Cross-enterprise Collaboration Research Articles

Function block-enabled operation planning and machine control in Cloud-DPP

Today, due to shop-floor uncertainties and widespread cross-enterprise collaborations, manufacturing systems of enterprises are increasingly demanded to be agile, adaptive, flexible and interoperable. Process planning systems are mission-critical constituent components of manufacturing systems in machining job shops of small and medium-sized enterprises in the machining and metal cutting sector. Cloud-based adaptive distributed process planning, which includes global supervisory planning in the cloud and local operation planning based on function block and cloud technologies, provides an effective approach for enhancing agility, adaptability, flexibility and interoperability of manufacturing systems.

The Empirical Evaluation of Semantic Alignment Quality Metrics for Vehicle Domain Component Frameworks Interface Ontologies

Semantic alignment of application software components’ ontologies represents a great interest in vehicle application domains that manipulate heterogeneous overlapping knowledge application frameworks. In the past few years, with the growth in the novel vehicle service requirements such as autonomous driving, V2X (Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication) and many others, automotive application software component models are becoming increasingly collaborative with other qualified cross-enterprise industrial partners to accomplish these complex service requirements. The most daunting impediment to this cross-enterprise collaboration is semantic interoperability. For efficient services collaboration through cross-enterprise semantic interoperability between the vehicle application frameworks’ software components, aligning the interface ontologies of these components by identifying the depth of semantic alignment relationships between the concepts of the interface ontologies is the major focus of this paper. In contrast to several existing ontology structural metrics, this work defines, evaluates and validates ontology metrics to measure the depth of semantic alignment between the vehicle domain software component frameworks’ interface ontological models. To emphasize the substantial role of semantic alignment of software component frameworks’ interface ontologies in semantic interoperability, a typical vehicle domain case study involving vehicle applications is considered for demonstration.

Manufacturing Services Scheduling With Supply–Demand Dual Dynamic Uncertainties Toward Industrial Internet Platforms

As a series of industrial Internet platforms have been launched, manufacturing facilities in the physical world, although distributed in different enterprises, are interconnected in the form of manufacturing services (MSs) in cyberspace. In this context, it makes possible for on-demand sharing of MSs as well as corresponding cross-enterprise collaboration. However, many dynamic uncertainties of both MSs and the submitted demands occur unpredictably, which seriously hinders the platforms' applications. To cope with the problem of MSs scheduling with supply-demand dual dynamic uncertainties, a three-stage approach based on an evolutionary hypernetwork model is proposed. In which, six of nine kinds of dynamic events and eighteen specific conditions are considered, and an event-condition-act mechanism is designed to guide local/global rescheduling if needed. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, as well as the potential of a platform employing the approach in response to different dynamic events in its application.

Scalable Hypernetwork-Based Manufacturing Services Supply Demand Matching Toward Industrial Internet Platforms

With the deeper application of sensor & cloud-based environment into manufacturing, deploying the industrial Internet platforms toward smart manufacturing has been more concerned. Based on the platforms, ubiquitous enterprises could participate in and support cross-enterprise collaboration, so that their distributed manufacturing facilities and capabilities could be shared and utilized in the form of manufacturing services (MSs). However, in order to achieve the successful application of the platforms, how to settle the supply demand matching (SDM) of the distributed manufacturing facilities and capabilities in the form of MSs, namely, MSs-SDM, becomes one of the most urgent problems to be solved. In addition, the trend of manufacturing socialization makes this problem much more scalable. In this context, this article aims to establish a set of hypernetwork-based models for the scalable MSs-SDM problem at first. An enterprises collaborative network is derived which is the projection of the underlying MSs-SDM situation to the upper-layer enterprises. Second, a method according to the evaluation on the cross-enterprise collaboration is proposed for this problem. In which, the created utilities, the rates of service invocation, and task allocation from both the global view of the overall network and the local view of each participated enterprise are evaluated. Finally, two steps of experiments introducing scalabilities illustrate the feasibility of the proposed models and the effectiveness of the derived method for MSs-SDM optimization, and further reveal five managerial implications to improve the operation and industrial practice of the platforms.

