Suitable Enterprise Research Articles

Sharing semantics among enterprise information systems with contextual ontologies: theory and practice

The Enterprise Information System (EIS) manages enterprise business, applies strategic and economic decisions, and holds communication with partners. Shared semantics are necessary to leverage system engineering benefits such as reusability and interoperability. In the last decade, research on ontologies and contexts was driven separately as formal support for treating the semantics sharing problem. In this paper, we show how to pair-up contexts and ontologies as a formal background for reaching a suitable global enterprise environment. To promote contextual ontologies, we present how to exploit technically the proposed formalism through an architecture and a prototype called Enterprise Information System Contextual Ontologies.

A comprehensive framework for selecting an ERP system

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for combining objective data obtained from external professional reports and subjective data obtained from internal interviews with vendors to select a suitable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) project. A hierarchical attribute structure is proposed to evaluate ERP projects systematically. In addition, fuzzy set theory is used to aggregate the linguistic evaluation descriptions and weights. An actual example in Taiwan demonstrates the feasibility of applying the proposed framework.

An economic analysis of biomass gasification and power generation in China

With vast territory and abundant biomass resources China appears to have suitable conditions to develop biomass utilization technologies. As an important decentralized power technology, biomass gasification and power generation (BGPG) has a potential market in making use of biomass wastes. In spite of the relatively high cost for controlling secondary pollution by wastewater, BGPG is economically feasible and can give a financial return owing to the low price of biomass wastes and insufficient power supply at present in some regions of China. In this work, experimental data from 1 MW-scale circulating fluidized bed (CFB) BGPG plants constructed recently in China were analyzed; and it was found that the unit capital cost of BGPG is only 60–70% of coal power station and its operation cost is much lower than that of conventional power plants. However, due to the relatively low efficiency of small-scale plant, the current BGPG technology will lose its economic attraction when its capacity is smaller than 160 kW or the price of biomass is higher than 200 Yuan RMB/ton. The development of medium-scale BGPG plants, with capacity ranging from 1000 to 5000 kW, is recommended; as is the demonstration of BGPG technology in suitable enterprises (e.g. rice mill and timber mill) in developing countries where large amounts of biomass wastes are available so that biomass collection and transportation can be avoided and the operation cost can be lowered.

Bottom-up planning approaches in enterprise modelling—the need and the state of the art

Increasing market demands for products in combination with technological progress led to the development of new manufacturing paradigms. Future enterprises will be composed of widely autonomous, self-organising and self-optimising work units which will be working together in flat hierarchies. In order to be agile, the work units will co-operate on a product-oriented basis. Thereby, work units of so-called virtual enterprises may belong to various companies and may be distributed world-wide. Enterprise models are used for documentation, (re-)design, analysis and the operation of a company. In order to be applicable in the future, they must be adaptable to the needs of future enterprises. For example, to speed up the (re-)formation and operation of a virtual enterprise, a methodology and tools based on suitable enterprise models are required to help to find the right partners and to determine the interfaces between those partners. This paper is organised as follows. Section 1 gives an overview of general trends in manufacturing and lists typical characteristics of future enterprises. Section 2 explains the authors' understanding of bottom-up design and why there is a need for a bottom-up design methodology. Following this motivation, existing enterprise models, also referred to as reference architectures, are reviewed. Next, the first research results of the methodology which were obtained are presented. Finally, we will give an overview of our Virtual Fa ctory Laboratory, Karlsruhe (VICTOR) which is an experimental platform for validating the approach taken.

Agricultural Planning Expert: A Model of Farm Enterprise Selection

Abstract Agricultural Planning Expert is a software model designed for advising small-scale farmers in southern Maryland. Choosing farm enterprises is modelled as consisting of four activities: suggesting enterprises for consideration, investigating the suitability of enterprises, allocating resources to suitable enterprises, and controlling the overall direction of an advising session.