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Stefan Bischof

Publications and source records attributed to Stefan Bischof.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Ontology-Mediated Neurosymbolic Constraint Acquisition from Multiple Stakeholders

Neurosymbolic research typically assumes a pre-existing symbolic specification, leaving the upstream challenge of acquiring and formalizing requirements and constraints largely unaddressed. We present an architecture that fills this gap by using an OWL configuration ontology to mediate between neural constraint sources and downstream consumers. In this framework, LLM assistants elicit soft stakeholder preferences, while hardware specifications define hard physical and engineering limits. The ontology unifies these heterogeneous inputs, leverages description logic to identify unsatisfiability, and generates symbolic explanations that enable LLMs to interactively renegotiate terms with users. Any remaining conflicts are resolved downstream via priority-based relaxation. We illustrate our approach on a microgrid use case from the FLEXI project and argue its generalizability to multi-stakeholder domains where constraint acquisition is distributed across human and automated sources of unequal authority.

cs.AI↗

Neuro-symbolic AI for Industrial Configuration

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on a wide range of generative tasks. Yet their probabilistic nature makes them, in isolation, fundamentally unsuited for industrial product configuration, where outputs must be syntactically valid, semantically consistent with a knowledge base of hundreds of features and rules, and producible by an existing manufacturing chain. We argue that Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI methods lay out a promising path towards industrial-grade configurators that are reliable by design, explainable, and trustworthy. This paper describes a taxonomy of three NeSy integration strategies, namely hybrid inference, hybrid fine-tuning, and hybrid training, exploring their usage in the configuration domain. We report our effort to operationalize NeSy concepts in an industrial configuration copilot and derive a set of practical design choices for deploying trustworthy AI in engineering environments. We close with a discussion of open research challenges we consider most pressing, in particular how to scale NeSy methods from small academic demonstrators to the size of industrial configurators.

cs.AI↗

Rail Topology Ontology: A Rail Infrastructure Base Ontology

Engineering projects for railway infrastructure typically involve many subsystems which need consistent views of the planned and built infrastructure and its underlying topology. Consistency is typically ensured by exchanging and verifying data between tools using XML-based data formats and UML-based object-oriented models. A tighter alignment of these data representations via a common topology model could decrease the development effort of railway infrastructure engineering tools. A common semantic model is also a prerequisite for the successful adoption of railway knowledge graphs. Based on the RailTopoModel standard, we developed the Rail Topology Ontology as a model to represent core features of railway infrastructures in a standard-compliant manner. This paper describes the ontology and its development method, and discusses its suitability for integrating data of railway engineering systems and other sources in a knowledge graph. With the Rail Topology Ontology, software engineers and knowledge scientists have a standard-based ontology for representing railway topologies to integrate disconnected data sources. We use the Rail Topology Ontology for our rail knowledge graph and plan to extend it by rail infrastructure ontologies derived from existing data exchange standards, since many such standards use the same base model as the presented ontology, viz., RailTopoModel.

cs.AI↗