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Basic research (research leading to international publications) at Molde University College covers the following topics:
These topics are discussed below. Generic Product Structures (Kai A. Olsen, Per Sætre)Norwegian industries cannot compete in the international markets with standardized products, as our production costs (wages, transportation) are higher than in many other countries. Norwegian manufacturers are therefore to a high degree oriented towards the more complex assemble-to-order and engineer-to-order markets, where each product is manufactured according to customer specifications. We find many examples on the west coast of Norway, where mechanical industry and shipyards are building complex customized products, often letting the more mundane tasks be outsourced to countries with lower industrial wages. This building of more complex products faster , as stated by the president of a local yard, put heavy demands on the logistic system. Experience is no longer enough to master the logistics when each order specifies a unique product, when design and production are parallel activities, when products are complex and when large parts of the project is manufactured by suppliers, often in other countries. This problem is recognized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). OECD has, in a recent report, estimated a lower industrial growth in Norway than in comparable countries, based on the fact that Norwegian Industry has not been able to utilize information technology as well as its competitors. These manufacturers look at information technology as the solution. However, none of the major commercial ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or MPC (Manufacturing Planning and Control) systems are designed to handle engineer-to-order manufacturing. At most, these systems can handle variant production, based on a simple generic Bill of Material structure. As a consequence most engineer-to-order manufacturers use IT technology for administrative purposes, but rarely for production-oriented activities. Typically a manufacturer uses a project-oriented planning systems, simple inventory systems and systems that support procurement, but there is seldom any effort to develop complete product structures, except at a manual level (drawings, etc.). Production-oriented control activities are therefore mostly manual and hence the positive effects from using IT-technology are missing. What these industries need are tools that make it possible to reuse historical product structures, i.e., to find tools that lie between the automated systems used by serial production industries and the information systems used by project-oriented industries. At Molde University College we have made efforts in developing new tools for generic bill of material (GBoM) structures to support variant-oriented and engineer-to-order production. In this effort we are incorporating user interfaces and visualization techniques. Prototype methods are developed and we are in contact with manufacturers to develop these into full systems. Our idea is to construct what can be called a product description language very much inspired by the object-oriented programming languages. These languages offer the programmer tools for constructing classes with data attributes and methods, and the user the opportunity in creating objects (through a user interface). In a production environment there may be many thousands of different components where most will have their own class definition. What is needed here, especially in an engineer-to-order-environment, is a system, which is very efficient in supporting the users to describe new components. In principle, in an engineer-to-order environment, a new product structure has to be established for every order. To make this process efficient, a system must be able to utilize historical structures in constructing new variations. Obviously the user interface will be crucial for such a system, as it must support "visual" product configuration. Information and Knowledge Management in Complex Networked Environments (Judith Molka-Danielsen)This research focuses on information and knowledge management in complex networked environments. Information Management problems permeate all levels of organizations and the problems are often exasperated with needs to communicate between groups or communities. Molka-Danielsen has recently published in the area of information management in disaster management operations. This preliminary examination of complex environments in the case of disaster situations, has indicated that the poor information flows both within and among groups and organizations often result in costly consequences for human life, quality of life and extensive costs to organizations. Ongoing research interest is to examine the development process and application of Information Computing Communications Technologies (IC2T) in and between complex organizations involving complex community networks. The following are ongoing collaborations and related research by Molka-Danielsen. 1. A research study on complex communities explores integrating diverse communities of practice (CoP) into a systems development process in the development of an e-Democracy service concept. This research is conducted in cooperation with HiM faculty of social sciences. 2. Study regarding IC2T in education includes ongoing collaborations with researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology, USA. 3. Exploration to assess and visualize the structural network characteristics of collaborative networks and their strength and vulnerabilities. This research is being done with faculty at the IT University of Berlin, Germany. Optimization (Arne Løkketangen)The optimization group is loosely organized, consisting of people from both the informatics and economics departments. The activities are focused on modeling, as well as developing and applying methods for solving many of the practical optimization problems that arise in transportation, logistics, economics and planning. These areas are within the main focus of Molde University College. There are two main research areas within the optimization group. One is based on heuristic search methods for combinatorial optimization problems, especially those tailored to solving rich models for real-world problems. These kinds of methods, which also might be classified as intelligent search methods, have been attaining a lot of attention, and success, lately, solving real world problems untraceable by the classical optimization methods.
