Manufacturing and knowledge-based systems in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea

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Manufacturing and

Knowledge-Based Systems

in

Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea

Bibliotheek TU Delft

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Manufacturing and

Knowledge-Based

Systems

• m

Singapore, Hong Kong

andKorea

The report of a research trip funded by

the European Commission through the

Esprit projects 809 and 2415.

The trip was made [rom

19 March 1990 -

9 April 1990.

H. de Swaan Arons

E.P. lansen

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Published and Distributed by

Delft University Press Stevinweg 1

2628 CN Delft, Tbe Netherlands phone +31 15783254 telefax: +31 15781661

by order of

Delft University of Technology

Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Infonnatics Section Knowledge-Based Systems

Julianalaan 132 P.O. Box 356

2600 Al Delft, Tbe Netherlands phone +31 15784698 telefax +31 15 786522 telex 38151 butud nl

Acknowledgments

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-The authors like to thank several persons who have made this trip possible. First of all, Prof. dr. H. Koppelaar who stimulated us to undertake this interesting research trip. During preparations we benefited from suggestions by Prof. dr. C. Besant (Imperial College London), Prof. dr. ir. H. Kals (University of Twente) and drs. J. Huber of the Royal Netherlands Embassy. In Korea we experienced additional support from Mr. Huber.

Finally, we like to thank all our hosts who spent a lot of time to provide us with a good impression of their companies and current research.

ISBN 90-6275-620-4/ eIP

No part of this publication may he reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmit-ted, in any fonn, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior pennission, in writing, from the publisher.

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Summary

Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea are fast developing coun-tries. The first two countries are South East Asia's financial and trade centres and have hardly any heavy industry. Korea, how-ever, has heavy industry (steel companies, automobile and ship building industry etc).

Singapore and Hong Kong have several public institutes (uni-versities, research institutes) carrying out advanced research on either knowledge-based systems or manufacturing.

Korea has also several of these public institutes. In addition to these advanced research institutes, several big industrial com-panies (e.g. Samsung, POS CO) have their own research pro-grams and quite impressing R&D departments.

In this publication the authors report on their visit to a number of institutes and companies in the three countries from 19 March till 9 April 1990.

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Henk de Swaan Arons, Eric-Pau/ lansen

Philips Machinery Factory Singapore

Philips Machinery Factory Singapore is one of the six machin-ery factories of the Philips organisation. Guided by a philoso-phy based on flexibility, highly skilled craftsmanship and reli-ability, the factory has distinguished itself as the largest and most advanced of its kind in South East Asia.

It combines local engineering expertise, highly skilled man-power and advanced equipment to produce high precision metal products and injection moulds for the Philips organisation in Singapore, the Far East Region and Europe. In recent years the factory has moved towards greater support of Philips' local in-dustry groups through its mould-making service and has widened its business scope for mechanisation projects in Singa-pore and the Far East.

The manufacture of components and spare parts to be chan-nelled back to the Netherlands is still, however, a strong base operation of the factory. A large quantity of the products pro-duced by this Singapore Philips factory are locally designed and developed and are used in the local Philips organisation. 35% of the factory's output is exported to the Netherlands, while ap-proximately 10% of output is destined for other Far East countries.

Philips Machinery Factory Singapore is split into two production departments Precision Machining and Mould Making

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-Manufacturing and KBS in Singapore, Hang Kong and Korea

which are supported by its Development and Services Depart-ment. Other departments are Development Services, Technical Services, Moulding, Personnel and the Administrative Depart-ment.

Philips Machinery Factory Singapore employs 300 people of which 190 are skilled craftsmen. Though a relatively young workforce with an average experience of 6 years, the factory's craftsmen command a broad base of experience, thanks to em-phasis on the development of multiple skills.

Several workers have had their education at the Philips Government Training Centre, which is one of the five educa-tion centres of the Singapore Economic Development Board that are sponsored by multinational companies. The Philips Govemment Training Centre especially trains people to be-come precision engineering craftsmen for the manufacturing sector in Singapore. The workers of the factory that have had their education at this training centre are obliged to work for some years at the factory. After this period some of these well-educated workers quit their job at Philips' to join another com-pany for more money and an expectedly better position.

The Precision Machining Department shows a layout which is dedicated to grouping machines that perform the same opera-tions. Most of the machines are controled by men (and 'Nomen), whilst a minority of them are CNC-machines or perform ac-tions without needing interference from human beings.

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Henk de Swaan Arons, Eric-Paul lansen

The aim of the management is to utilise the available machines as much as possible. If a machine can handle a new job, one is picked from a list of jobs awaiting service on this machine. To select a job, two scheduling criteria are considered. The first criterion concerns earliest due date scheduling: the job with the earliest due date will he selected. If more than one job appears to be candidate, the second criterion has to be concerned: the job that has the most remaining tasks has to be processed first since the chance of breakdowns and consequently loss of time, is larger for those jobs with the most remaining tasks to he per-formed.

Alrnost every order by the factory's clients will be considered, because the factory is assumed to have 'infinite' capacity. This assumption is based on the fact that machines are available to the factory 24-hours each day. Generally, the operators are not, but since wages are relatively low in these areas and the work-ers are still willing to work in overtime, extra capacity can easily he established.

The factory produces high quality moulds for items ranging from low end cu stomer produets to sophisticated high technol-ogy and geometrically intricate produets such as television sets, compact disc players and steam irons. The produets of the Mould Making Department are mainly destined for Philips' Consumer Electronics, Domestic Appliances and Personal Care factories. Approximately 85% of the Department's output is

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utilised locally while the balance is produced for Philips in the Region, the Netherlands and other non-Philips clients.

A tour around the Domestic Applianees Factory by its general manager Mr. Ch.H.C. van der Heijden, and later by mr. Choo Y 00 Keong of the Development Services Department showed a

clean, weIl organised and air-conditioned (hardly any tropical influences) working area with many modem machines and skilled personnel.

Information Technology Institute: ITI

(Singapore)

ITI is a department of the National Computer Board (NCB) which coordinates information technology activities in Singapore. ITI itselfhas several sub-departments (ISDN, Com-puter Science, among others) and a knowledge systems

labora-tory.

