Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In this paper, we describe the design and development of a simulation-agent interface for real-time distributed control system benchmarking. This work is motivated by the need to test the feasibility of extending agent-based system to the physical device level in manufacturing and other industrial automation systems. Our work focuses on the development of hybrid physical/simulation environment that can be used to perform tests at both the physical device level, as well as the planning and scheduling level of control. As part of this work, we have extended the proxy design pattern for this application. This paper focuses on the resulting software design pattern for distributed control system benchmarking and provides examples of its use in our hybrid physical/simulation environment.

The paper addresses the issues of industrial application integration in business processes using agent enabled Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). in this paper, we show that agent-enabled SOA can play an important role for service integration. Our architecture combines Web services and intelligent agent technologies orchestrated by a business process management system. This architecture is grounded in a semantic service integration model and supported by the CAPNET agent platform tools. We describe the architecture and illustrate the approach by an industrial application scenario from petroleum wells’ drilling.

This paper addresses the design and implementation of a multiagent based control architecture to support modular reconfigurable production systems. The requirements for plugability of modules (manufacturing components) and product changes were considered and tested against an educational platform based of fischertechnik, which resembles a production system composed of several workstations connected by a crane and conveyors.

Extended and networked enterprises distribute the design of products, planning of the production process, and manufacturing regionally if not globally. The usual face-to-face work is going to be replaced, at least partly, if not totally, by computer mediated collaboration. Awaited are reduced problems of resolution cycle time, increasing productivity and agility, and reduced travel to remote sites, enabling more timely and effective interactions, faster design iterations, and improved resource management. Mixed reality based work environments support distributed collaborative work between remote sites. An application for solving a control task collaboratively is described.

The Virtual Enterprise model is an emerging approach to answer to the new requirements of the business environment, relying on dynamically reconfigurable partnerships, with extremely high performances, strongly time- oriented while highly focused on cost and quality, in permanent alignment with the market, and strongly supported by information and communication technology, dictating a paradigm shift face to the traditional organizational models. Reconfiguration dynamics is a main characteristic of this model, which claims for supporting environments implementing a set of functionalities. Some existing technologies can partially support this organizational model, but the reconfiguration dynamics can only by assured by an environment able to managing, controlling and enabling networking and dynamics in virtual enterprise creation/ reconfiguration. The Market of Resources is an environment coping with these requirements. The paper presents and discusses its validity in terms of improving the potential inter-organizational reconfiguration dynamics.

Business Networking is an innovative business paradigm that can help companies to remain competitive in the market. Nevertheless, its practical implementation is very complicated because of the several dimensions that it involves. There are several cases of business network cooperation; however, each one has its particular characteristics that determine its success. This paper addresses the domain of collaborative networks, established by SME in textile industry, in the scope of an academic research project based on a case study research methodology and centered on a large industrial pole in Brasil.

A virtual breeding environment (IVBE) is an association of enterprises willing to collaborate in a network to provide goods or services, described by business processes. Two major components of the VBE are an e-catalogue of competences and a repository of business process templates specifying the necessary roles that enterprises should play to participate in collaboration networks for providing a specific service. Process templates should be concretised for particular needs and enterprise capabilities. Which enterprises shall participate in and the committed resources have to be decided at moment of template concretisation: once identified the process template for a business opportunity differnt enterprises could collaborate. Specific responsibilities are assigned to enterprises using information from semantically defined capabilities stored in the VBE’s e-catalogue. This paper describes an approach for template process definition and concretisation in a simple way; thus enterprises could be assigned to participate in a business process when their capabilities and availability of resources are found to be the most appropriate. The capabilities of a tool implemented to perform process template concretization is described.

Joining collaborations and maintaining relationships within these has become a major concern for managers in industrial companies. This change to a large extent arises due to the globalisation of markets and the ongoing specialisation of companies, fostered by the possibilities of information technology and data communication. However, such a structural change requires adaptations by companies to fit the characteristics of industrial networks. In particular; the increasing complexity of collaborations in highly dynamic environments oftentimes is underestimated. This paper shows an approach to cope with this increasing complexity by the application of principles of complex systems from various sciences to collaborative enterprise networks regarded as socio-technical systems, considering the tool and die industry as example.

Nowadays a sophisticated match making mechanism is necessarily for appropriate collations in virtual enterprise (VE). Virtual market based match making operation enables effective partner search in terms of products allocation by distributing the scheduled resources according to the market prices, which define common scale of value across the various products. We formulate the VE match making model as discrete resource allocation problem, and propose a complex market-oriented programming framework based on the economics of complex systems, Three types of heterogeneous agents are defined in the complex virtual market. It is described that their interactions with micro behaviour emerge a macro order Of the virtual market, and the clearing price dynamism can be analysed in economic terms. The applicability of the framework into resource allocation problem for VE is also discussed.

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is a concept that aims at integrating the various processes and stages involved during a typical product lifecycle for the extended enterprise. PLM technologies endeavor to offer a powerful collaborative platform to support distributed product development. In order to maintain the integrity of product definition data throughout the life of the product, and to manage business processes used to create, manage, disseminate, share and use the information, this paper first explores the connotations of PLM; then presents a conceptual modeling framework including a four-tier-architecture; furthermore models product lifecycle in the stages of requirement analysis, conceptual design, engineering design, manufacturing and services, and finally proposes an integration framework to support interoperability of distributed product data sources.