Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in integration of semantics into the Semantic Web environment, whose goal is to access, relate and combine information from multiple sources. With regard to this tendency, our work studies a mechanism to model ORM schemas in the Description Logic language SHOINK (D), the underpinning of a Web ontology language. This mechanism meets the key feature required by ORM schemas (i.e. identification and functional dependency constraints). It can be applied to integrate information not only from systems described in ORM schemas but also from relational databases into the Semantic Web environment.

A novel method for semantics-based reconciliation of long-lived transactions in concurrent engineering environments is described. The reconciliation is a key element of recent optimistic replication technologies facing the challenges of diverging replicas, conflicts between concurrent operations and disturbing consistency. The research presented addresses the general problem of semantically consistent and functionally meaningful reconciliation and enables significant simplification and formalization of its solution. The advantages of the method are strong guarantees of semantic consistency of the convergent representation, capabilities to use it in autonomous and user interactive modes as well as avoidance of combinatorial explosion peculiar to many other methods. The particular application is presented to illustrate how the method can be effectively applied for collaborative software engineering in the scope of the emerging UML-driven methodology.

In the last 40 years, the development of Controlled Vocabularies (CVs), such as dictionaries, classifications, taxonomies, and of course the “appealing” ontologies, has been the focus of many research projects around the world targeting the Construction sector. Being involved in several pan-European initiatives, the authors of this paper show milestones on the path of evolution (what has happened so far), the current situation (where we are now) in terms of development and adoption of results, the main problems found regarding both development and adoption of the CVs, and finally, present some speculative and provocative ideas about the future of CVs in the European Construction sector.

Collaborative Engineering tasks are difficult to manage and involve a high amount of risk — as such, CE tasks generally involve only well-known pre-established relationships. Such collaborations are generally quite static and do not allow for dynamic reactions to changes in the environment. Furthermore, not all optimal resource providers can be utilised for the respective tasks as they are potentially unknown.

The TrustCoM project elaborated the means to create and manage Virtual Organisations in a trusted and secure manner integrating different providers on demand. However, TrustCoM focused more on the VO than on the participant. The BREIN project enhances the of such VO systems to support even providers with little business expertise and provide them with capabilities to optimise their performance.

This paper analyses the capabilities of current VO frameworks on the example of TrustCoM and identifies the gaps from the participant’s perspective. It then shows how BREIN addresses these gaps.

The original Cross Enterprises Grid Collaborative Designing System could not meet industrial demands on dynamic sharing of various and transient manufacturing resources and collaboration due to their inherent weakness. The concept of collaborative designing technology under the guidance of Grid theory based on the principle of facing to business users, supporting “Integration on Demands” and “Instantaneous Integration.” During application integrating process, Business-driven Grid technology breaks the barriers between computer experts, domain experts, business designers and business executants, and supports instantaneous integration. Unlike traditional network collaborative design technology, Resources is integrated instantly according to the directives of its business users, and thus comes the concept Grid Collaborative Designing. This paper analyzes the different between manufacturing and computing resources, gives the definition, connotation and the problem which Grid Collaborative Designing attempt to solve, discusses the differences and similarities between Grid Collaborative Designing and other related technologies, analyzes the limitation of traditional technology supporting cross-enterprise collaboration. At last an architecture of WSRF based OGSA is yielded, it encapsulate manufacturing resources into services using WSDL description, services mapping and deploying method, and the core research issues in Grid Collaborative Designing are submitted and the related technologies are summarized.

The control of the design process requires to take into account three narrowly overlapping dimensions relating to the product, as an object to be defined, the process, as a generator of this object and finally the organization. Within the framework of the work undertaken during the IPPOP project, an integrated model was proposed with a view to development of a prototype of software. We are interested here in the software tool which can be brought to the actors to manage design process by correlating the organization of the company and the definition of product development process with the structure of the design projects and the control of the real process. This tool is materialized by the development of the PEGASE software for which we present an application inspired of an industrial case study in SME.

Ant-based clustering due to its flexibility, stigmergic and self-organization has been applied in a variety areas from problems arising in commerce, to circuit design, and to text-mining, etc. A new ant-based clustering method named AMC algorithm has been presented in this paper. Firstly, an artificial ant movement(AM) model is presented; secondly, the new ant clustering algorithm has been constructed based on AM model. In this algorithm, each ant is treated as an agent to represent a data object, each ant has two states: resting state and moving state. The ant’s state is controlled by two predefined functions. By moving dynamically, the ants form different subgroups adaptively, and consequently the whole ant group dynamically self-organized into distinctive and independent subgroups within which highly similar ants are closely connected. This algorithm can be accelerated by the use of a global memory bank, increasing radius of perception and density-based ‘look ahead’ method for each agent. Experimental results show that the AMC algorithm is much superior to other ant clustering methods. It is adaptive, robust and efficient, and achieves high autonomy, simplicity and efficiency. It is suitable for solving high dimensional and complicated clustering problems.

The objective of the work presented is to enable different equipment manufacturers, especially SMEs, to provide new services to extend their products. Although a number of ICT solutions for product extension are available, they do not allow for an efficient collaboration within extended enterprise, taking into account different, dynamically changing collaboration patterns and different technical backgrounds of the actors to be involved. The research work presented is aimed at pushing the use of advanced service oriented architectures for Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) in industrial practice. The new CWE solution will include so-called core collaborative services, addressing application independent functionality to support collaboration and covering the common collaboration actions. The objective is to develop means/tools to efficiently engineer application services for product extensions. The tools which will either automatically update application services and/or allow users, non-IT experts, to generate/update application services by themselves, are investigated. The applications in specific industrial environments are presented.

In Brazil, the industry of agricultural machines and implements represents a A Japanese automotive manufacturer finally achieved the less than one year lead-time for product development of its new automotive that was released in 2005.

NOTE, a new automotive released from Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. in January 2005, was thrown into the market after 10 and a half months of product development period, which was the first achievement all over the world. (1) That means “super-shortened process” reduced the lead-time of new automotive development to the half which had needed more than 20 months. The Japanese automotive industry has achieved the less than one year period of “super-shortened process”, coming from “five-lot process” in 1980’s through “shortened process” in 1990’s as a result of its continuous efforts.(Fig.1) I have brought up the methodology called “Digital Collaboration Process Methodology” from the countermeasures which has contributed these 20 year process innovations.

The pursuit of health efficiency has become the aim of many stakeholders in their respective sector, because of the increasing demand for health care services and the rising expenses in the sector. However, the efficiency analysis is complex in systems, like the health system, where exist conceptual challenges, multiple objectives and great scope for error. One of the difficulties is the selection of prominent variables of the efficiency model, which represent the requirements of stakeholders. The Stakeholders’ Analysis is a technique used to evaluate different clusters of insterest in complex systems. Yet, its application for efficiency analysis in the health sector is still rare. This paper aims at using the stakeholders’ analysis as a support for the efficient health model and verify its advantages and restrictions.