Like all other developing and developed countries Singapore has realised potential and benefits of information technology. In 1986 the Singapore Govemment endorsed the National In-formation Technology plan which recommends the exploitation of information technology as a key strategy for Singapore to support her economie development in the 1990's. Research and Development work were initiated and with this the formation of ITI. ITI was formed on 1 April 1986 as a Research and Development arm of the Singapore National Computer Board.

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The mission of ITI is to be a leader in the exploitation and ex-celeration of the productive and innovative use of information technology.

lts objectives are:

1. to develop indigenous applied R&D capability in emerg-ing lTs which could generate economie value for Semerg-inga- Singa-pore,

2. to collaborate with local industry to develop innovations of potential commercial value.

The strategies identified to achieve these objectives are:

1. to partner with information technology companies which will export and specialise,

2. to set up resource centres for the information technology industry to promote broad based technology diffusion, 3. to carry out pioneering application projects whieh will

enable ITI to upgrade lts knowledge and expertise, 4. to carry out joint projects with MNCs to transfer

tech-nology from intemationalleaders.

ITI's research activities are market driven and are focused on technologies with economie potential. It welcomes partnership opportunities with the industry and universities and encourages local companies to work jointly to develop new information technology products. It sets up resource centres which serve as technology incubation centres that excellerate the transfer of

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technology to the industry and the development of innovative infonnation technology applications.

Over the last two years !TI has grown to a staff strength of 70 researchers. Most of them majored in computer science and computer or electron ic engineering with a third of them hold-ing post-graduate degrees. In addition there are about 20 com-puter professionals from the local infonnation technology in-dustry and user organisations working with !TI in joint pro-jects.

ITI concentrates its research efforts on software engineering, integrated office systems and knowledge systems ..

Knowledge Systems Laboratory

The Knowledge Systems Laboratory employs 20 computer professionals and the main subjects concern planning, schedul-ing and resource allocation .. Por smaller expert systems Xi +

and PC+ are being used. GURU, Nexpert and KEE are being used for medium sized applications, whilst C, Common Lisp and Objective Care being used for larger applications concern-ing schedulconcern-ing.

The Knowledge Systems Laboratory is divided into two de-partments, Knowledge Engineering Resource Centre (KERC) and Knowledge Systems Application Development (KSAD).

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Knowledge Engineering Resource Centre

KERC is meant to promote the development of knowledge sys-tems applications by developing prototypes. KERC reduces the entry costs of exploring with new technology by providing vendor donated HW and SW as weIl as training and guidance to local SW companies to develop expert systems in collaboration with user organisations. At the end of each KERC operation cycle, the participants have been trained and have developed prototypes which may be enhanced into products or applica-tions for the companies.

During the stage in which the first prototypes are being made, the following prototype systems give a fine overview of such prototype applications:

1. manufacturing process scheduling, 2. process planning for auto lathe, 3. investment portfolio management, 4. intemal control evaluation (auditing), 5. yard management,

6. berth allocation.

Some examples of prototypes in a further stage are: 1. underwriting adviser,

2. time table scheduling, 3. paint failure analysis,

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Manuj'acturing and KBS in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea

4. integrated circuit tester failure diagnosis, 5. power supply failure diagnosis.

Other prototypes are:

1. warehouse space allocation,

2. production line trouble-shooting HEDS

(HEDS

=

Hitachi Electronic Devices Singapore),

3. student career counselling, 4. resource scheduling,

5. policy automation (pending).

Since the prototypes are sponsored by the companies that apply for the help of ITI, after finishing the prototype project the re-su lts are fed back to the sponsoring company. Within this com-pany a decision process starts in which the benefits of further development are established.

If a company decides to carry on, this will only be possible if KERC considers full scale development to be possible. The de-cision is based on two important criteria:

1. the project is complex and interesting enough,

2. the project is focused on their own research (planning and scheduling).

At the moment KERC is a non-profit centre.

Knowiedge Systems Application Development (KSAD)

KSAD develops the projects that are thought to be interesting for fuil scale development by KERC.

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At the moment of the visit three projects were under develop-ment by KSAD. The Ship Planning System (SPS) already has carried on for a few years.

The aim of SPS is to assist the Port of Singapore Authority (PSA) to plan the loading and discharging of container ships efficiently, and to produce plans that minimise the turn around time of the ships and enable smooth operations at the container terminal. The system has been designed as an expert assistant for the ship planners in PSA. SPS is of strategie importance to PSA in maintaining its status as premier port in South East Asia and in meeting the challenge of rapidly increasing container ship volumes in the 1990's.

Version 1 of SPS was successfully delivered to the users in June 1988. SPS may lay claim to being the first major planning and scheduling expert systems in Singapore and one of the rare few in live use in the world. Since its implementation, the system has increasingly been used to plan the loading and discharging of container ships that come into Singapore.

From a mere 2 percent in June 1988, the percentage of ships planned with the aid of the system has grown steadily to 45 per-cent in February 1989. This figure is expected to increase even further.

To plan a container ship three major tásks are performed. Firstly, the structure of the ship has to be defined. Secondly, the ship planner has to mark out the areas in the ship where the dif-ferent containers are stowed or are to be stowed. Lastly, the

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ship planner has to schedule the loading and discharging opera-tions of the quay cranes, taking complex sets of constraints into consideration . SPS assists in all these three tasks.

For the first two an easy to use object-oriented colour graphical interface is provided. The structure of the ship and the stowage can be easily defined using this interface. The interface has been designed to be similar to the documents received from the shipping lines. In the ma in task of shipplanning, extensive graphical aids are also provided. The system automatically summarizes all the information it has and presents a consoli-dated view of the stowage to assist the ship planner.

As planning is do ne by the ship planners, the system dynami-cally verifies all the constraints that have to be considered. Previously the ship planner had to carefully check all con-straints by carrying out a tedious pencil-paper simulation. The planning time required for each ship has thus been greatly re-duced. With improved planning efficiency, planners will be able to explore multiple container loading and discharging ap-proaches, thus improving the quality of the overall plan. The system provides mechanisms for keeping track of all the alter-natives and helps the ship planner to compare the plans. SPS has helped PSA to achieve significant productivity ga ins and poten-tially better plans.

