About

Knowledge Based Systems, Inc. (KBSI) is a dynamic engineering and systems analysis, consulting, and systems/software development company.  Our history reflects our capability and determination to complete initiatives on schedule, within budget, and with high quality results.

Since its founding in 1988, KBSI has established a reputation for excellence in turning research results into innovative commercial technologies.  KBSI has been awarded numerous major research and development contracts.  Our professionals have a wealth of education and expertise in the areas of mechanical, industrial, electrical, aeronautical and manufacturing engineering, as well as computer science, management science, and artificial intelligence.  KBSI is proud to have multiple professional engineers on staff.

KBSI’s professionals strive to:

• Lead the industry in technology development through advanced scientific research.
• Convert research results into next generation products that benefit our clients.
• Use our experience and expertise in systems/software development, design, and process improvement strategies to generate cost-effective results for our clients.

KBSI transitions innovative research and technology into successful cutting edge solutions and software for government and commercial clients worldwide in the following areas of expertise.

3-D Mod­el­ing & Solid Mod­el­ing Asset Man­age­ment Con­trol Sys­tems Cost Mod­el­ing & Ana­lysis Cyber Se­cur­ity & Threat De­tec­tion Data Min­ing, Know­ledge Dis­cov­ery, Fore­cast­ing De­cision Sup­port Sys­tems/De­cision Mak­ing En­ter­prise Ar­chi­tec­ture Design Health In­form­at­ics In­form­a­tion Data Mod­el­ing Know­ledge Man­age­ment

Multi-sensor In­teg­ra­tion & Design Plan­ning & Schedul­ing Pro­cess Ana­lysis & Design Pro­duc­tion Man­age­ment Se­mantic Tech­no­lo­gies/On­to­lo­gies Sim­u­la­tion Mod­el­ing & Anaylsis Sim­u­la­tion-based Train­ing Sys­tems In­teg­ra­tion Data Visu­al­iz­a­tion & Dis­play

At KBSI, our customer-centered approach ensures that we not only understand the challenges faced by our clients but that, as partners, we work together to design and implement the right solutions to their needs and that together we develop the capabilities for continually advancing their enterprise in the future.

SBIR contract with Johnson Space Center

KBSI Facilities

Knowledge Based Systems, Inc.’s corporate and business offices, research and development center, and marketing and sales operations are located in College Station, Texas.  Other locations include an Oklahoma City, Oklahoma office that supports consulting, training, and software tools primarily to support the Tinker Air Force Base Air Logistics Center and local manufacturing industries and an office in Dayton, OH that supports ongoing efforts at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center.

KBSI maintains a state-of-the-art general purpose computing facility, including networked workstations, internet services, and data warehouses.  All of the resources in the general-purpose network are linked via ethernet.  KBSI’s technical and business operations are integrated through state-of-the-art local area networks (LANs) and an Internet-based wide area network connected by secure virtual private networks (VPNs).  In addition to using the LAN for general communication, KBSI uses the network as a hardware and software resource for researching the theories and applications of information integrated systems environments.  KBSI’s internet connections also enable international electronic communication and coordination of corporate activities.

KBSI Successes

KBSI was awarded a Phase II NSF SBIR grant to develop a knowledge-based simulation model design environment.  This research investigated the use of qualitative methods to support the development of simulation model specifications starting from IDEF3 process descriptions.  Much of the insights and architectural designs developed in the Phase I project were quickly transitioned in the first few months of Phase II to a commercial product, the PROSIM^® application.  There are currently over 3,000-fielded PROSIM^® units.  KBSI’s current customers include a large number of U.S. government agencies and military installations using PROSIM^® to support lean, process re-engineering, and DoDAF architecture modeling.

