The design and production of goods that satisfy the special needs of individual customers are of central interest to the European industry. A major trend is to improve customer specific adaptation with configurable products. We are interested in the methods, practices and tools that support product configuration tasks. The research described in this paper is meant to guide our future work. We h...

Project idea Supplying technical documentat ion accompanying a product in multiple languages is a growing problem, particularly in Europe with its legislation on the common market. A huge amount of translation work needs to be done when creating and updating technical documentation. In response to these needs, the T E C H D O C project aims at supporting the creation and maintenance of technica...

By using the stochastic frontier methodology, this study investigates the technical efficiency and total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Indonesian provincial economies during the period from 1993 to 2000. In addition to the estimation of provincial technical efficiency, factors that contribute to technical inefficiency are also examined and the TFP growth is decomposed into technological p...

This paper presents a VV&A solution to effectively address VV&A problems arising during the development of complex simulation systems. First, a VV&A process is presented along with the development of a computer support tool, HITVICE, which helps to organize and manage the different VV&A activities. Second, the optimal design method for VV&A schemes is presented to produce an optimal scheme, acc...

In this case study in knowledge engineering and data mining, we implement a recognizer for two variations of thèbull ¯ag' technical charting heuristic and use this recognizer to discover trading rules on the NYSE Composite Index. Out-of-sample results indicate that these rules are effective. q 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

The establishment of an organizational help desk (HD) is to provide technical support to users when they encounter technical problems related to hardware, software and network connections. Due to the lack of resources, users often have to wait for a considerably long time before their enquiries and problems are answered and solved. This paper discusses the background of HD and its existing chal...

Permanent changes, short product life cycles and increasing market pressure force companies to an accelerated cycle of product and service innovation. Organisations are facing the challenge to manage the knowledge and skills of their workforce in the context of human resource development. It is needed to prevent the crucial lose of knowledge for competitive advantage. Therefore organisations in...

Business Process Redesign (BPR) helps rethinking a process in order to enhance its performance. Practitioners have been developing methodologies to support BPR implementation. However, most methodologies lack actual guidance on deriving a process design threatening the success of BPR. In this paper, we suggest the use of a case-based reasoning technique (CBR) to support solving new problems by ...

P2P technical support forums are widely used by information technology (IT) firms as supplements for technical support call centers. A typical technical support forum allows customers to post technical questions and receive answers from their peers. From time to time, customers may also receive answers directly from a firm’s technical support teams, although many forums explicitly state that fo...

Distributed computing environments place more computer power in the hands of the end-user, and often demand increased technical support. In response, organizations may choose to move technical support personnel close to end-users. This can isolate them from each other, and may limit their ability to share knowledge. Thus, the growth of distributed computing calls for increased ability to share ...