Advance

ADVANCE is a three year project (01.10.2010-30.09.2013) co-financed by the European Commission’s Seventh Research Framework Programme under the Intelligent Information Management objective.
The main objective of the project is to provide collaborative communities or networked enterprises, primarily logistics networks, with a solution platform which enables them to improve their operations through analysis of operational data, decision support and network-wide sharing of otherwise locally constrained information.
This is to be realized by collecting and filtering the large amounts of structured but still low-level operational information, and detection of patterns, assembly of verifiable process models and issuing forecasts, reports, and suggested decisions with the help of an expert system. The output of the system will be generated in accordance with cognitive models of preferences, expectations and perspectives of human operators to allow them a direct interpretation and assessment of the automatically generated output, also providing thereby important feedback for further refinement of the machine- generated process models.
The ADVANCE software will have the capacity to analyse massive data sets for long term planning as well as rapidly processing huge amounts of new data in real time. It will provide a dual perspective on transport requirements and decision making dependent on the latest snapshot information and the best higher-level intelligence. Summarizing its key functionalities, the ADVANCE platform will:

• allow companies to extend their already existing infrastructure towards better information sharing;
• provide means for exploiting this information for better operating decisions;
• present automatically generated results in a human-interpretable way;
• facilitate the alignment of artificial and human expertise so that they can cross-validate and collaboratively adapt the system as the knowledge domains evolve.

The additional reference material will give insight into the mechanisms of sharing and exploiting information to the benefit of the network by presenting:

• the theoretical background of the ADVANCE solution's underlying processes, and
• a knowledge-engineering based methodology for identifying and representing relevant processes and decision priorities in the decision support system.