Most real-world optimization problems are made under uncertainty about the future. In stochastic programming, the other main area in the optimization group, uncertainties are explicitly incorporated and expressed. By doing so, one gets much more robust solutions to the problems, in particular because flexibility in solutions is valued. This is an area that is expanding rapidly internationally. The applications of operational research methods to industrial problems are done in cooperation with Møreforsking Molde, Sintef Applied Mathematics, SINTEF Technology Management, and directly with industrial partners. Typical application areas are found in transportation planning and scheduling for forest harvesting and bus and bus driver scheduling, both nationally and internationally. We are also involved in production planning in deregulated energy markets, financial portfolio management and production scheduling in the (French) car industry. Visualization and user interfaces (Kai A. Olsen)From 1990 Molde University College has had research and educational cooperation with University of Pittsburgh, USA. The research effort has been within visualization and user interfaces. A new method for multidimensional visualization - VIBE (Visualization by Example) has been developed. VIBE is both a visualization system and a graphical user interface to a collection of data objects, e.g. a document collection. This work was the starting point for a focus on visualization at the University of Pittsburgh. Further, this work has lead to more general research within testing of user interfaces, especially visual interfaces. Dip. Scienze dell'Informazione, Universita' di Roma "La Sapienza" has been involved in these efforts, among other projects to develop an image retrieval version of the VIBE system. Robustness & Reliability Management of Networks (Ketil Danielsen, Bjørn Jæger)The research of Danielsen and Jæger are in the areas of resource management of telecommunication networks. Prior topics of research include algorithms for network survivability, and auctions for market-based resource allocation. This research has been part of an on-going collaboration with the Telecommunications Dept. at University of Pittsburgh, USA. The algorithms that they have developed for data networks are of interest in the context of logistics and transportation networks. Ketil Danielsen has lead research in real-time pricing to regulate access to network resources (links, buffers) both in datagram (IP-only) and reservation networks (RSVP/IP). Formerly, in cooperation with Jæger and Molka-Danielsen they performed the first QoS-evaluation in UNINETTs national production academic network using RSVP, a resource reservation protocol. Systems development (Ottar Ohren)The research in the area of systems development has focused on the following issues. Methods and tools for learning and collaboration. This work has focused on the development of a learning and collaboration environment based on object oriented principles. A CASE tool with a computer-based version of the CRC-card was developed and was put into the context of a collaboration environment. The tool also included interaction diagrams, scenario diagrams, etc. The CASE tool focused on team based and evolutionary development of information systems. Enterprise processes and enterprise modeling methods. Part of the work has focused on enterprise modeling methods and tools in general and analysis and design of enterprise models. One such model is a maturity model for the enterprise modeling and engineering processes. This model was presented as a stepwise framework with a description of each level and a set of key activities or practices. Information flow in business models includes analysis of information requirements and development of a strategy for how business processes get the required information. A method based on a mapping between the information model and the business process model has been proposed. The method also includes a criticality evaluation and a ranking of the information entities. Information flow is of particular interest for collaborating organizations working in a cross-organizational information-sharing environment. In these days of e-business such a working environment becomes even more important and is also closely related to enterprise resource planning (ERP). Concepts like the virtual value chain (as an extension to Porters value chain) serve as a useful approach to this topic. The research within this area has centered on the above issues and in particular on information flow problems, multiple identification problems and the problems related to rapid change-over of information systems. IT for SME (Kai A. Olsen, Per Sætre)Researchers at Molde College have developed several IT systems for SME. In this process a special change-oriented development method has been used. The ideas behind this process have been the basis for several papers. |