Subproject F: Management and quantification of maturity improvement

Professor Dr.-Ing. Jürgen Beyerer
Dr.-Ing. Julius Pfrommer
Dr.-Ing. Tobias Käfer

Management and quantification of maturity improvement involves research into possibilities for quantifying the maturity of process instances based on systems theory and probabilistic methods. The main goal is to develop measures with a clear semantics and which can be traced back to observable or estimable process and product quantities. All arising uncertainties, both aleatoric and epistemic, are treated consequently by means of probability theory.

This pragmatic attitude is also in concordance with the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM). For the continuous estimation of the production process maturity and the accelerated maturation within this research unit, an important principle is pursued: all aspects of the data, information and knowledge (DIK) that arise throughout the procedure will be consequently formalised, structured, organised and stored within a so-called virtual process dossier (VPD). The evolution of the process and all models, control algorithms etc. are stored in the VPD in such a way that it can be systematically reused and automated inference and reasoning can be applied to it. The VPD will be organised as a huge knowledge graph on which effective search, querying, inferences, and reasoning can be performed, and on which decision support for process experts can be based. The scientific challenges are due to the heterogeneity of DIK and the integration of physical prior knowledge and qualitative reasoning approaches into semantic knowledge representation and query processing.