Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

A growing number of collaborative networked organizations can be founded in industry, services, and research. However. the lack of a reference model that could synthesize and formulize the base concepts, principles, and recommended practices, is an obstacle for an easier and more consistent development of the area. Therefore a reference modeling approach is proposed considering multiple modeling perspectives. Examples are given and steps for further research are identified. Establishing a reference model in this area is a long term endeavor; this contribution is aimed as just a step in this process.

Networked electronic displays provide unique and effective capabilities for businesses and industries to communicate with their consumers. Today there are many solutions for static distribution of media-contents. However; delivering dynamic media-contents remains a major challenge. The overall goal of this work is to provide an intelligent media-content distribution, by which business intelligence is utilized to strengthen the business-customer relationships and increase profitability. This paper proposes a multi-agent approach to model the dynamic scheduling problem in media-content distribution. The proposed approach is validated through a prototype implementation.

With the development of web services related technologies, more and more enterprises adopt web services to encapsulate their business systems to be published on Internet. Due to the different semantic of the web services, it brings much difficulty to implement the dynamic cooperation of the cross- enterprise services efficiently. This paper introduces a service composability model to support the dynamic cooperation of cross-enterprise services by utilizing the semantic rules of the internal composability. The WSDL descriptions of the web services are extended with semantic capability, which enable the cross-enterprise services to be composed and cooperated automatically according to the synthetic comparison of the semantic features. Furthermore, a policy driven negotiation process is also proposed to enable the cooperation of cross-enterprise services to achieve win-win.

One of the issues in development and implementation of Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a formal theory, or formal theories, Of VE. There are serious problems concerning VE, formal theory(ies) development, Besides the ones which are commonly known and easily perceived, one of the biggest problems is a general misunderstanding about formalisms and formal theories (FTs) that occurs too often, substituting the formal theory by the formalism. The paper clarifies in an informal way the differences and some implications between formal theory and formalisms, expecting that it will contribute to a better perception of the problem as well as to the directions and approaches concerning VE formal theory development.

Enterprise collaboration typically occurs in the context of a process. Therefore, in order to support collaboration, there is a need to establish a framework able to handle a diversity of collaborative processes with different computational and communication requirements. This paper discusses the need for such framework, points out key requirements and proposes a strategy for a supporting technological infrastructure. Processes are seen as the central modeling entity in this framework. Portability of process definitions among different technological bindings is also a considered issue.

This paper presents an innovative approach in supporting the operation of complex equipment. The concept was developed in the context of the KoBaS project (Knowledge Based Customized Services for Traditional Manufacturing Sectors Provided by a Network of High Tech SME’s) whose main objectives are the development of new knowledge based tools for an intelligent use and management Of more sophisticated manufacturing machines; and the creation of an innovative extended network of high-tech SMEs for use, customize, support and make business out of the new development tools. As a concrete example the paper presents a KoBaS solution based on the machine Maintenance. This solution allows one to know the machine condition, to detect and diagnose machine failures, to manage ordinary and extraordinary maintenance plans and maintenance work orders and to provide training support for maintenance interventions.

Product assembly design is a complex activity possible involving collaboration between different designers geographically dispersed. This paper puts forward some significant methodologies and technologies for distributed assembly and presents a collaboration architecture that manages to support working in both synchronous and asynchronous ways. Meanwhile, we adopt a three-level conflicts detection scheme to avoid conflicts effectively and a data streaming technology based on C/P (command/parameter) to realize the real-time design. Based on the technologies mentioned above, a design system that supports real-time collaborative assembly is developed and we validate it by assembling a mechanical press across network collaboratively.

This article presents an integrated approach to reaching, a robust decision in a full-scale multi-attribute decision problem inspired from a real-word case. The Hypothetical Equivalents and In-Equivalents Method (HELM) is first validated using the full-scale decision problem. The major drawbacks of the HEIM have been identified. In an attempt to eliminate the drawbacks of the HEIM, the Game Relative Importance Method (GRIM) is integrated into the method for a robust solution. The results obtained from the application of this integrated approach to the real-life decision problem have been presented. We conclude that the new approach presented yields good and efficient solutions with less computational time in comparison to applying only the HEIM.

This paper presents some results of our recent investigation on how to address changes in manufacturing environments. The results presented here are based on our recent visits to manufacturing plants (in order to understand current industria practice) and a comprehensive literature review. It has become apparent that agents and multi-agents based technologies have the power and flexibility to deal with the shop dynamics. This paper also discusses research opportunities and challenges in this area, presents our recent research work in developing agent-based technologies to streamline and coordinate design and production activities within a manufacturing enterprise, and between the enterprise and its suppliers.

This paper presents the continuous work on a previous project on vision-based hand interaction design. The original work developed a vision-based approach of bare-hand-based posture recognition and motion tracking. This paper further investigates its application in virtual assembly. The accuracy, and robustness of the developed approach enable product engineers to perform assembly operations while manipulating virtual objects directly in virtual environments with bare hands. The direct human involvement creates a user- defined assembly sequence, which contains the human knowledge Of mechanical assembly. By extracting the precedence relationship of machinery parts, the system becomes capable of generating alternative assembly sequences for robot reprogramming. Operation of the presented approach a illustrated and analyzed with experiments.