Version 2 of SPS is currently being tested at the site. This ver-sion provides more extensive automatic planning capability, thus easing the task of the ship planners even further. Initial

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testing of this version has yielded highly promising results. In

many cases the system is able to produce plans of a quality com-parabie to that of expert ship planners. This project represents two years of successful collaboration between ITI and PSA. Demonstrations

In the following some applications are discussed which have been demonstrated in ITI' s laboratories.

Ship Planning System

ITI demonstrated two applications: the above-mentioned ship planning system for PSA and an aircraft service scheduling system for Singapore International Airlines (SlA).

The first system has been developed on a SUN 3 workstation with a colour screen. It supports the ship planner to load and discharge container vessels which will arrive at and depart from the Port of Singapore. This is a complex task since many constraints have to be considered. First, before a place in the vessel can be assigned to a container they would have to take into account some important parameters such as the container's destination, its type (either 20 or 40 ft) and its weight (for well-balanced ship loading). The ship planners are specialists in their field. They are able to construct almost optimal plans in only little time. However, on-going the planning severallast minute changes have to be incorporated into the plans. Vessels do not enter according to earlier plans, also containers are quite of ten

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not available or other containers have higher priori ties. In these rushy circumstances operators are quite often performing much less optimal. AIso, because of the last minute changes constraints are not always obeyed which could cause a consid-erabie delay in the planning process.

Especially in these special circumstances the ship planning sys-tem proves its value. It considers all possible constraints, aids the planner by helping producing loading and discharging plans. If the planner wants to violate the constraints he is wamed by the system with sufficient explanation. However, the planner is allowed to overrule the system, but this decision is recorded by the system that will accept no responsibility for such a decision.

For instanee, the system will produce a wa ming when two cranes on the quay, according to the planner's commands, will clash or approach to closely. In both cases the system will con-tinue as planned if the planner ignores the wamings. In the lat-ter case, no harm will be done. In the former case, the planner is held responsible for his decision.

The ship planning system is certainly user-friendly with its full-coloured graphics screen, mouse and fast response. The inter-face is written in Objective C. For the planning part, the use of merely production rules did not appear to he sufficient. For this part of the program a combination of Flavours and Common Lisp has been used. For the database, containing all data con-ce ming vessels and containers, the RDBMS Ingres has been

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se-Henk de Swaan Arons, Eric-Paul lansen

lected. The system runs on a SUN 3 workstation. Since version 3 is under way, also a SUN 4 SPARC system has been envis-aged. The operational version 2 is a 70 Mb executable program of which the planning program takes about 20 Mb.

It appeared that ITI and other institutes in Singapore, e.g. ISS, are carrying out other projects for the Port of Singapore Authority, some of them concerning the ship planning system. An example of this is the container number recognition pro-gram. One of the problems the builders of all these support systems are facing is to compile them to an integrated support system for the ship handling activities.

Airground Services Planning

One of the applications concerned the planning of SlA's air-ground services at Changi Airport. The program is far from operational, yet, the demonstration showed clearly how the system will operate when it will be operational at the airport. A major difficulty, not really interesting from a point of view of knowledge-based systems, is the requirement that the system will have to be operational under all circumstances. Airplanes have to land, albeit af ter a delay, and the frequency of arrivals and departures is high: during the peak hours only a few min-utes.

In fact, the aim of the system is quite easy: when airplanes ar-rive or depart they need assistance of ground services. Ground services is the concern of Changi Airport Authority, fueling is

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Mamlacturing and KBS in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea

taken care of by the airliners themselves. When an airplane is about to land, a team needs to be ready for the following tasks: the airplane has to be taxied to the terminal gate which requires a truck with a driver and assistant, it needs to be cleaned, toilets have to be emptied and cleaned, water has to be supplied, etc. For this task a team of about 4 men is available, one of whom will be capable of fighting fires. For instance, for a Boeing 747, the team will consist of one tractor driver, his assistant, one man dealing with the toilets and one for the water supply. Since only a limited number of ground service personnel is available, the conceming officer faces a scheduling problem. Even more frequently than with the ship planning system, last minute changes occur quite often, since aircraft are easily delayed or arrive earl ier than expected. In these cases the planner should be able to reschedule quickly.

Although the airground services problem is not so complex as the ship planning system, the highly frequent changes make time pressure high. For instance, in peak hours, when the num-ber of groundsmen is hardly sufficient, it may be necessary that a groundsman has two tasks at the same time. Then, making a quick reschedule could be rather difficult. An automated tem which can offer some support could be a big help. The sys-tem developed can be described as follows.

The planner has to reschedule the resources, taking into account the roster, the flight numbers, the equipment available and the staff attendance. Scheduling the resources is being emphasised.

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After the schedule has been generated the resources are de-ployed. Finally, the usage of the resources is monitored and changes in requirements need to be reported fast. The system has been developed on a Texas Instrurnents ' Explorer with KEE. No production rules have been used. The development of the system took about 6 months.

Institute of Systems Science: ISS (Singapore)

The research of ISS focuses on producing technical inventions and prototypes which will lead to the development of a next genera ti on of information systems. Next generation systems stem from emerging technology, such as advances in data bases, fiber-based communications and heterogeneous networks; from new standards, evolving in such fields as communications, windowing and graphics; and from novel concepts and tech-niques, for instance, neural networks and user interfaces. One specific aspect that is common to the next generation sys-tems ISS will work on, will be the multimedia orientation of the systems. Multimedia systems are those that embody a rich tex-ture of different media forms such as text, graphics, image video and voice. Multilingual interfaces and processing are a necessary complement.

In the area of information technology training, the institute also offers a large amount of courses attended mainly by executives, middle managers and technical professionals from a

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cross-sec-Manufacturing and KBS in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea

tion of industries. In January 1989 ISS hosted the 2nd International Workshop in Economics and Management. One of the other objectives of ISS is the transferring of tech-nology in close contact with the industry.

The research plan of ISS includes Hypermedia, Multimedia Databases, User Interface, Mu1ti1ingua1, Artificia1 Intelligence, High Speed Communications and Distributed Systems.

One of the projects ISS is involved in, concerns a system for the Port of Singapore Authorities (PSA). The system is under de-velopment and will be used at the container terminal in the har-bour and is part of the complete automatization of most of the harbour activities.

