Business Process has been the focus to improve the enterprise’s effectiveness in dealing with a dynamic and ever-changing environment. Workflow system is one of the approaches to realize the process in the enterprise. Under the Workflow framework, the process is hardwired in advance, which in many cases lead to inflexibility of the predefined process when dealing with unpredictable challenge from the environment. This thesis introduced an approach to realize the process in an enterprise under different framework than the Workflow system. In this thesis, the process is dynamically assembled on a given request, hence facilitating an enterprise to deal with numerous challenges and supports the enterprise to survive in a constant changes environment....[ Read more ]

Business Process has been the focus to improve the enterprise’s effectiveness in dealing with a dynamic and ever-changing environment. Workflow system is one of the approaches to realize the process in the enterprise. Under the Workflow framework, the process is hardwired in advance, which in many cases lead to inflexibility of the predefined process when dealing with unpredictable challenge from the environment. This thesis introduced an approach to realize the process in an enterprise under different framework than the Workflow system. In this thesis, the process is dynamically assembled on a given request, hence facilitating an enterprise to deal with numerous challenges and supports the enterprise to survive in a constant changes environment.

This thesis develops a framework called a Declarative Processing Environment, whose main task is to assemble a process dynamically. A methodology is developed to coordinate available resources based on the available knowledge in order to response to a given request. The proposed framework applies interdisciplinary work between psychology and computer science to build a system that is close to a natural cognitive system. Although there is a clear direction in the Artificial Intelligence area to build a natural cognition system based on the psychological research studies, there is very little work on bridging the gap between the theory of living system cognition and the application in the industrial engineering area. This thesis attempts to bridge the gap by applying the research studies in the real field of industrial engineering.

Finally, the thesis describes how the prototype of the Declarative Processing Environment can be built using an agent-based system based on Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model. The prototype of the system is intended to be part of the Knowledge Management System that is now being developed under the Mass Customization research group at the HKUST in the Department of IEEM.