We are pleased to offer a series of webinars on the Value of Information, including a conversation with Professor Ron Howard. Webinars are $50 each.

• The Value of Information and the Free XLTree™ Software (Sam Savage): Monday April 13, 11:00 AM PDT (Note: this webinar is offered free of charge)

• A Conversation with Ron Howard (Ron Howard, Sam Savage, Tom Keelin, & Doug Hubbard): Tuesday April 21, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM PDT

• Transitioning to the Digital Factory at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics (Bryan Massie & Tony DeMarco): Thursday April 30, 10:00 AM PDT

• How Much is Someone Else’s Help Worth? Exploring Why the Value of Information Can Be a CIO’s Best Friend When Making Big Decisions (William D. Reed): Wednesday, May 13, 9:00 AM PDT

• Information Economics and Stochastic Digital Twins (Steve Roemerman): Wednesday May 27, 10:00 AM PDT

• Using Value of Information to Decompose Systemic System Integration Schedule Risks (Brian Asti & Dan Harmeyer): Thursday June 4, 10:00 AM PDT

Thursday April 30, 10:00 AM PDT

Transitioning to the Digital Factory at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics

The industrial internet of things (IIoT) is transforming the manufacturing landscape. Lockheed Martin Aeronautics is harnessing this revolution by connecting machine assets to sensors to capture, store, and analyze critical operational detail on the F-35 production line that will enable edge analytics, condition-based maintenance, and predictive modeling. Learn how Lockheed Martin Aeronautics is securely capturing machine data and streaming this information into a data lake. We'll also take a deep-dive into an LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) recursive neural network model that we’ve implemented for automated anomaly detection in the time-series data.

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Wednesday, May 13, 9:00 AM PDT

How Much is Someone Else’s Help Worth? Exploring Why the Value of Information Can Be a CIO’s Best Friend When Making Big Decisions

When should a Chief Information Officer (CIO) reach out and bring in an outside consultant for help? Should he/she be willing to pay that consultant $100k for an assessment? How about $250k? Is it worth that much? Is there a way to determine that? Yes, there is a way; by using the Value of Information, a fundamental element of decision analysis. When uncertainty is high in a business decision, and the internal resources can't reduce that uncertainty themselves, an assessment from outside experts can help reduce that uncertainty to improve the odds of making the right decision. In this talk, I will walk the audience through a common decision that CIOs face and how the VOI can be used in a decision model to improve the potential outcomes.

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Wednesday May 27, 10:00 AM PDT

Information Economics and Stochastic Digital Twins

Many digital twin applications require information economics. This can be caused by data transport costs, and often is caused by the costs of sensors and sensor installations. This presentation discusses different types of Digital Twins. It uses for an illustration the problem of improving the availability of the F-18 aircraft, lowering the cost of sustainment, and improving aircraft safety by use of stochastic digital twins predicting the remaining useful life of dangerous energetic components (e.g., ejection seat rockets). Adding sensors, cables and processing to critical safety items (e.g., ejection seats) is time consuming and expensive. A key aspect of this successful digital twin project was to aggressively apply the principles of information economics. A second aspect of the project was to embrace the uncertainty imposed by data parsimony, and employ stochastic methods in the twin design.

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Thursday June 4, 10:00 AM PDT

Using Value of Information to Decompose Systemic System Integration Schedule Risks

Successful systems integration depends upon a tightly choreographed sequence of operations performing their roles correctly. Design, Procure, Build, Test, and Deliver stages must all be completed to schedule. There are multiple, linked, hierarchical dependencies, and any delays can propagate through the downstream stages. Conventional wisdom within the organization held that certain functions were more likely to cause delays than others.  Using the concept of a Stochastic Information Packet (SIP) to incorporate uncertainty, our Division team built a simulator for an entire product line moving through integration. We further applied the Value of Information to understand where we needed to reduce uncertainty.  Accordingly, we identified new ways to measure performance within stages that thus far had escaped scrutiny because they were difficult to measure. These tools enabled us to identify the biggest opportunities for improving performance. Needless to say, our biggest opportunities exist in places different from what conventional wisdom held. We’re now working with stakeholders to address those performance gaps. 

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