Enterprise Architecture for a Facilitated Transformation from a Linear to a Circular Economy

The circular economy is central to the agenda of responsible production and consumption with propositions for the conservation of natural resources and a broader understanding of the obligations of enterprises and product developers. The circular economy is challenging traditional operating models of enterprises due to the need to manage larger parts of the product life cycle and value chains. A linear economy will normally address a smaller part of the life cycle. The operating models of companies are supported with respect to information and technology with an enterprise architecture model. This article examines the necessary steps for analysing and designing the enterprise architecture model, aiming to facilitate the transformation of an enterprise from operating in a linear to operating in a circular economy model. The fundamentals and requirements of the circular economy enterprise are extracted to isolate the design requirements for the operating model, entailing cross-enterprise collaboration, traceability, and a broader value chain understanding. Furthermore, it conceptualizes enterprise architecture and its role and importance in connecting business strategies and operating technologies. This article develops an enterprise architecture framework, named the Circular Economy Enterprise Architecture Framework (CEEAF), which can form and support the effort of transitioning companies or be embedded into existing enterprise architecture frameworks. The CEEAF differs from traditional enterprise architecture frameworks by addressing the broader responsibility of the enterprise, the extended enterprise, the elimination of end-of-life perspectives and mind-sets, and the capabilities of the individual enterprise and its design activities.

Policy reconciliation for access control in dynamic cross-enterprise collaborations

ABSTRACTIn dynamic cross-enterprise collaborations, different enterprises form a – possibly temporary – business relationship. To integrate their business processes, enterprises may need to grant each other limited access to their information systems. Authentication and authorization are key to secure information handling. However, access control policies often rely on non-standardized attributes to describe the roles and permissions of their employees which convolutes cross-organizational authorization when business relationships evolve quickly. Our framework addresses the managerial overhead of continuous updates to access control policies for enterprise information systems to accommodate disparate attribute usage. By inferring attribute relationships, our framework facilitates attribute and policy reconciliation, and automatically aligns dynamic entitlements during the evaluation of authorization decisions. We validate our framework with a Industry 4.0 motivating scenario on networked production where such dynamic cross-enterprise collaborations are quintessential. The evaluation reveals the capabilities and performance of our framework, and illustrates the feasibility of liberating the security administrator from manually provisioning and aligning attributes, and verifying the consistency of access control policies for cross-enterprise collaborations.

A PageRank-based reputation model for personalised manufacturing service recommendation

ABSTRACTThe number of manufacturing services for cross-enterprise business collaborations is increasing rapidly because of the explosive growth of Web service technologies. This trend demands intelligent and robust models to address information overload in order to enable efficient discovery of manufacturing services. In this paper, we present a personalised manufacturing service recommendation approach, which combines a PageRank-based reputation model and a collaborative filtering technique in a unified framework for recommending the right manufacturing services to an active service user for supply chain deployment. The novel aspect of this research is adapting the PageRank algorithm to a network of service-oriented multi-echelon supply chain in order to determine both user reputation and service reputation. In addition, it explores the use of these methods in alleviating data sparsity and cold start problems that hinder traditional collaborative filtering techniques. A case study is conducted to validate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed approach in recommending the right manufacturing services to active service users.

Demand-based manufacturing service capability estimation of a manufacturing system in a social manufacturing environment

The exponential growth of cross-enterprise collaboration in recent years has facilitated the emergency of a new manufacturing mode called social manufacturing, wherein order winning hinges mostly on their customer and demand-oriented manufacturing service capability rather than the traditional factors such as relationships and distances. Therefore, a manufacturing service capability estimation model is proposed in this article, which comprises two sub-models, that is, a machining service capability (M-capability) model and a production service capability (P-capability) model. The former explains what kinds of manufacturing service a manufacturing system can provide, while the latter estimates how much manufacturing service the manufacturing system can produce in a certain time period. Besides, each of the two sub-models is considered from both single-socialized manufacturing resources and multi-socialized manufacturing resources’ manufacturing system perspectives. First, an ontology and Semantic Web–based model is established for estimating the M-capability of a single-socialized manufacturing resource manufacturing system and further extended to multiple socialized manufacturing resources manufacturing systems. Then, P-capability evaluation model based on rough set–based propagation neural network is proposed for a single-socialized manufacturing resource manufacturing system. Afterward, the results of rough set–based propagation neural network are further utilized as the inputs of the latter particle swarm optimization–based P-capability estimation model for multiple socialized manufacturing resources manufacturing systems. Finally, a typical case is fully studied to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed models.

An authorization model for cross-enterprise collaborations

In the modern enterprise world, collaboration has emerged as a standard of best business practice. In order to build competitive advantages and minimize inefficiencies, organizations nowadays pursuit strategic alliances with partners outside the comfort of familiar security zones, loosen their hierarchical structures, exploit edge competencies, and aggregate diverse and heterogeneous sources of information. Nevertheless, such techniques dictate the concentration, use, and circulation of corporate information and sensitive personal data and, thus, ignite severe information confidentiality and privacy concerns. Hence, the employment of the appropriate collaboration technology is not sufficient; potential lack of successful protection mechanisms limits the effectiveness of partnerships and denies the respective investments to reach their full potential. In this paper, an authorization framework toward the protection of sensitive resources in the context of cross-enterprise scenarios is presented. The proposed framework is founded on the utilization of a semantic information model, which integrates individual privacy preferences, organizational access control rules and information handling policies into the authorization determination procedure. Partners within the framework are organized in a bridged federated architecture in order to build a secure communication network, within which semantic and trust interoperability is guaranteed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Self-Organized P2P Approach to Manufacturing Service Discovery for Cross-Enterprise Collaboration

The combination of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture plays a promising role in distributed manufacturing environments in that the peer service can be used to facilitate the integration and discovery of distributed manufacturing resources and achieve communication and collaboration across distributed virtual enterprises. However, the large size, dynamic nature, and heterogeneous expression of distributed manufacturing resources bring forth a serious challenge in scalability and efficiency. This paper presents a self-organized P2P framework that supports scalable and efficient manufacturing service (MS) discovery for cross-enterprise collaboration by forming and maintaining autonomous enterprise peer groups (PG). Each enterprise exhibits as a peer that provides some sharable MSs that are represented comprehensively and formally with a generalized ontology. Each enterprise PG dynamically clusters a set of enterprise peers offering semantically similar MSs, and elects the most reputed peer through multicriteria trust evaluation as its core (i.e., super peer, SP). Then, a MS request can be first routed to the suitable SP and further to its leaf peer in a systematic way, thus supporting efficient service discovery. A prototype system is implemented on JXTA for real application and validated through an experimental case study.

Combining social network and collaborative filtering for personalised manufacturing service recommendation

Owing to the rapid proliferation of Web service technologies in cross-enterprise manufacturing collaborations, information overload is becoming a major barrier that hinders the effective discovery of the shared manufacturing services provided by collaborative partners for supply chain deployment. Thus, we aimed to identify a different approach for discovering manufacturing services by making personalised service recommendations that are suited to the specific needs of active service users based on usage data from previous retrievals made by past service users. The proposed approach combines social network and collaborative filtering techniques in a unified framework to predict the missing Quality of Service (QoS) values of manufacturing services for an active service user, thereby improving the effectiveness of personalised QoS-aware service recommendations. The social network explores the usage of preference and tagging relationships among service users and manufacturing services in making personalised recommendation, which alleviates the data sparsity and the cold start problems that hinder the traditional collaborative filtering techniques. A case study and experimental evaluation demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve the practicality and accuracy to personalised manufacturing service recommendations in a real application.

Ontology-based approaches for cross-enterprise collaboration: a literature review on semantic business process management

Based on an in-depth analysis of the existing approaches in applying semantic technologies to business process management (BPM) research in the perspective of cross-enterprise collaboration or so-called business-to-business integration, we analyse, discuss and compare methodologies, applications and best practices of the surveyed approaches with the proposed criteria. This article identifies various relevant research directions in semantic BPM (SBPM). Founded on the result of our investigation, we summarise the state of art of SBPM. We also address areas and directions for further research activities.

A New Framework for Mapping Business Domain Ontologies

In cross enterprise collaboration, business domains need to interoperate and collaborate to each other for receiving profits. To create an understanding of enterprises and the ways they do business, a starting point could be business models. The goal of business modeling is to create semantically representations of business domain concepts like transactions, processes, value chains. Business domain ontologies can be used as a reference model for concrete business models. Business domain ontology describes concepts, concept relations and axioms that are potentially relevant for business models. The three main business modeling ontologies are REA, the e-value ontology and the Business Model Ontology (BMO). In this paper, a mapping is proposed between these three well known business domain ontologies (REA, e-value and BMO). The proposed mapping helps business domains with different ontologies in a cross enterprise collaboration, to be understandable and interoperable, but it does not force each business domain to have a common vocabulary and a unique ontology in order to be interoperable to each other. General Terms Business domain ontology mapping.

Modeling and analyzing of an enterprise collaboration network supported by service-oriented manufacturing

Service-oriented manufacturing is a new manufacturing paradigm and it has appeared in large-scale enterprise clusters over the past few years. In this situation, the increasing service demands from production processes have led to more enterprise collaborations. And the more collaborations among different enterprises have led to the generation of a service-oriented enterprise collaboration network. The purpose of this article is to investigate the clustering characteristics of a service-oriented enterprise collaboration network through an integrating analytic hierarchy process and complex network theory. First, the concept of service-oriented manufacturing is introduced and a logical architecture for implementing the modeling and analyzing of a service-oriented enterprise collaboration network is put forward. Then, the authors establish a topology model of a service-oriented enterprise collaboration network and use an analytic hierarchy process method to estimate the network weights among different manufacturing or service enterprises. Next, service-oriented manufacturing blocks are illustrated and an improved genetic algorithm is adopted to find the optimal blocks. To verify the feasibility and rationality of the proposed method, finally, a case study is presented. It is expected that a reasonable decision of cross-enterprise collaborations and layout would be provided in the present study.

Manufacturing Deep Web Service Management: Exploring Semantic Web Technologies

Since the wide adoption of database and Web service technologies in cross-enterprise manufacturing collaboration, leveraging deep Web contents through service discovery has become one of the most advanced trends in the manufacturing field. However, the effective service discovery and knowledge retrieval from manufacturing deep Web services is still a critical issue because of the underlying intricate structures of deep Web pages. This motivates us to seek a different way to manage manufacturing deep Web services by semantically annotating them to reflect their hidden, dynamic, and heterogeneous contents. In this article, a novel ontology-based approach that uses semantic Web paradigm is proposed, and its implementation in real applications is validated.

Process Fragment Libraries for Easier and Faster Development of Process-based Applications

The term is recently gaining momentum in business process management research. We understand a process fragment as a connected and reusable process structure, which has relaxed completeness and consistency criteria compared to executable processes. We claim that process fragments allow for an easier and faster development of process- based applications. As evidence to this claim we present a process fragment concept and show a sample collection of concrete, real-world process fragments. We present advanced application scenarios for using such fragments in development of process-based applications. Process fragments are typically managed in a repository, forming a process fragment library. On top of a process fragment library from previous work, we discuss the potential impact of using process fragment libraries in cross-enterprise collaboration and application integration.

Battle of the Enterprise 2.0 – The Quiet Revolution in Software Industry

The evolution and development of “enterprise class” systems expect software to enable new business processes, cross-enterprise collaboration, and information discovery that was previously impossible or impractical with offline or legacy enterprise applications. Current trends are that businesses need to change rapidly to take advantage of emerging business models to integrate applications and functionality, both within the four walls of the enterprise and within the extended enterprise of suppliers, partners, and customers. Many technologies and models with a dramatic impact on the future of the industry have materialized: services-oriented architecture (SOA), grid computing, open source, software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing. Lately, the Web 2.0 concept has moved to its potential in the business world. We assist the Enterprise 2.0 emergence, a concept that we anticipate that will rebuild the profile of the software landscape.

SWMRD: a Semantic Web-based manufacturing resource discovery system for cross-enterprise collaboration

As supply chains are becoming ever more global and agile in the modern manufacturing era, enterprises are increasingly dependent upon the efficient and effective discovery of shared manufacturing resources provided by their partners, wherever they are. Enterprises are thus faced with increasing challenges caused by the technical difficulties and ontological issues in manufacturing interoperability and integration over heterogeneous computing platforms. This paper presents a prototype intelligent system SWMRD (Semantic Web-based manufacturing resource discovery) for distributed manufacturing collaboration across ubiquitous virtual enterprises. Ontology-based annotation to the distributed manufacturing resources via a new, multidisciplinary manufacturing ontology is proposed on the semantic web to convert resources into machine understandable knowledge, which is a prelude to the meaningful resource discovery for cross-enterprise multidisciplinary collaboration. An ontology-based multi-level knowledge retrieval model is devised to extend the traditional information retrieval approaches based on keyword search, with integrated capabilities of graph search, semantic search, fuzzy search and automated reasoning to realise the intelligent discovery of manufacturing resources, e.g. to facilitate more flexible, meaningful, accurate and automated resource discovery. A case study for intelligent discovery of manufacturing resources is used to demonstrate the practicality of the developed system.

AN APPROACH TO SUPPORT CROSS-DOMAIN ENGINEERING IN INTERCULTURAL VIRTUAL ORGANISATIONS

AbstractFor many enterprises recent significant challenges, such as: 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 are of crucial importance. Forming networks through co-operation between different companies (virtual organizations) has become an important business strategy for SMEs to respond to these challenges. The paper discusses new approaches to support intercultural and cross-enterprise collaborations using a modular framework, which provides an integrated view of the relevant information on a data level and allows on the fly integration of external systems.

Gird manufacturing: a new solution for cross-enterprise collaboration

Industry has put forward demands on cross enterprises collaboration including various resources sharing. In order to meet these demands, much has been done to realize cross-border collaboration. However, after analyzing the unique features of manufacturing resources and the limits of existing technologies like Internet, EC, ASP and Web-based design/manufacturing, which adopt many new Web technologies like Web mark-up languages, Web-based client–server programming tools and distributed object modeling methods, it is concluded that all these technologies could not meet industrial demands on dynamic sharing of various resources. Therefore grid manufacturing is put forward to meet these demands. According to the features of resources to be shared and the technologies to be used, grid manufacturing distinguishes itself from Web-based manufacturing by providing the transient services and by achieving the interoperability. The differences and relationship between grid manufacturing and grid computing are yielded. At last, a Web service-based architecture of grid manufacturing is proposed and the related technologies are summarized.