The loading of the ships with containers depends on the desti-nation of each single container. For instanee, a ship may contain containers to be delivered in Rotterdam and Bremen causing the loading of the ships to be done in su eh a way that containers that have to be unloaded first are loaded last. The system which is being developed is avision system to recognize the container, and routing the container to aspecific location before loading. Each container has a unique identification consisting of four letters and seven digits of which the last one is for checking the correctness of the previous digits. This unique identification can be found on all sides of the container.

Unfortunately, recognizing characters is is not a simple task. First, different type faces are used by the companies and

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some-Henk de Swaan Arons, Eric-Paul lansen

times the identification is written on a white background with dark paint instead of with a bright paint on the original con-tainer surface. Also the size of the characters may vary from container to container, whilst the girders on the container can cause distorted views. These difficulties are accompanied by other difficulties such as other numbers on the container, char-acters that are faded, the complete identification not written as one part but as blocks beneath each other or even completely vertical.

The system that is being built by ISS first takes a picture of one side of the container, af ter which the image is simplified, fol-lowed by marking the light-intensity changes in the image. The characters that can be recognized and the pattem in which they occur, are checked against the container identifications known to the system. With this information, even identifications that are not clearly read can be distinguished.

Chinese University of Hong Kong

The department visited is officially called the Engineering Program. At the moment it consists of three subdepartments, the Information Engineering Department (lED), the Computer Engineering Department (CED) and the EIectrotechnical Engineering Department (EED). In a later stage, probably al-ready in 1990, the three departments will be combined into the Department of Computer Science. The three subdepartments

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exist for only one year at the time of our visit and are housed in a brand new building. lED counted 10 staff members and 60 undergraduate students, CED 16 staff members and 240 both graduate and undergraduate students, about the same figures hold for EED. The total numher of students is about 600, but it is expected that they will he doubled in a few years. The under-graduate study normally takes four years, followed by a two years graduate study, the first year of which is spent to follow-ing courses and in the second year a thesis has to be written. As yet, there are no Ph. D. students.

The available equipment consists of some PCs and some work-stations, but will soon he expanded following a HK$ 20 million (US$ 2.5 million) plan which foresees network facilities and about 75 (80386/80486) workstations and a few SPARC sys-tems. A vailable software is Pascal, C, Prolog (being quite popular) and Lisp (getting increasingly popular). Expert sys-tem tools have not been bought, since they are being built within the department as will he explained later on.

Because of its recent existence, a coherent research programme could not yet he presented. Nevertheless, some main topics have already been covered due to the interest of individual re-searchers. The emphasis will be put on Telecommunication since it is the belief of t~le Department's Dean, Prof. George Fan, that this subject will lead to fruitful research cooperation with industry, for example IBM.

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Beside this, Neural Networks is the research field of Dr. Chun, who got his Ph.D. degree from Prof. Winston at MIT in the USA. He is also very interested in resource scheduling. Recently, he started a research project which aims to schedule passenger gates to incoming aircraft, which could in some sense he compared to the manufacturing scheduling process.

He is also involved in a combined pattern recognition 'and knowledge-based system research project The program is be-ing carried out on a recently launched IBM RISC machine, the RS 6000 (up to 40 MIPS) and aims to recognise handwritten Chinese characters. A Chinese character consists of a number of lines each of which are drawn in a fixed direction. Furthermore, Chinese characters have a fixed sequence of these lines. Characters are written on a tablet, so that it can be recognised at which points lines start and in which sequence they are drawn. However, this information is not sufficient. Sometimes, handwritten characters do differ quite a lot from the printed characters. An intelligent pattern recognition pro-gram compares the character with its recently gained informa-tion with already stored characters. A demonstrainforma-tion showed only successes, although, even on a fast RISC machine and with a limited number of characters, processing could take some time. This was not a real problem as the research had just started. (At the time of our visit, an article in the International Herald Tribune of 26 March 1990 reported Sony and Canon are beg inning to sell computers which convert writing, not quite

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instantly, into ASCII characters, intenningled with electronic sketches. These machines still make mistakes, but some American companies are already trying to improve them. The Sony Palmtop and the Canon AI Note have al ready appeared in Tokyo's electronic stores. It is there where the need for these machines is greatest since the enonnous complexity of entering about 7000 Chinese-based ideographs into a personal computer delays office automation. The battery-operated machines cost from $500 to $2300, and so far they are available only in Japan, where the need is the greatest.)

Dr. Leung, who got his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of London, has his main research interests in expert systems, fuzzy logic applications and AI computer architecture.

In the last two years, he has developed two expert system shells. The first has been called the Fuzzy Expert System Building TooI. It has been used in a medical application and the results have been published.

The shell can be described as follows. Much of the infonnation resident in the knowledge base of a typical expert system is

im-precise, incomplete or not totally reliable. This expert system shell is based on fuzzy logic and numbers are presented. It is a rule-based system which can deal with exact, inexact (fuzzy) and combined reasoning as weU as uncertainty represented by fuzzy numbers. It has a naturallanguage interface using a fuzzy logic representation. It has demonstrated its usefulness in

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sev-~ ~-~---~---~~~~--~-~ ----~~-~~~~-~~_._---~~-~----~~---~

eral application areas such as c1assification, risk analysis and in-fonnation retrieval.

It is also Dr. Leung's opinion that most rule-based systems are not flexible enough to handle problems that mix logical deduc-tions, rule-based inferences and procedure execution.

However, mixed problems are quite common in real world

applications. Therefore, his second system concerns an expert system shell using structured knowIedge.

