Knowledge management in the design and operation of High-Speed Rail

Every large-scale project, especially one involving issues where knowledge is dispersed globally, can benefit from making project participants aware of what modern knowledge management and related fields are, what their potential applications are in the project, and what benefits they can bring.This certainly applies to the High-Speed Rail project, due to several of its characteristics:
1) It is a large-scale project, so all possible improvements should be utilized;
2) There is a great deal of knowledge about high-speed rail dispersed around the world, so it is not about creating new, innovative knowledge from scratch, but about gathering and verifying existing knowledge and innovatively adapting it to Polish conditions;
3) In the High-Speed Rail project in Poland, checking the consistency of the actions of individual project participants and synthesizing the gathered knowledge can be of great importance.
4) Data related to the operation of High-Speed Rail will certainly constitute a very large set, so its analysis should utilize the full extent of the vast experience of knowledge engineering in the field of data analysis (data mining).
Knowledge management, in combination with its related field (or even its precursor, see below), knowledge engineering, can contribute significantly to solving problems or improving activities related to the above characteristics of the High-Speed Rail project.
2. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT VS. KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING; POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS
Knowledge management is a field related to both science studies and knowledge engineering, including knowledge extraction from large datasets. Historically, knowledge management grew out of computer science and knowledge engineering (see, e.g., Wierzbicki and Nakamori 2007a), as the term “knowledge management” was first used in the early 1980s by the company DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) to describe specific software products aimed at automatically documenting the results of programmers’ work so as not to lose them, e.g., in the event of the author’s illness; similar solutions, although without using the term “knowledge management,” were also used earlier by IBM. However, the term “knowledge management” was so attractive that in the early 1990s it was adopted by management sciences, and the concept of knowledge management is treated today rather as a subject of management sciences, see, e.g., (Dieng and Corby 2000). This also led to sharp disputes (see (…)

Knowledge management in the design and operation of High-Speed Rail – PDF file for download