The Army-funded GERMAT™ SBIR project developed decision aids for the automated design and generation of intelligent information processing agents.  Specifically, the project automates the designing of hybrid neural net/fuzzy logic models from a domain experts/end users description of a problem situation and a set of domain data.  A key product of this effort is the Generalized Event Representation Modeling and Analysis Tool (GERMAT™) software that automatically generates trained neural network architectures and Fuzzy Associative Memories (FAMs) starting from a structured description of a problem situation.  The GERMAT™ software was successfully commercialized at the end of the Phase I effort as the Intelligent Cash Forecaster™ software for banking and financial applications.  The GERMAT™ software was given an Army Phase II success award, and the technology was subsequently utilized in projects at the Corpus Christi Army Depot, specifically the Predictive and Preventative Expert System (PPMES™).  The successful implementation of PPMES™ within provided CCAD with extended capabilities for predicting and managing probable equipment failures.

KBSI was also awarded a Phase II SBIR contract by the Air Force entitled Sustainment Principles and Technologies for Aircraft Depot Maintenance (S-Physics). The Sustainment Physics (S-Physics) effort developed, extended, and validated guiding principles and practices for aircraft sustainment, a by-product of which was a detailed characterization of the fundamental differences between the production manufacturing and the sustainment domains.  These efforts fueled the development of advanced process and supporting information system requirements that address sustainment domain needs, resulting in the definition of a closed-loop, high velocity, constraint-based planning and scheduling infrastructure that enables significantly higher levels of asset and status visibility, coordination support, shop floor knowledge capture, and rapid rescheduling capability.  This innovative technology was leveraged to win a three-year Air Force contract, Lean Value Chain (LVC), that supported the analysis of critical part management and parts procurement at the U.S. Army’s CCAD and the USAF’s Tinker AFB.  KBSI’s work on LVC included the implementation of technologies and process improvements in support of critical part anticipation, solution presentation, and solution management oversight.  In addition, the U.S. Army awarded KBSI a five-year IDIQ contract (currently ongoing) for the application of S-Physics technologies to the Corpus Christi Army Depot.  Three powerful software tools were developed as a result of the S-Physics project in association with workload planning and shop floor scheduling methods and technologies:  the Workload Project Planner tool, the Workload Transition Testbed (WTT™) tool, and the Workload Simulator (WorkSim^®) tool.  Air Logistics Centers, Army Maintenance Depots, Army Aviation Field Maintenance Units, and the NASA Space Shuttle Program have benefited from these tools.  The WorkSim^® tool was also implemented at Bender Shipbuilding & Repair in Mobile, Alabama.

KBSI was also awarded an Air Force (Tinker AFB) Phase II SBIR contract (and subsequent Enhancement) entitled XML/IDEF3-Based Training.  The XML/IDEF3 SBIR effort developed technology for rapidly capturing, integrating, customizing, storing, managing, and disseminating enterprise asset and process knowledge throughout the depot maintenance organization to support improvements in asset visibility, resource utilization, and production costs.  KBSI, using an aggressive technology insertion strategy, applied these innovations to key DoD and industry facilities for manufacturing, maintenance, and repair and to service industries such as banking, insurance, and healthcare. The ability to generate low-cost, high-quality training systems allowed these customers to realize improved productivity, quality, and cost savings.  Using technology from the XML/IDEF3 project, KBSI developed the RampMap^® tool that allows operations and maintenance personnel to manage and track work items, production assets, and resources.  The RampMap^® tool is currently the Air Force Command Standard System for visualizing and managing aircraft and GSE locations and moves at all Air Force ALCs.

KBSI was awarded a U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command Phase II SBIR contract entitled Hybrid Discovery Wizard (HDWizard™).  This project provided the U.S. Army with robust, hybridized approaches and methods for applying common sense reasoning techniques in Decision Support and Knowledge Management Systems, benefiting the Army’s critical parts supply management, military threat assessment, target/decoy recognition and discrimination, and military COA planning.  KBSI received a Phase II Plus on this project resulting in a technology transfer award for a U.S. Army Cargo PM (ASAALT/PEOAVN Cargo) four-phase project (CH47 Soldier Focused Logistics).  This PEO/AVN initiative supported the DoD short- and long-term strategic goals of reducing Army Total Life Cycle Sustainment costs and Operational Availability while improving efficiency and quality.