Cheo

Hsoog

Machioery Co. (Hoog

Koog)

The Chen Hsong Machinery Co. Ltd. was established by two en-trepeneurs Chen and Hsong in Hong Kong in 1958 as a small workshop to provide maintenance and repair service for ma-chinery parts, water taps and pipes. Later, Hsong stepped out of the business. At the present, Chen is still the Managing Director of Chen Hsong Machinery. In 1965, Chen Hsong Machinery (CHM) began the production of injection moulding machines. In 1973, a new factory was set up with assembly line and addi-tional production equipments, such as CNC machines. This was a period in which CHM had to face a lot of technical, financial, and material problems. Eventually CHM overcame all these problems. CHM is now part of the Chen Hsong Holdings Ltd. During the 80's, CHM grew and more factories were founded. In 1980, the Chen Hsong Machinery (Taiwan) plant was set up in Taiwan, whilst in 1981 a new CHM in another part of Hong

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Kong was set up. In the United States a joint venture, Nypro Chen Precision Moulding Co. Ltd., was started in precision moulding (1982). Further extension concerns the production of robots in cooperation with Japan, the Chen Yushin Co. Ltd. Some of the robots are made in Hong Kong based on a licence agreement.

In 1987, two new developments were started. For producing injection moulding machines they started a joint venture with the People's Republic of China: Chen De Plastics Machinery Co. Ltd. and in Taiwan a second factory was set up: Asian Plastic Machinery Co. Ltd. The investment in the Chen De Plastics Co. Ltd. was increased to establish an expansion by constructing a new plant Chen Hsong Machinery Co. Ltd. ne ar the one built in 1981.

This plant produces injection moulding machines and is situated next to Hong Kong CAD-CAM Services Ltd., a high precision mould production plant. This plant was acquired (75%) in 1989. To further extend the holding, Hong Kong's first ad-vanced ductile cast-iron plant Chen Hsong Foundry Co. Ltd. was set up in 1990.

General Consensus of Chen Hsong Machinery

It appears that CHM, and in fact also the other plants, are the most advanced plants in the area. CHM is a model to other com-panies.

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Joint Venture China

The investment in the Chen De Plastics Machinery Co. Ltd. ba-sically involved a percentage of 25 of the company. This in-vestment remarkably paid itself back in only two years! Now the involvement of CH Holding concerns 60%.

Injection Moulding Machines

The injection moulding machines produced by CHM are at least 50% cheaper than the comparative machines of their competi-tors. Most of the parts of injection moulding machines have to be bought from suppliers that do not reside in Hong Kong. In this way, the costs are hard to cut down. However, workforce and space are cheaper than elsewhere and cause these machines to be cheaper. Workforce is cheaper because the social benefits are nihil, overtime is rather easily possible and there exist no unions.

Export

Most of the products were meant for the domestic market, but during the last decade CHM is also busy with exporting their products. However, they did not market their products until now.

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The talk ofthe day: 1997

1997 is the year of the retuming of Hong Kong to the People' s Republic of China and consequently the clash of different sys-tems, capitalistic and communistic, and its influence on various aspects in society and management.

Motorola Semicooductors (Hoog Koog)

Motorola was founded in 1928 in Chicago. The goals of the world-wide Motorola company include

• awareness of importance and realising global marketing, • to be best in class,

• to provide good returns to share-holders.

The part of Motorola we visited is the Semiconductor Products Sector of the Asia Division Centre in Hong Kong. The Asia Division Centre recently celebrated its 20th anniversary after starting its activities in 1967. Motorola Semiconductors build Integrated Circuits and supply them to cu stomers all over the world. Alrnost the complete process for manufacturing these ICs is controled by Motorola Semiconductors. The only part of the manufacturing process that is not performed, is the manu-facturing of the waf ers containing several chips.

Most of the steps of the manufacturing processes are automated. The loading and unloading is often performed by humans, whilst the testing of, for instance, the painting of the IC casting

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(e.g. type number) is also done by humans. This is not yet au-tomated because of the high demands on the vis ion system to be used. The testing of the functioning of the les however, is ob-viously done by using dedicated microcomputers.

The manufacturing processes are functionally divided at vari-ous levels in the building. For shortening the cycle time a cellu-lar layout has been adopted. At each working place at which a machine is located, a sign indicates that the machine is either working (the background of the sign is green), idle (yellow background) or malfunctioning (red background). The usage of these signs and corresponding colours is to inform everyone,

e.g. the workers or the inspecting manager, about the status of

a

certain machine. In this way, the operators of the machines are

not disturbed if someone needs to know the status of that par-ticular machine.

As often can be seen in Asian plants, most of the people are wearing uniform clothing. Some of this is functional because of the possible static electricity of the environment and the damage this may cause to the very fragile semiconductor products. Visitors can be shown around most of the facilities if they cover there shoes with protective, anti-static over-shoes.

The usage of artificial intelligence is very low, almost nihil. However, there is some research going on on vision systems and their applicability during the testing phase. The usage of expert systems or knowledge-based systems is not foreseen for the near future.

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Mamlacturing and KBS in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea

Most of the planning is done by using a dBase IV application on a PC under MS-DOS. Because the planning concerns very large batches, this is sufficient for Motorola Semiconductors. The planning system uses data down-Ioaded from their main-frame computer. Also data from other computers within the Motorola company can be used. This is done by using satellite communi-cation with main-frame computers in the USA.

Of great importance is the ability to locate and allocate the nat-ural resources to be used during the manufacturing of the semi-conductors. Of course the stock at Hong Kong is the ma in source for the resources, but in case this stock is running out, also resources available in stocks of other Motorola factories can be used. The information on these stocks can be found in the databases reachable by satellite.

Until recently the products manufactured by Motorola Semiconductors Hong Kong were not designed by Motorola Hong Kong. Now Motorola Hong Kong has developed a micro-processor which can be configured for several different pur-poses. It is described to be a complete computer on a chip. This new chip has been designed by a group of Hong Kong people at their Hong Kong facilities. The chip is called DragonKat be-cause it was finished during the Year of the Dragon (1989). One of the new activities is the development of a complete new research centre in the area of Taipo, part of the New Territories in Hong Kong and where more companies are establishing new factories.

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Korean Advanced Institute of Technology:

KAIST

It is quite difficult to understand the difference between the various institutes involved in Korean research. First there is the Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), but there is also the Korean Advanced Institute of Technology (KAIST), the Korean Institute of Technology (KIT), and the various pri-vate and state universities.

The difference was explained by Prof. Hyun Seung Yang, an as-sociate professor of the Department of Computer Science at KAIST, who got his B.S. degree from Seoul National University, and his M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in Electric Engi-neering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA.

KIST is a research institute, not involved in education at all. Although the emphasis of KAIST is on research, it has also both an undergraduate and a graduate program. KIT has only un-dergraduate courses. Of course, the main task of the universi-ties is education, nevertheless they also do research, although they find it hard to have research funded. However, this is usually the case for all universities. Private universities are mostly sponsored by big companies, such as the University of Pohang (POSTECH). The research institutes are said to be quite prestigious and even at Chinese University of Hong Kong this

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was confirmed. The staff of the Oepartment of Computer Science of KIST consists of Prof. Jin Hyung Kim, the chairman who got his M.Sc. and Ph.

o.

degrees in Computer Science from University of Califomia, Los Angeles, USA; the above-mentioned Prof. Yang, about ten fuH-time Ph.

o.

students and about twenty M.Sc. students. The major research topics can be categorised as foHows.

1. Research on Basic Technologies, such as knowledge rep-resentation, AI programming languages and systems, neural network models and machine learning,

2. Research on Advanced Information Systems. This re-search involves the technologies of knowledge-based systems and the development of expert system building tools and their application to specific areas, thus projects concerning expert system building tools, knowIedge-based consultation systems, intelligent tutoring systems and information retrieval.

3. Research on Computer Vision. This research concerns the technologies enabling machines to perceive and un-derstand their environment from sensory data. Projects in this category concern pattern and character recogni-tion, knowledge-based vision systems CAO-based 3-0 Robot vision and neural network-based vision.

Some projects will be discussed in somewhat more detail. Certainly, the HyKET system (Hybrid Knowledge Engineering TooI) is worth to be mentioned. The project started in 1987 and

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is still on-going. It is funded by tbe Korean Ministry of Science and Technology.

Expert systems have rapidly evolved into the most visible ap-plication of artificial intelligence to the real world problems. Increasing demand of expert systems has led to tbe development tools for tbe rapid construction of expert systems. Tbe early AI development systems have utilized only one representation methodology, such as frames, rules or logic programming. As the AI systems become more complex, hybrid artificial intelli-gence development systems are required, which integrate sev-eral artificial intelligence metbodologies into a single system providing multi-paradigm knowledge representation schemes. In this project, a hybrid tooI is developed, integrating a

Common Lisp environment~ a rule-based system, an

object-ori-ented knowledge representation system (CLOS) and X-Windows user interface features. The system contains a Foreign Language Interface (very important to Koreans with their own character set), garbage collection and a Truth Maintenance System. Unfortunately, the system was not demonstrated. Tbe motivation of tbe Ministry to have carried out this project instead of buying a turnkey system, for instance in tbe USA (KEE, Knowledge Craft, Nexpert), has been to get experienced with implementing knowledge-based techniques and to attempt to improve existing systems by realising a more flexible environment. Furthermore, it has been considered

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im-Manufacturing and KBS in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea

portant that the system had to be interfaeed to both the English and the Korean language.

A second project which is also funded by the government is a US$ 10 million project, concerning the role of AI technology in military applications. It started in 1988 and is still on-going, although it was planned to be ended at the end of 1989. The functions of the Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence (C3I) Centre are to analyze the collected data, to correlate them with known information and to disseminate the conclusion to military field commanders in the form of situa-tion and threat analysis, status reports and targeting informa-tion. As the input data hecomes larger and larger, and the types of problems more complex, the performance of the con trol centre is almost sure to drop below the level necessary to maintain the adequate battle advantage. Extensive research and development efforts may provide some relief in the form of new and advanced computer systems for support of C31 centre personnel. The decision-making process required for accom-plishing the above functions can he automated by using an

ex-\ pert system.

Commander's policy, military knowledge and expert's opinions can he represented by frames and mIes. The inference engine uses such knowledge to decide the current status of the world. It receives sensored data, processes them and updates the world model according to its decision. So the world model inc1udes the current hypotheses to he confirmed and the highly probable

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hypotheses to be explored. A user interface provides the end user with up-to-date hypotheses in the world model in the form of reports, tables and figures. It also accepts queries and ex-plains its inference results, so that the end user can see the cur-rent status of the battle field and assert the new fact interáctive-ly. In this project, the feasibility of AI methodology in C31 problems is investigated and Jangkoon, a prototype expert sys-tem which can help the control centre personnel by automated decision-making and on-line user interaction, is implemented. The research is carried out on a Symbolics Lisp machine. A colour monitor displays the details of the battlefield, its rocky surface and the various military components (headquarters of both own and enemy forces) and the military events.

Although the former projects were rather big, the actual em-phasis of the department has been put on (knowledge-based) applications in the field of pattem recognition. Consequently, some projects are related to this research field. Korea, like China and Japan, has its own character set, and alike the Chinese University of Hong Kong is doing with Chinese, it is carrying out research on automatic Korean document recognition. The project is funded by the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology and now it has taken about two and a half years of development. The system accepts a non-form(ltted document from a scanner and recognizes the text to convert it into com-puter processible files. The documents to be scanned are still

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restricted to printed documents, but recognising handwritten Korean text is envisaged.

The system is composed of four stages: preprocessing, charac-ter recognition, training and postprocessing. In the preprocess-ing stage, the image is normalized to correct its skewness and is segmented into text and non-text areas. Each single character image, which is extracted from text areas using horizontal and vertical projection data, is then recognised by a statistical al-gorithm. It consists of two steps to save computing time. In the first step, the mesh vector of an input character image is classi-fied roughly into a group of similar candidate characters using a decision tree classifier. In the second step, the candidates are labeled by comparing Euclidean distances from prestored char-acter modeIs. Due to noise and similarity, recognition results are checked with a prestored wordlist and confusion probabili-ties are used to correct if the word is not on the list. The system is now being trained to read only a few font types, but it can easily be adapted to any other font types through a separate training stage. It recognizes a laser beam printer output Hangul with an accuracy of 99.5%. It takes about three minutes to pro-cess a document containing about 1000 characters on an IBM 386 Pc.

