Instructional aid for tactical wargame model

A tactical gaming model for wargame play between two teams A and B through a control unit C has been developed, which can be handled using IBM personal computers (XT and AT models) having a local area network facility. This simulation model involves communication between the teams involved, logging and validation of the actions of the teams by the control unit. The validation procedure uses statistical and also monte carlo techniques. This model has been developed to evaluate the planning strategies of the teams involved. This application software using about 120 files has been developed in BASIC, DBASE and the associated network software. Experience gained in the instruction courses using this model will also be discussed.

Segregating Discourse Segments from Engineering Documents for Knowledge Acquisition

The broader goal of the research being described here is to automatically acquire diagnostic knowledge from documents in the domain of manual and mechanical assembly of aircraft structures. These documents are treated as a discourse used by experts to communicate with others. It therefore becomes possible to use discourse analysis to enable machine understanding of the text. The research challenge addressed in the paper is to identify documents or sections of documents that are potential sources of knowledge. In a subsequent step, domain knowledge will be extracted from these segments. The segmentation task requires partitioning the document into relevant segments and understanding the context of each segment. In discourse analysis, the division of a discourse into various segments is achieved through certain indicative clauses called cue phrases that indicate changes in the discourse context. However, in formal documents such language may not be used. Hence the use of a domain specific ontology and an assembly process model is proposed to segregate chunks of the text based on a local context. Elements of the ontology/model, and their related terms serve as indicators of current context for a segment and changes in context between segments. Local contexts are aggregated for increasingly larger segments to identify if the document (or portions of it) pertains to the topic of interest, namely, assembly. Knowledge acquired through such processes enables acquisition and reuse of knowledge during any part of the lifecycle of a product.