Representation of Activity Knowledge for Project Management

Abstract

Representation of activity knowledge is important to any application which must reason about activities such as new product management, factory scheduling, robot control, vehicle control, software engineering, and air traffic control. This paper provides an integration of the underlying theories needed for modeling activities. Using the domain of large computer design projects as an example, the semantics of activity modeling is described. While the past research in knowledge representation has discovered most of the underlying concepts, our attempt is toward their integration. This includes the epistemological concepts for erecting the required knowledge structure; the concepts of activity, state, goal, and manifestation for the adequate description of the plan and the progress; and the concepts of time and causality to infer the progression among the activities. We also address the issues which arise due to the integration of aggregation, time, and causality among activities and states.