Professor Dov Dori

General Information

Dov Dori is Information and Systems Engineering Professor and Head of the Enterprise System Modeling Laboratory at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and Research Affiliate at the Engineering Systems Division, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he lectures on a regular basis. Between 1999-2001 and 2008-2009 he was Visiting Professor with the Engineering Systems Division, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Sloan Business School at MIT. His research interests include conceptual modeling of complex systems, systems architecture and design, and software and systems engineering. Prof. Dori has invented and developed Object-Process Methodology (OPM), presented in his 2002 book. He won the Technion Klein Research Award for OPM, the Hershel Rich Innovation Award for OPCAT, the OPM supporting software, and the Dudi Ben Aharon Research Award for Document Image Understanding. Prof. Dori has founded OPCAT Ltd., which develops an OPM modeling support environment. He initiated and headed the series of international conferences on Model-Based Systems Engineering held at Technion, Israel in 2007 and 2009, and at George Mason University, VA, in 2010. Prof. authored over 200 publications. He is Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition and Senior Member of IEEE and ACM and member of INCOSE.

Research Summary

Object-Process Methodology (OPM) is a generic system development approach that unifies structure, behavior and function within a single model. Processes in OPM are independent building blocks beside objects, which enable explicit dynamic modeling, intertwined with the object model. This unification paradigm of the static-structural-existential aspect with the dynamic-procedural-behavioral aspect in a single model is unique to OPM. Using a visual formalism of Object-Process Diagrams along with an equivalent natural Object-Process Language (OPL) textual specification provides OPM with a high expressive power. By integrating the structural and procedural system aspects and expressing them in analogous graphic and textual representations, OPM specifies formally, yet intuitively, systems in various domains and at all levels of complexity. The resulting specification explicitly states how processes generate, consume and affect objects by transforming them from one state to another.

OPM has been augmented by Mor Peleg in her Ph.D. thesis with temporal constraints to handle real-time systems. Arnon Sturm has done work to generate database schemata from OPL script. Iris Berger has developed a Java code generator from OPL script. Dagan Gilat is using OPM for discrete event systems simulation.

We are in the process of developing OPCAT - Object-Process CASE Tool, which is a software product that helps develop systems using OPM. An early version of OPCAT won the 1997 Hershel Rich Technion Innovation Award.

Machine Drawing Understanding System

Understanding technical documents is part of document image analysis, a developing field in the area of computer vision and pattern recognition. The research our group has carried out in this subject has concentrated on developing the Machine Drawing Understanding System (MDUS) which is ultimately aimed at reconstructing 3-dimensional objects described in drawings. Several algorithms for sparse-pixel primitive detection were developed and implemented, including recognition of bars, arcs, arrowheads and text. In an international contest held in 1997, MDUS was rated as the best performing systems in the domain of mechanical engineering drawings.

Content Based Image Retrieval

Supported by a grant from the Israeli Ministry of Science, this research project is aimed at indexing and retrieving images from an image base according to their semantic content by matching Object-Process Diagrams.

Current Research Projects

OPCAT - Object-Process CASE Tool: Development of a CASE tool to support the Object-Process Methodology (OPM)

World Wide AlbumContent-based image retrieval: retrieving images for an image database according to their semantic contents as expressed by an Object-Process Diagram (OPD)

Commercializing OPCAT: Founded in 2005, OPCAT, Inc., partially owned by Technion Research and Development Foundation (TRDF), is developing a commercial version of OPCAT, which is being used by a growing number of enterprises worldwide to model and develop highly complex systems