KBSI was awarded a U.S. Air Force Rome Lab Phase II SBIR project entitled Knowledge Discovery Wizard (KDWizard), which focused on designing, developing, and validating an adaptive framework for knowledge discovery that provides mechanisms for generating knowledge-discovery applications beginning with end-user specifications of decision objectives and sets of data sources.  KBSI, building upon the HDWizard™ and KDWizard technologies, was awarded an SBIR contract from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command entitled Adaptive Toolkit for the Discovery of Threats (ATDT).  The ATDT toolkit addresses the need for innovative Homeland Security technologies, providing mechanisms for rapidly and cost effectively discovering emerging threat situations by integrating intelligent knowledge discovery techniques with knowledge-based methods.  The ATDT toolkit also reduces the time and effort for converting distributed data to actionable decision information and threat prediction in dynamic and uncertain environments.

KBSI was also awarded an Army ARL SBIR project to develop a generalized maintenance modeling and simulation tool suite. The ATLAS™ suite provides a unified modeling and experimentation framework for capturing and applying subject matter expert knowledge to assessing current and future combat systems maintenance concepts, maintenance manpower and capacity planning, and soldier load/effectiveness using simulation, tradeoff analysis, data-mining analytics, and optimization.  The initial ATLAS™ suite was adapted by the Army Cargo (CH-47) Program Management Office as their key technology for Soldier Focused Logistics.  It has also been applied by the Army Utility (UH-60) Program Management Office as a field commander decision support system within their Health, Utilization, and Maintenance Management System (HUMS).  The ATLAS™ Go-to-War (GTW™) tool provides key decision impact assessment capabilities for Soldier Focused Logistics (SFL)-based management decision-making.  This tool provides the capability to assess alternative material provisioning options in terms of the resultant Go-To-War (GTW™) capability.

KBSI was awarded an OSD funded SBIR Phase II to design and develop the Blood Reserve Availability Assessment, Tracking, and Management System (BRAMS™).  The BRAMS™ technology supports blood data collection, inventory management, and advanced analytics to address supply chain issues in defense and civilian blood networks. The BRAMS™ effort successfully developed a web interface for collecting blood data and exporting that blood data to JMAR in the format specified by the JMAR Interface Control Document (ICD).  The BRAMS™ effort also implemented data integrity and access control mechanisms to ensure that the data entered is valid, clean, and not duplicated by other data sources.  The BRAMS™ tool used data mining and knowledge based analyses to develop proactive problem identification and resolution capabilities.  The BRAMS™ technology has been commercialized through an application with the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).  It provides the engine for the DHHS worldwide civilian and military blood tracking system.  The DHHS project has transitioned BRAMS™ blood data collection and analyses capabilities to blood collection, storage, and transfusion facilities.  KBSI is also in the process of setting up an additional BRAMS™ application to transition the BRAMS™ technology to the Bio-vigilance domain.  The resulting Bio-vigilance system will collect data about issues and incidences in blood collection and transfusion across the nation.  It will provide metrics, reports, analyses of trends and patterns in blood collection, and transfusion incidences.  In the next generation, this scope will be expanded to cover additional components including tissues and organs.

Not all commercialization is measured in terms of sales or revenue generation.  Under the Data Display Transformation Framework (DDTF) project with Edwards AFB, KBSI successfully pursued standardization of the Data Display Markup Language (DDML) with the Range Commanders Council.  DDML has been voted for acceptance into the IRIG 106 Chapter 9 standard.  As such, it represents the standard format for representing data displays across test ranges.  The adoption of this standard provides the avenue for the defense community to realize the benefits from the DDTF project.  As an example of these benefits, KBSI was able to install DDTF technologies at NAWS Pt. Mugu to aid in the migration from their legacy display system to the upcoming CDS system.  DDML-based translators are currently operational at Pt. Mugu, resulting in an estimated savings of 2500 man-hours versus manually converting all displays.  A phase III contract is currently being negotiated under which KBSI can continue supporting this effort in future evolutions of the CDS.