Related to this project is the one in which a human computer interface is being constructed which will be able to accept handwritten input. Human computer interaction is a hot issue in the field of computer science. In this research project, an

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on-Henk de Swaan Arons, Eric-Pau/ lansen

line handwritten character recogllltlOn system using a PHOTRON FIOS-6640 digitizer, a high quality, thin transpar-ent tablet overlaying flat display is being used. Both conven-tional structural pattern recognition as weIl as neuro-comput-ing methods are perforrned. As to this project, one is again re-ferred to the article on this subject in the International Heraid Tribune of March 26, 1990, where some commercially avail-able machines (Sony, Canon) were reviewed.

A recent project concerns computer vision based on neural net-works. It is funded by KAIST itself and is being carried out by Prof. Kim and Prof. Yang. In this project experiments are car-ried out to use neural network algorithrns for recognizing a bi-nary image. To reduce the size of the whole neural net, and to implement a recognition system which is independent of trans-lation, rotation, and the size of an object, six features are ex-tracted from the image by using the geometrie moment and the features are used as input of the neural net. For the neural net classifier, a multilayer-perceptron is used, which has one hid-den layer and is learned by back-propagation. As aresuit it is possible to imp1ement a shape recognition system which is in-dependent of translation, rotation and change of size, combin-ing the property of invariance of moment, non-linear decision-making facility of neural net classifier and robustness to noise. The problem in invariance of moment is studied, and an exper-imental result will he introduced of the Hopfield and Harnming net as a model which is using the image itself as input.

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The department has a wide variety of hardware and software available, a.o. a HP 9000/350 AI workstation with a colour monitor, some SUN workstations, Macintoshes (11, eX),

equipment for scanning and processing images; the software concerns KEE, some home-made systems and (parallel) image-processing software.

Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology

(Korea)

The field of commerce Samsung is working in, is not restricted to electronics or electronic appliances, but ranges from shoes and c10thing to chips and aerospace activities. For the research on techniques for the various fields of application, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, or SAlT for short, focuses on the development of computer software, new materials for the information industry, and electromechanical systems. Unfortunately, due to heavy traffic between KAIST in Seoul and the location of SAlT in Kyung, even Samsung's comfort-able company car did not manage to take us there in time to at-tend the complete scheduled program. Only a brief introduc-tion and a discus sion with some senior researchers and SAIT's vice-president were possible.

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Pohang University (Korea)

Pohang Institute of Science and Technology (POSTECH) was founded in 1986 as a private research-oriented institute of higher leaming in science and engineering. It is located in the city of Pohang, which is also the site of the Pohang Iron and Steel Co., Ltd. (POSCO), the financial sponsor of POSTECH. POSTECH forms a cooperative triad with POS CO and the Research InstÏtute of Industrial Science and Technology (RIST).

POSTECH was founded to meet the national need for advanced research and high quality education in science and technology and to contribute to a balanced regional development of Korea. The three major roIes of a university - teaching, research and service to society - are not only fulfilled but developed through POSTECH's basic structure. The CUITent stage of Korea's in-dustrialization caBs for increased self-reliance in science and engineering as well as highly competent scientists and engi-neers. POSTECH attracts many faculty members for its re-search activities, allowing the undergraduate student-facility ratio to be kept at four-to-one.

At the same time, POSTECH will educate Korea's brightest young scientists and engineers, engage in wide-ranging re-search in basic science, applied sciences and engineering, pro-mote close cooperation between academia and industrial

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orga-Manufacturing and KBS in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea

nizations for fruitful transfer of research results, and faster creation of new technologies.

POSTECH aims at training students to be weU-rounded and in-teUectually mature persons. Therefore, beside the technical subjects, a wide ranging exposure to the humanities, social sciences, and Korea's cultural heritage is provided.

So POSTECH has big ambitions. First a great deal of money (about US$ 200 million) was invested in founding this univer-sity and without doubt it is one of the most modem universities in Korea. Buildings, laboratories and equipment are brand new and for many students as well as for staff it will be quite a plea-sure to study and to do research. Next, POSTECH aims for be-coming Korea's elite university and claims that it already has achieved this position. Students are well-selected, only the best 2% are admitted. If these students need financialor other sup-port, they can receive scholarships from the university, in fact indirectly from POSCO. So, financial problems will not hinder talented students to come to POSTECH.

Furthermore, POSTECH stimulates international exchange of researchers and students. It considers that the rapid pace of sci-entific and technological progress in recent years makes com-munication and collaboration with active research teams around the world imperative. Such international contacts exist with weU known institutes such as University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the United States, the University of Birmingham, and Imperial

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College of Science, Technology and Medicine in the United Kingdom, Université de Technologie de Compiègne in France, and RW Technische Hochschule, in Aachen, West Germany. Finally, about 90% of the scientific staff at the Department of Industrial Engineering that we visited got the master's and Ph.

D. degree from leading American universities.

POSTECH offers courses in the following ten departments:

Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, Chemical Engineering, Computer Science, Electronic and Electrical Engineering, lndustrial Engineering, Life Science, Materials Science and Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering.

At the moment POSTECH has about 1200 students, a number which will increase to approximately 2000 within the next five years. Also the staff will increase: it is estimated that the present 160 staffmembers will be about 300 in 1995.

Although the emphasis of our visit was the Department of Industrial Engineering, we will also make some brief remarks about the Department of Computer Science. The research pro-grams concentrate on Computer Systems (e.g. developing a multiprocessor parallel computing machine using transputers), Artificial Intelligence (e.g. development of an own shell and an AI machine for symbolic processing; computer vision, by studying image analysis natural networks and parallel process-ing of pattem recognition) and Computational Theory. One should keep in mind that the university is only three years old and is trying to find its way.

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Hardware and software facilities are: V AX 8800 (VMS), V AX 8200 (ULTRIX), IBM 4381 (VMNSE), SUN/APOLLO/HP workstations, IBM PC/ATs, Extensive Net/One broadband LAN, access to SDN network; UNIX, SUPRA, MANTIS, MUSIC, and the AI software OPS5, ART, SI and KEE.

At the Department of lndustrial Engineering research concen-trated on the following fields:

Manufacturing Engineering

CIM, CAM, knowledge-based engineering systems, applica-tions of industrial robots and computer vision, AGVs and AS/RS, factory automation, production planning and process control.

