Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in the Context of Systems Engineering

Large-scale systems engineering projects may be construed essentially as multi-agent problems wherein decisions are made by several people (stakeholders, managers, designers, etc.) across the organizational hierarchy. All agents in an enterprise possess knowledge in one form or the other, be it the knowledge gained from requirements gleaned from stakeholders, domain-specific knowledge, knowledge of rules and regulations, knowledge gained from experience on other projects, etc. Lack of a formal means of representing the knowledge shared among these agents often results in miscommunication which in turn results in poor decision-making and, thereby, schedule delays and cost overruns. Such issues can hinder the competitive advantage in a mission-critical environment. It is equally important to capture the knowledge possessed by systems engineers, who have a great deal of experience having worked on multiple long-term and large-scale complex projects, who are leaving the workforce. This paper focuses on formally capturing knowledge that exists in various phases of systems engineering lifecycle by leveraging epistemic modal logic. The approach in this paper aims to address some of the issues with the traditional document-centric approaches.