In the past days, the Cefriel team of the PERKS project organised two interactive online hands-on sessions, each lasting two hours, involving external stakeholders to test and validate our solutions in realistic scenarios. Around a dozen participants from both academia and industry joined the sessions, each bringing their own use cases and domain-specific needs, resulting in a rich and diverse testing environment.
The use cases covered a wide spectrum of procedural knowledge, ranging from industrial and operational scenarios – such as wind energy workflows, software release processes, digital twin deployment, urban mobility planning, and last-mile delivery coordination – to more knowledge-intensive and domain-specific cases, including knowledge elicitation techniques, healthcare monitoring, and food preparation processes. This diversity made it possible to explore how PERKS solutions can adapt to very different contexts and levels of complexity.
During the sessions, participants were guided through the creation of procedures using PERKS tools, directly experiencing how procedural knowledge can be modelled, structured, and managed using a knowledge graph-based approach. Rather than passively observing demonstrations, they actively engaged in modelling their own scenarios, experimenting with the representation of steps, conditions, and execution logic.
This hands-on approach also surfaced important challenges and requirements. Participants highlighted open questions related to the modelling of complex conditions, the distinction between actions and processes, and the need to better capture dynamic changes or dependencies within procedures. On the tooling side, several comments pointed to the importance of adapting the user interface to specific domain contexts and user needs, for instance by tailoring representations and interactions to different types of users and scenarios.
At the end of the sessions, participants completed a short evaluation questionnaire and contributed to a collective feedback board. Overall, the feedback indicates a strong interest in PERKS and its potential applications. Participants recognised its value for capturing and sharing organisational knowledge and saw clear opportunities for applying it to their own contexts.
At the same time, some important conditions for adoption emerged. Integration with existing systems, data, and workflows was consistently highlighted as a key factor for real-world uptake. In addition, the ease of use of the tools and the learning curve – especially for domain experts without a strong technical background – remain important aspects to consider. These insights are largely aligned with challenges already identified within PERKS and actively addressed throughout the project, for instance through the development of domain-specific solutions and pilots, thus confirming and reinforcing the directions already taken within PERKS. Participants also highlighted the importance of combining PERKS with complementary technologies and execution tools to fully realise its business potential.
These hands-on sessions therefore provide valuable validation of the project’s design choices, while also helping to refine the exploitation paths of PERKS results. The feedback collected contributes to a clearer understanding of how the solutions can be positioned, integrated, and adopted beyond the project’s duration, supporting their transition into real-world applications across different domains.