Director: Professor Markus Stumptner
The Knowledge and Software Engineering lab follows a design science based approach for the modelling of real world problems, typically from an industrial and organisational background, incorporating work from different computing disciplines such as process management, metamodelling, and Artificial Intelligence. The main focus of my recent work is in the areas of interoperability, integration, and emergent semantics. Typical application areas involve the asset management/plant operations sector, design and product configuration, as well as health and bioinformatics.
Applications such database integration and complex business process engineering address maintenance and continued interoperability of integrated systems within and between organisations. Through analysis and representation of design and manufacturing processes, the Lab aims at leading the way to future intelligent engineering applications. Integrating heterogeneous software systems within an organisation is being investigated to support continuous monitoring and maintenance of essential infrastructure and other corporate assets.
Research in advanced knowledge technologies is applied to automate mass customisation of products, configuration of software and hardware systems, as well as intelligent composition and reconfiguration of process descriptions and software components within the service-oriented architecture paradigm. To ensure interoperability between diverse systems, reasoning about concepts (”Ontologies”) extended with more expressive knowledge representation formalisms constitutes an essential research direction in the lab.
Model-based reasoning and its application to intelligent diagnosis, monitoring and repair of complex systems is another central research foundations within the lab. Research in formal methods and reasoning approaches for software systems has led to an intelligent tool to aid the development and maintenance of (embedded) software systems.
The Knowledge and Software Engineering Laboratory is supported by many industry partners including the Australian Nuclear Science Technology Organisation (ANSTO), the Defence Science Technology Organisation (DSTO), General Motors Holden, the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC), Siemens, SunWater, PetroChina, the Collaborative Research Centre for Integrated Engineering Asset Management (CIEAM) and the Australian Research Council (ARC).
KSE Lab is also a part of the Semantic Systems Group of the ACRC. Other member labs include the: