Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The use of IT solutions to support preparedness, response and recovery process has been envisioned as a possible way to improve the support for collaboration among the actors participating in mobile teams operating under constrained scenarios. Software applications supporting mobility have typically been conceived as functional extensions of centralized enterprise systems hosted on corporate servers. However, in this work, we focus on those mobile scenarios which go one step further in terms of interoperability requirements. This proposal aims to support the design, deployment and execution of ad-hoc collaborative business processes (workflows) in mobile networks, operating under constrained conditions and taking advantage of the Active Entity (AE) concept.

In recent years, many research projects related to cooperative and collaborative learning, as well as to learning communities based on these practices, have appeared. Numerous authors have recognised the innovative potential of collaborative networked learning, thus allowing for the growth of research in the field of collaboration connected with education and distance learning. In this paper, through a case study in the context of teacher training, we intend to show that collaborative environments actually work.

Partners in a collaborative network (CN) must interact and share their knowledge. This paper focuses on how the knowledge exchanged in these interactions can be easily and precisely reached by CN partners through an knowledge search framework. In order to improve the search precision, ontologies are used to add metadata (semantic annotations) to documents as well as to provide support for semantic queries. This paper is also concerned to the CN-related requirements not addressed by current information retrieval solutions, like annotations consistency maintenance, multiple ontologies management, ontology mappings management and security issues. The proposed framework is being developed under the scope of the ECOLEAD Project as part of a broader ICT infrastructure for supporting CNs.

The potential of a Virtual Breeding Environment (VBE) is the ability to design and to realise innovative, customized products by selecting and integrating for each order the worldwide leading partners. To exploit this potential, it is too late to configure the consortium and to search for partners on the basis of an already specified bill of material: Co-operation has already to take place with the product-idea, where possible contributions to the planned end- product must be identified while concretising the bill of material. Only in this way, the VBE is able to benefit from the expertise of all potential partners and to ensure that the expertise of the planned consortium is also synchronised with the needed capabilities for the requested end-product. In this paper, a method to support the building of consortia within the VBE on the basis of open product designs will be highlighted. The method starts from an end-product and collects possible contributions from potential collaboration partners.

Manufacturing leanness and agility are requirements of today’s manufacturing systems. Leanness call for a best fit of the manufacturing systems to products, therefore requiring product oriented manufacturing systems (POMS). Manufacturing agility can be achieved through easy systems reconfiguration to fit changing manufacturing requirements, which may mean dynamically configuring POMS. For this a suitable design system is required. Due to complexity of this design, and to the need for using suitable design methods, which may not be available locally, distributed sources of design services can be used. This paper presents and describes a prototype of a Distributed Design system for POMS based on a POMS design methodology and distributed suppliers of design services.

In order to be able to develop new products in a growing competitive environment the modern SMEs face a number of challenges: how best to design and innovate, how to understand constantly shifting customer needs, how to produce the products that meet those needs within tight budget and time constraints. Forming networks through co-operation between different companies (virtual organisations) has become an important business strategy for SMEs to respond to these challenges. The paper discusses new approaches to support cross-domain engineering and cross-enterprise collaborations with help of a modular framework, providing an integrated view of the relevant information. The result of the research carried out is a partly implemented framework for intercultural and cross-domain collaboration, based on the ontology-supported common understanding between the partners within a virtual organisation.

Scheduling is a multi-criteria decision problem in practice, where different schedulers may agree on key objectives but differ greatly on their relative importance in a particular situation. This kind of problems can be tackled with Collaborative approaches, which is the aim of this work. Collaboration supports work being undertaken by dispersed entities allowing the sharing of final results and also the process of obtaining them. This involve a range of activities such as information exchanging, knowledge sharing, argumentation, problem solving strategies, role playing, group mediation, individual training and conflict resolution, among other. Here, we propose a Collaborative framework with an Adaptive behaviour to be used in Manufacturing Scheduling Environments.

The main goal of the paper is to present what virtual organizations are developed to support public administration on municipality level. The virtual organizations are visible through their Web sites. Within the last few years, in Poland a unique opportunity for virtual organizations’ development has been created. The Parliamentary Act on Access to Public Information for citizens and business was adopted and the rapid development of the Web sites was noticed. This research has been done for Polish municipalities and the research method covers analysis of the contents of their Web sites. The last part of the paper covers answers the question if the internet is really utilized to improve the governance in the communities i.e. towns and villages.

Ubiquitous computing allows users to move between gateways to the information world in ways that are appropriate to their current physical as well as contextual settings. Advanced visualization techniques, including immersive displays and augmented reality, have the potential to address the collocation needs of mobile engineering teams, and enhance their collaboration effectively. The paper explores the use of innovative technologies for implementing a ubiquitous engineering service infrastructure. This comprises a wide range of value-added engineering services that make use of visualization technologies - combined with location tracking techniques - to convey user and context sensitive, semantically enriched, high dimensional multimedia contents.

This paper presents the key features of an engineering methodology dedicated to Organisation Networks. This methodology constitutes one of the elements of a full engineering framework developed through a PhD research thesis. The authors mainly focus hereafter on specifying the “design” and “preliminary engineering” activities of the engineering procedure. The methodology is illustrated on a case study from the sector of metallurgical industry.