. This paper is concerned with the computational view of knowledge re-use to establish an understanding of a knowledge- based system for decision support. The paper explores knowledge re-use for decision support from two perspectives: knowledge provider’s and knowledge re-user’s. Key issues and challenges of knowledge re-use are identified from both perspectives. A structural model for knowledge re-use is proposed with initial evaluation through empirical study of both experienced and novice decision maker’s behaviour in reusing knowledge to make decisions. The proposed structural model for knowledge re-use captures five main elements (knowledge re-uers, knowledge types, knowledge sources, environment, and integration strategies) as well as the relationships between the elements, which forms a foundation for constructing a knowledge-based decision support system. The paper suggests that further research should be investigating the relationship between knowledge re-use and learning to achieve intelligent decision support.
