Mark S. Fox

Mark Stephen Fox (born 1952) is a Canadian computer scientist, Professor of Industrial Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Urban Systems Engineering at the University of Toronto, known for the development of Constraint Directed Scheduling in the 1980s and the TOVE Project to develop an ontological framework for enterprise modeling and enterprise integration in the 1990s.

Biography Fox received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1975, and his PhD in Computer Science from the Carnegie Mellon University in 1983 with the thesis "Constraint-directed search: a case-study of job-shop scheduling."

Fox started his academic career at Carnegie Mellon University as Associate Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, where he also headed the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Systems of The Robotics Institute. In 1991 he returned to the University of Toronto, where he was appointed Professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He is also Senior Fellow in the Global Cities Institute at the University of Toronto.

He is elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and elected fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advance Research. In the beginning of the 1990s it was initiated by Mark S. Fox and others at the University of Toronto . Initially the project had defined four goals:

provides a shared terminology for the enterprise that each agent can jointly understand and use, defines the meaning of each term (aka semantics) in a precise and as unambiguous manner as possible implements the semantics in a set of axioms that will enable TOVE to automatically deduce the answer to many "common sense" questions about the enterprise, and defines a symbology for depicting a term or the concept constructed thereof in a graphical context.

The TOVE framework wants to support reasoning about enterprises, and therefore "provides a characterisation of classes of enterprises by sets of assumptions over their processes, goals, and organization constraints." It has been further developed in the fields of concurrent engineering, supply chain management and business process re-engineering.

Publications Fox published some books and numerous articles on Artificial Intelligence, Scheduling, Ontologies, and Enterprise Modelling. A selection. Books: Mark S. Fox (1983). Constraint-directed search: a case-study of job-shop scheduling. Carnegie-Mellon University Peter Bernus and Mark S. Fox eds. (2005). Knowledge sharing in the integrated enterprise : interoperability strategies for the enterprise architect. Peter Bernus, Guy Doumeingts, Mark S. Fox (2010). Enterprise Architecture, Integration and Interoperability

Articles, a selection 1984. "ISIS—a knowledge‐based system for factory scheduling". With S.F. Smith in: Expert systems 1 (1), p. 25-49 1995. "Methodology for the design and evaluation of ontologies". With M. Grüingger in: IJCAI-95 Workshop on basic ontological issues in knowledge sharing, Montreal. 1998. "Enterprise Modeling". With M. Gruninger. In: AI magazine. 19 (3), p. 109 2000. "Agent-oriented supply-chain management" With M. Barbuceanu and R. Teigen in: International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems 12 (2-3), p. 165-188