Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

There is a definite trend for European SMEs to form “collaborative networks” based on core competencies to have a competitive advantage in the dynamic global market. This leads to the need of utilising electronic communication for which arrangements for a basic level of technological competence and IT infrastructure have to be established. Currently, the IT infrastructure of many SMEs is based on inappropriate tools, which cannot supports standardised communication within the network. The Tool-East initiative described in this paper is attempting to reduce the technological infrastructure hurdle by providing an open-source ERP/CRM platform to SME participants in the Tool-and-Die making industry. This will be done in the hope that SMEs in this sector will standardise their business process annotation so that they will be able to exchange business documents with each other electronically.

This paper presents a methodology dedicated to the specification of collaborative processes. The successful implementation of methodology requires information about partners and collaboration that takes place in network as well as a reference framework. Information is used to characterize collaborative behavior of partners while cartography contributes to describing the field of collaborative processes. To obtain this information, we apply two approaches: 1) direct gathering information from partners by analyzing their requirements in order to understand their expectation on collaboration and 2) extracting observable information from our “6naps” collaborative platform in order to understand how partners have been collaborating. Cartography will then use this information to propose a specific BPMN collaborative process dedicated to the collaborative context.

For supporting process interconnection, on top of an existing open-source Business Process Management (BPM) environment oriented to Web Services (modeling module and execution engine, BPEL - Business Process Execution Language - compatible), this paper will propose a support to task-oriented, interactive decisional activities to be performed by CNO (Collaborative Networked Organizations) Actors. At the current status of achievements no standards neither existing solutions are able to provide such feature. These services aim at providing an innovative modeling and execution environments able to manage complex and compound services made of automatic and manual activities.

Small Internet Service Providers (ISPs) face many challenges in the world today. One solution for survival is to collaborate in a virtual cluster providing an attractive range of services that can be rapidly composed and deployed. An efficient software infrastructure is required to support such a cluster. The VISP software platform is designed for workflow technologies and will allow the cluster to model, specify, deploy and execute workflows that support the operation of the cluster and the provision of the tailored ISP services that it is offering to customers.

Similarly to the high-end market segment, a large number of ERP installations in the small and medium market segments also fails or results in time and cost overruns. To overcome those difficulties, a partnership-based e-business model amongst value chain actors is proposed. This model is supported by a platform, which engages and involves local actors in flexible multinational e-collaborations (forming European clusters in the ERP industry), in order to expand and broaden their activities. The envisaged outcome is to improve response times, low cost operations, flexibility towards clients, and provision of high-quality services tailored at end customers, facilitating the whole value chain to act as a single business entity (Virtual Organization).

We present a conceptual framework enabling to manage broad set of activities supported by multi-module software application for construction project management. The proposed structure is based on a common building information model (the industry standard IFC Model — ISO PAS 16739), the ISO 9001:2000 Quality Management System, for high-level process specification, and an integrated software infrastructure encompassing the product and process information exchange among the CAD-ERP and Scheduling Systems that support IFC. In this context, we developed Construction Management Phases for Software Interoperability, Organizational and IT Management Processes with using of ARIS methodology in order to implement IFC views. Based on this, we outline a web-based environment enabling to plug in all component tools via a common client, providing a coherent GUI.

In fast changing markets, dynamic collaboration ability involves establishing and “enacting” business relationships on the fly in an adaptive way. Such dynamic organization relies on interoperable and agile IT solutions. A contemporary approach for addressing these critical issues is the Service Oriented Architecture which can be introduced to implement opened and flexible information system. Accordingly, collaborative processes can be implemented as a chain of services resulting of a service composition process. Nevertheless, combining “directly” elementary IT services from different enterprises may lack of security (as the different enterprises can get information of the partner IS organization) and leads to highly complex system due to the IT service granularity. To overcome these limits, we have developed a service oriented enterprise model which transforms enterprise structure as a set of well defined Virtual Service. Virtual Services are used to orchestrate more elementary IT services and are combined together to form the service chain according to different policies. As contractual relationships between enterprises are concerned, a particular attention must be paid on the service level agreements to support an end to end convenient quality of service level. That is why, we propose to couple the Virtual Service description to a dynamic service level management system, orchestrated thanks to elementary agents.

The FUSION approach proposes both a conceptual framework and a system architecture that supports the composition of business processes using semantically annotated web services as building blocks. Results will be validated by supporting collaborative commercial proof-of-concept pilots. The FUSION approach will facilitate trans-national pilot cases having operations spanning the enlarged Europe, in particular: integration of transactions of a franchising firm, provision of career and human resource management services, collaboration of companies in a chain of schools of foreign languages. The paper provides an overview on the FUSION approach and illustrates how it can be applied on one of the pilot cases.

If we try to increase the level of automation in Business-to-Business (B2B) Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) scenarios, we confront challenges related to the resolution of data heterogeneities, service discovery and process composition. In this paper, we propose the Enterprise Interoperability Ontology (ENIO) that provides a shared, common understanding of data, services and processes within B2B integration scenarios. ENIO consists of an Upper Enterprise Interoperability Ontology (Upper ENIO), which is based on the DOLCE-SUMO alignment, with extensions called facets that cover several dimensions of the EAI domain. Each facet contains a relative meta-model that utilizes widely adopted standards. Finally, we demonstrate the utilization of ENIO in a real-world B2B scenario across a franchisor-franchisees collaborative value network.

Service-oriented computing is being adopted at an unprecedented rate, making the effectiveness of automated service discovery an increasingly important challenge. UDDI has emerged as a de facto industry standard and fundamental building block within SOA infrastructures. Nevertheless, conventional UDDI registries lack means to provide unambiguous, semantically rich representations of Web service capabilities, and the logic inference power required for facilitating automated service discovery. To overcome this important limitation, a number of approaches have been proposed towards augmenting Web service discovery with semantics. This paper discusses the benefits of semantically extending Web service descriptions and UDDI registries, and presents an ovennew of the approach put forward in project FUSION, towards semanticallyenhanced publication and discovery of services based on SAWSDL.