The role of ahedd

ahedd is a Digital Innovation Hub that facilitates the creation of a digital innovation ecosystem. In each business case, ahedd identifies the need of the client and conducts a business analysis. Then this need is matched to the technological competences of one or more partners of its ecosystem. Working as a united entity, the client is provided with a single point-of-contact to build trust and facilitate all communication.

The solution

In this case, the Mechanics and Materials division of the Hellenic Naval Academy, with long experience in failure analysis, identified the need and addressed it to the Software and Knowledge Engineering Lab (SKEL) of NCSR Demokritos, the technological experts of ahedd ecosystem that lead cutting-edge research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and are involved in the design and development of complex systems and infrastructures.

ahedd and SKEL, working as a unique entity, helped describe the technical components and services that could contribute to the solution, in an extensible, scalable and sustainable manner. They investigated the whole process and involved experts and end-users in the analysis to determine that the solution would be effective and tailored to the specific needs. Then, they proposed the co-development of a platform that integrates the existing know-how in materials failure with decision-making using AI-enabled tools.

SKEL, in cooperation with the Hellenic Naval Academy, in this work in progress, analyses the stages of naval materials failure management and of decision making in Maintenance and Repair Operations of the client and identify the user needs. Then the platform is designed based on semantic content analysis and multilingual information extraction, creation and maintenance of ontologies, services composition as well as interaction with web-based information systems. The final system will help the expert in charge to be able to assess the causes of any failure, decide the optimum intervention, and generate a report easily. The system will be scalable so that new modules can be added, providing additional functionalities dictated by future needs.

This ambitious interdisciplinary project enjoys the support of the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation, the national institution through which a profound reforming effort is being undertaken in the field of Research and Innovation in the country.

Other areas of application

Such a failure management and decision-making system can be tailored and integrated into many large organisations that would optimize their resources and reduce risks associated with material/component/system failures.