Shape - Safety-critical Human- and dAta-centric Process management in Engineering projects

Planning large infrastructure systems and their development processes is a complex task. This is especially true for systems that must comply with strict safety regulations, such as for example railway safety systems. The problem of planning and monitoring such processes is addressed by the project SHAPE (Safety-critical Human- and dAta-centric Process management in Engineering projects) - a collaboration between the Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Siemens AG Österreich.

Who is the employee best suited to solve a specific task? When will the required test laboratory space be available? Have all the safety-critical requirements been met? Taking into consideration all these aspects and coordinating the individual steps manually is a challenging endeavor. A new planning and monitoring tool developed within this project should provide valuable future support.

The developed solution shall enable the automatic execution of the development processes for large projects as well as the formalization and automated verification of compliance with business rules and regulations. The better the utilized data and tools are documented, the more efficient planning is possible, minimizing overall risks for the successful execution of infrastructure projects.

Methods belonging to the fields of process management, semantic technologies and constraint-based, automatic configuration are combined in the project. A novelty of the system is that it shall consider both structured (e.g., spreadsheet files with the required information) and unstructured data (e.g., normative documents in natural language).

Unstructured data is analyzed, transformed and integrated into a semantic model. As a consequence, this shall enable the transfer of experiences from one development project to similar follow-up projects. Moreover, the users of the system can derive the optimal order in which certain process steps should be executed.The main focus of the resulting system is to simplify the work of the involved project personnel by seamlessly integrating with existing tools and not interrupting standard workflows. The result is a simplified development process which allows for a more efficient resource-utilization whilst simultaneously guaranteeing a high level of service.