Human Factors Engineering

Human performance in engineering systems, man-machine systems, biomechanics, work physiology, human-computer in-terface, work measurement and method analysis, industrial safety management;

Information Systems and Computer Applications

Database design and management, management information systems, artificial intelligence inc1uding expert systems, MAP system, manufacturing information system, simulation;

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Operations Research and Applied Statistics

Mathematical programming and optimization, stochastic pro-cesses, quality control and reliability, decision analysis, applied statistical and probabilistic models.

The department has several laboratories, e.g. a laboratory for robot research (robot vision: automated guided vehicle and collision avoidance) , a laboratory with eNe milling machines and lathes, and a complete mini Flexible Manufacturing System, including a transportation system, tooI and equipment storage and small CNC machines). The department has access to the VAX and IBM mainframes (for research and administra-tion respectively) and staff members have their own 286+ pes, mostly of Korean brand, e.g. Daewoo and it has some IRIS graphical workstations (Silicon Graphics).

Often used software are Turbo Prolog, Turbo Pascal and many graphical packages.

The computer room for students counts about 50 pes (Daewoo), so there is no lack of computer equipment. Furthermore, in the student dormitories there are special PC rooms, connected to the campus network.

The university is not yet ready, but progress is rapidly made.

For instance, the University Library has abollt 150,000 vol-umes (will be 200,000 in 1995) and 1500 international journals (which will be extended to 2000 in 1995).

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A visitor gets a very good impression of the new University in statu nescendi. Nevertheless, the money spent to a rapid devel-opment shows hardly any resemblance with POSCO's credo:

"Resources are limited, creativity is not limited".

Pusan University (Korea)

The University of Pusan is a national university in the South East of Korea and many differences can be noticed with the private POSTECH.

It was already predicted by POSTECH that Pusan University would have much less facilities. Furthermore, in contrast to the staff members at POSTECH, most of the staff at Pusan University have degrees from Korean universities.

Another difference is that Pusan University is a "reai" univer-sity, with both engineering and science departments: Medicine,

Art, Law, History, Languages, Theology, and Mechanical, Industrial, Chemical and Electrical Engineering. For this rea-son, Pusan University counts many more students than POSTECH: 25,000 students.

Also Pusan University has Student Exchange programs: with Stanford University, University of California (USA) at Berkeley and Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine (United Kingdom). Much interest exists to exchang-ing knowiedge, staff members and students with foreign uni-versities.

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Pusan University has many older buildings with po or facilities. This on itself is not a reliable indicator since the prestigious Tokyo University has a po or housing as wel1. Nevertheless, the lack of enough and advanced computer equipment is a reason for real worries.

The Department of Industrial Engineering has a yearly input of about 50 students, and has 200 students in total. They are taught by five faculty members which have a rather heavy education load: nine hours/week/semester.

Y onsei University (Korea)

Y onsei University is a private university located in Seoul and is again a "real" university, with Faculties of Medicine, Law and Theology etc.

Although Yonsei is also private, as is POSTECH, at this uni-versity many complaints were uttered about the government's influence. On the one hand the government contributes only marginal1y to the costs of the university, but on the other hand it dictates several boundary conditions which Y onsei finds very hard to meet. It would have a continuing shortage of financial means which would be thought very different for national uni-versities. However, POSTECH is also a private and, as it seems, very rich university, sponsored by the private company POSCO, which on its turn finds the majority of the stocks in the hands of the state.

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The visit was to the Department of Computer Science. It has its own AI group. Research items are: again neural networks, character recognition (using a.o. neural networks), and general applications in expert systems. The rule-based expert system tooI Insight II has been bought, but its possibilities were found not very satisfactorily. In a later stage, this expert system shell was replaced by ART.

Some applications were demonstrated. One concemed a finan-cial expert system, an advisory system on the stock market. On the Korean stock market about 600 companies are represented, however, the expert system used only forty of them. The devel-opers were told that this system was not good enough for real advice and that two real experts were needed to improve its performance.

A second application concemed written (on-line) character recognition (this research topic also had priority in Singapore and Hong Kong). It appears that on-line character recognition is many times easier than off-line recognition. The reason is found in the fact that writing a word follows fixed directions. Although the final results of the writing are the same, with off-line recognition the extra information conceming directions is lacking, which would cause big difficulties (at KIST, however, a demonstration of off-line reading and interpreting printed text showed to give no real problems; the difference probably is hand-written and printed text).

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At the department there are 240 undergraduate students and another 45 on master level.

The equipment at the department concerns about 30 PC 286+; a V AX workstation, some SUN 4 workstations would be avail-able shortly. All faculty members have their own 286+ PC. The department has network facilities and would have access to a new Cyber, shortly.

Korea Institute of Science and Technology:

KIST

KIST is a contract research institute which was merged with a graduate school of science and engineering: Korea Advanced Institute of Science (KAIS). This combined institute, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAlST), man-aged both research and education.

In order for Korea to join the rank of developed countries by the year 2000, it is necessary to strengthen the international competitiveness through scientific progress and technical inno-vation. For this reason, the exclusive concentration on R&D activities caused the rebirth of KIST to take place in 1989 thus separating from KAlST.

KIST is comprised of four institutes: Korea Ocean R&D Institute, Systems Engineering Research Institute (SERI), Genetic Engineering Centre and the Centre for Science &

Manufacturing and knowledge-based systems in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea

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Manufacturing and

Knowledge-Based Systems

in

Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea

Manufacturing and

Knowledge-Based

Systems

•

m

Singapore, Hong Kong

andKorea

The report of a research trip funded by

the European Commission through the

Esprit projects 809 and 2415.

The trip was made [rom

19 March 1990 -

9 April 1990.

H. de Swaan Arons

E.P. lansen

Contents

Summary

Philips Machinery Factory Singapore

Information Technology Institute: ITI

(Singapore)

=

Knowiedge Systems Application Development (KSAD)

Airground Services Planning

Institute of Systems Science: ISS (Singapore)

Chinese University of Hong Kong

Cheo

Hsoog

Machioery Co. (Hoog

Koog)

Motorola Semicooductors (Hoog Koog)

a

Korean Advanced Institute of Technology:

KAIST

o.

o.

Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology

(Korea)

Pohang University (Korea)

Pusan University (Korea)

Y onsei University (Korea)

Korea Institute of Science and Technology:

KIST