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Mark S. Fox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mark Stephen Fox(born 1952) is a Canadiancomputer scientist,Professor of Industrial Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Urban Systems Engineering at theUniversity of Toronto,known for the development of Constraint Directed Scheduling in the 1980s[1][2]and theTOVE Projectto develop an ontological framework forenterprise modelingandenterprise integrationin the 1990s.[3][4]

Biography

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Fox received his B.Sc. inComputer Sciencefrom theUniversity of Torontoin 1975, and his PhD in Computer Science from theCarnegie Mellon Universityin 1983 with the thesis "Constraint-directed search: a case-study of job-shop scheduling."

Fox started his academic career atCarnegie Mellon Universityas Associate Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, where he also headed the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Systems of The Robotics Institute. In 1991 he returned to the University of Toronto, where he was appointed Professor of Industrial Engineering at theUniversity of Toronto.He is also Senior Fellow in the Global Cities Institute at the University of Toronto.[5]

He is elected Fellow of theAssociation for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence,and elected fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advance Research.[5]

Work

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Fox's current research interests concernsmart cities,in particular "ontologies for modelling cities and their performance, causal analysis of crowd sourced data (e.g., analysis of reports provided by citizens to the city), and process mapping and analysis of city services (e.g., social services)."[5]

In the past he has been particularly interested the fields of "enterprise engineering (i.e., information technology for business process engineering), constrained-directed reasoning, a unified theory of scheduling, enterprise modelling (i.e., TOVE) and coordination theory."[5]

TOVE project

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Toronto Virtual Enterprise Ontologies, Fox andGruninger(1998).

TheTOVE project,acronym ofTOronto Virtual Enterpriseproject is a project to develop anontological frameworkforenterprise integration(EI) based on and suited forenterprise modeling.[6]In the beginning of the 1990s it was initiated by Mark S. Fox and others at the University of Toronto.[7]Initially the project had defined four goals:[8]

  1. provides a shared terminology for the enterprise that each agent can jointly understand and use,
  2. defines the meaning of each term (aka semantics) in a precise and as unambiguous manner as possible
  3. implements the semantics in a set of axioms that will enable TOVE to automatically deduce the answer to many "common sense" questions about the enterprise, and
  4. defines a symbology for depicting a term or the concept constructed thereof in a graphical context.[9]

The TOVE framework wants to support reasoning about enterprises, and therefore "provides a characterisation of classes of enterprises by sets of assumptions over their processes, goals, and organization constraints."[10]It has been further developed in the fields ofconcurrent engineering,supply chain managementandbusiness process re-engineering.[5]

Enterprise modeling

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In the 1995 seminal article "Methodology for the Design and Evaluation of Ontologies" (1995) Grüninger and Fox outline the definition and scope ofenterprise modelling,stating:

In enterprise modelling, we want to define the actions performed within an enterprise, and define constraints for plans and schedules which are constructed to satisfy the goals of the enterprise. This leads to the following set of informal competency questions:
  • Temporal projection - Given a set of actions that occur at different points in the future, what are the properties of resources and activities at arbitrary points in time?
  • Planning and scheduling - what sequence of activities must be completed to achieve some goal? At what times must these activities be initiated and terminated?
  • Execution monitoring and external events - What are the effects of the occurrence of external and unexpected events (such as machine breakdown or the unavailability of resources) on a plan or schedule?
  • Time-based competition - we want to design an enterprise that minimizes the cycle time for a product. This is essentially the task of finding a minimum duration plan that minimizes action occurrences and maximizes concurrency of activities.[11]

Publications

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Fox published some books and numerous articles on Artificial Intelligence, Scheduling, Ontologies, and Enterprise Modelling.[12]A selection. Books:

  • Mark S. Fox (1983).Constraint-directed search: a case-study of job-shop scheduling.Carnegie-Mellon University
  • Peter Bernusand Mark S. Fox eds. (2005).Knowledge sharing in the integrated enterprise: interoperability strategies for the enterprise architect.
  • Peter Bernus,Guy Doumeingts,Mark S. Fox (2010).Enterprise Architecture, Integration and Interoperability

Articles, a selection

  • 1984. "ISIS—a knowledge‐based system for factory scheduling". With S.F. Smith in:Expert systems1 (1), p. 25-49
  • 1995. "Methodology for the design and evaluation of ontologies". With M. Grüingger in:IJCAI-95 Workshop on basic ontological issues in knowledge sharing,Montreal.
  • 1998. "Enterprise Modeling".WithM. Gruninger.In:AI magazine.19 (3), p. 109
  • 2000. "Agent-oriented supply-chain management" With M. Barbuceanu and R. Teigen in:International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems12 (2-3), p. 165-188

References

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  1. ^Katia P. Sycara (1990)Innovative Approaches to Planning, Scheduling and Control: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at San Diego, California, November 5–8, 1990.p. 413
  2. ^Gert Smolka (1997)Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming - CP97: Third International Conference,CP97, Linz, Austria, October 29 - November 1, 1997, Volume 3. p. 401.
  3. ^Eldon Yu-zen Li, Timon C. Du (2007)Advances in Electronic Business: Volume II.p. 313
  4. ^Angelika C. Bullinger (2009)Innovation and Ontologies: Structuring the Early Stages of Innovation Management.p. 146
  5. ^abcdeMark S. FoxFaculty profile, University of Toronto. Accessed September 19, 2013
  6. ^Terje Totland (1997).5.2.3 Toronto Virtual Enterprise (TOVE)Thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim.
  7. ^Mark S. Fox andMichael Gruninger(1998) "Enterprise Modeling".American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
  8. ^Fox, M.S., (1992), "The TOVE Project: Towards A Common-sense Model of the Enterprise",Enterprise Integration Laboratory Technical Report.
  9. ^Chapter 1: A Common-Sense Model of the Enterprise: The TOVE Projectateil.utoronto.ca.Accessed September 17, 2013
  10. ^Uschold, Mike,andMichael Gruninger."Ontologies: Principles, methods and applications."Knowledge engineering review 11.2 (1996): 131.
  11. ^Michael Grüningerand Mark S. Fox (1995) "Methodology for the Design and Evaluation of Ontologies."p. 3−4
  12. ^Mark S. Foxpublications indexed byGoogle ScholarEdit this at Wikidata
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  • Mark S. Fox,Enterprise Integration Laboratory, University of Toronto
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