Improving the creation and management of collaborative networks within the European maritime sector : an operational collaboration model for the European maritime sector

The first ever model of operational collaboration for the European maritime industry is presented, built upon the established current state-of-the art in engineering collaboration modelling and addressing key industry requirements. The requirements for operational collaboration practices in the European maritime industry were identified using three approaches: an industrial survey of 69 associations, companies and institutions in the maritime sector; an analysis of prototype collaboration tools; and through an analysis of literature. These requirements were thematically grouped and consolidated where they overlapped, and then translated into model elements and interactions between them. A model that accurately abstracts service and technology collaboration provision between companies in a variety of collaboration modes was built, and validated against a series of steps that an organisation would need to undertake, to develop a particular mode of collaboration to supports their needs. It was tested in three industrial case studies, providing encouraging feedback demonstrating successful implementation. It provides the opportunity for reassessment of the employed processes and activities, and provides a structure for improving collaborative engineering design. Whilst the research was based in the European maritime industry, the model has wider applicability within the collaborative design of complicated engineering artefacts such as automotive or aerospace

A Context-Aware Inter-organizational Collaboration Model Applied to International Trade

Part 4: Architecture, Security and InteroperabilityInternational audienceIn international trade, there are a number of aspects that influence the interactive relationships between business organizations and governmental organizations, which makes it difficult to regulate the business processes in an integrated way. Modeling such kinds of organizational interactions requires a mechanism to differentiate interactive environments and elaborate regulations according to their characteristics. For this purpose, a context-aware inter-organizational modeling approach is proposed in this paper. The approach analyzes organizational interactions through three phases from abstract to concrete: (1) general specifications which describe organizations in terms of atomic roles with intellectual objectives, (2) contextual specifications which extend general specifications by applying contexts to derive composite roles with details on how to accomplish the objectives, and (3) operational specifications which construct a set of complete models of an inter-organizational collaboration by assembling contextual specifications according to the run-time environment. An example consisting of two scenarios of direct control and self-regulation in international trade is used to illustrate our model

Business and logic charateristic in an collaborative situation

MISE 2.0 (for Mediation Information System Engineering, second iteration) project has been launched in 2009. The MISE 2.0 engineering approach is based on BPM (Business Process Management) and MDE (Model-Driven Engineering). Running a regular BPM approach on a specific organization consists in gathering structural, informational, and functional knowledge in order to design cartography of processes covering the behavior of the modeled organization. Regarding the MISE 2.0 project the BPM approach concerns a set of organizations and MDE helps in automatizing the different steps: i) Knowledge gathering (situation layer): collect information concerning the collaborative situation, ii) Processes cartography design (solution layer): design the processes according to the knowledge gathered and iii) MIS deployment (implementation layer): implement an IT structure able to run the processes cartography. Both the transitions between these layers are the hard-points of this approach: The first gap is managed at the abstract level of MISE 2.0 while the second one is managed at the concrete level of MISE 2.0. The current PhD is focused on the first issue: designing a relevant processes cartography from the modeled collaborative situation. However, this is usually a manual activity, which requires a large amount of work to draw the processes and their links. The current research works aim at building such collaborative process cartography in an automated manner. Our principles are (i) to gather the essential and minimum initial collaborative knowledge (e.g. partners, shared functions and collaborative objectives) in models, ii) to deduce the missing knowledge with the help of a collaborative metamodel, an associated ontology and transformation rules and iii) to structure the deduced knowledge in a collaborative process cartography thanks to dedicated algorithms

Caractérisation et logique d'une situation collaborative

Initié en 2009, le projet MISE 2.0 (deuxième itération du projet Mediation Information System Engineering) s’articule autour d’une approche BPM (pour Business Process Management) et d’une vision MDE (pour Model-Driven Engineering). La réalisation d’une démarche BPM classique au sein d’une organisation nécessite de recueillir une connaissance couvrant à la fois les aspects structurel, informationnel et fonctionnel afin de définir des modèles de processus caractéristiques du comportement de l’organisation. Concernant le projet MISE 2.0, l’approche BPM considérée concerne un ensemble d’organisations collaboratives. Quant à la composante MDE, elle est destinée à faciliter l’automatisation des différentes étapes de la démarche : i) Recueil de la connaissance (caractérisation de la situation) : Il s’agit de collecter les information concernant la situation collaborative considérée, ii) Déduction de la cartographie de processus collaboratifs (définition de la solution) : il s’agit de définit les processus collaboratifs adaptés à la situation collaboratives caractérisée au niveau précedent and iii) Déploiement du SI de médiation (implémentation de la solution) : il s’agit d’implémenter le SI de médiation sous la forme d’une plateforme informatique capable d’orchestrer les processus collaboratif définis. La problématique scientifique relève des deux transitions entre ces trois niveaux d’abstractions : la première transition est prise en charge au niveau abstrait de la démarche MISE 2.0 alors que la seconde est traitée au niveau concret. Les travaux de thèse dont il est ici question se focalisent sur le niveau abstrait : déduction d’une cartographie de processus collaboratifs satisfaisant la situation collaborative considérée. Ce type d’objectif relève généralement d’activités entièrement manuelles qui nécessitent une importante quantité de travail afin d’obtenir les modèles de processus escomptés. Les travaux de recherches présentés ambitionnent d’automatiser cette démarche. Le principe est le suivant : (i) recueil, sous la forme de modèles, de la connaissance nécessaire à la caractérisation de la situation collaborative (informations sur les partenaires, les fonctions qu’ils partagent et leurs objectifs), (ii) déduction de la connaissance complémentaire relative à la dynamique collaborative qui pourrait satisfaire ces objectifs selon les moyens disponibles (cette phase s’appuie sur un métamodèle collaboratif, sur l’ontologie associée et sur des règles de transformation) et (iii) structuration de cette connaissance générée sous la forme d’une cartographie de processus collaboratifs (grâce à des algorithmes dédiés). ABSTRACT : MISE 2.0 (for Mediation Information System Engineering, second iteration) project has been launched in 2009. The MISE 2.0 engineering approach is based on BPM (Business Process Management) and MDE (Model-Driven Engineering). Running a regular BPM approach on a specific organization consists in gathering structural, informational, and functional knowledge in order to design cartography of processes covering the behavior of the modeled organization. Regarding the MISE 2.0 project the BPM approach concerns a set of organizations and MDE helps in automatizing the different steps: i) Knowledge gathering (situation layer): collect information concerning the collaborative situation, ii) Processes cartography design (solution layer): design the processes according to the knowledge gathered and iii) MIS deployment (implementation layer): implement an IT structure able to run the processes cartography. Both the transitions between these layers are the hard-points of this approach: The first gap is managed at the abstract level of MISE 2.0 while the second one is managed at the concrete level of MISE 2.0. The current PhD is focused on the first issue: designing a relevant processes cartography from the modeled collaborative situation. However, this is usually a manual activity, which requires a large amount of work to draw the processes and their links. The current research works aim at building such collaborative process cartography in an automated manner. Our principles are (i) to gather the essential and minimum initial collaborative knowledge (e.g. partners, shared functions and collaborative objectives) in models, ii) to deduce the missing knowledge with the help of a collaborative metamodel, an associated ontology and transformation rules and iii) to structure the deduced knowledge in a collaborative process cartography thanks to dedicated algorithms