A SEMANTIC KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ENVIRONMENT FOR PRODUCT LIFECYCLE COTS

摘要

There is an increasing need for effective tools for managing life cycle costs of civil products. Thesernproducts range from large infrastructure systems, such as bridges and highways, to smaller items such asrnHVAC systems. The industry has expressed a need for collaborative systems for optimizing productrnLCC and for incorporating industry best practice into the optimization process. This paper presents arnweb-based semantic system for managing products' life cycle costs. The basic architecture of thernproposed system represents costs as a hierarchy of cost elements. Each cost element has a dollar valuernthat could be deterministic, probabilistic or fuzzy. Several indigenous and exogenous factors (alsornrepresented in hierarchies) can have a set of impacts on the values of these costs. Through the analysisrnof different impact possibilities and probabilities, a decision maker can study various alternativernscenarios and define the optimum set of costs and their values. A set of web services are used to capturerncost elements, factors and their impacts. A schema for representing industry knowledge regarding costsrnand factors that influence their performance. The semantic nature of the system allows for it to be anrnintegral part of a corporate memory system, where decision makers will be able to document and accessrnlessons learned about LCC optimization.