2016, Article in monograph or in proceedings (Conference: EurOMA 2016, pp. 11)Lean manufacturing has proven to be an efficient means improving mass production. Recently, Lean is of increasing interest for high-variety, low-volume production environments. However, little research has been done in this field. Yet, this contribution provides a systematic literature analysis in conjunction with expert interviews and qualitative data analysis not only to demonstrate the status quo of Lean in HV/LV but to develop a research agenda. In addition, a Maturity Model is developed analysing Lean implementation through a combination of tools, processes, and interoperability supporting the assessment of the application of Lean in various in HV/LV environments.
2009, Article in monograph or in proceedings (2009 IEEE International Technology Management Conference, ICE 2009)The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is increasingly used as decision support method in concurrent innovation projects with multiple stakeholders. AHP is welcomed for supporting procedural justice, which regards transparency and fairness of decisions. This is useful for policy settings, with diverse stakeholder interests, for prioritization questions with diverse criteria or for allocation of scarce resources. However, AHP's promises for procedural justice are partly grounded in its supposed numerical accuracy. We show that the numerical basis of AHP is not as unambiguous as current 'AHP standard practice' suggests. By contrast, AHP can contribute to the other criteria for procedural justice (efficiency and participation), which may explain AHP's continuing and growing popularity. We conclude that the research and practitioner community should on the one hand continue to develop AHP's procedures for full participation of all types of stakeholders, while on the other hand finding solutions to the accuracy problems.
2007, Article in monograph or in proceedings (Belgian/Netherlands Artificial Intelligence Conference, pp. 291-298)Philosophy can benefit from experiments performed in a laboratory for philosophical experimentation (SophoLab). To illustrate the power of Experimental Computational Philosophy, we set up and ran several experiments on a part of Harsanyi's theory on utilitarianism. Then it became clear that his theory is underspecified. We filled in the blank spots and discovered that information and its costs are key in the effectiveness of act and rule utilitarianism. We also identified three further elements that have particular influence on the effectiveness of both strands of utilitarianism: group size of agents, decision-making around uncertainty, and social culture towards particular types of actions.
2006, Article in monograph or in proceedings (Artificial Life X: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems)Constructing artificial moral agents serves at least two purposes: one, better understanding of moral reasoning, and, two, increasing our trust and confidence in creating autonomous agents acting on our behalf. When constructing agents we must identify what kind of agent we are trying to implement acknowledging still severe restrictions in both our understanding of moral reasoning and technological capabilities. In constructing agents, as part of the SophoLab project, we adopt a set of requirements and design principles. As building blocks the belief-desire-intention model is used along with the deontic-epistemic-action logic framework as modeling and specification languages. Implementation in executable software is done using the JACK agent language. Attempts at constructing agents and actual experiments provide some first encouraging results but also point at the large hurdles still to be taken.