The role of Enterprise portals in Enterprise Integration

Today’s enterprises are moving business systems to the Internet - to connect people, business processes, and people to business processes in enterprise and across enterprise boundaries. The portal brings it all together: business processes, departmental sites, knowledge management resources, enterprise management systems, CRM systems, analytics, email, calendars, external content, transactions, administration, workflow, and more. The goal of this paper is to present the role of the Enterprise Portal in internal and external enterprise integration.Portal, Enterprise Portal, Integration, ETL, EAI, EII

Future challenges and recommendations

Rapid advances in information technology and telecommunications, and in particular mobile and wireless communications, converge towards the emergence of a new type of “infostructure” that has the potential of supporting a large spectrum of advanced services for healthcare and health. Currently the ICT community produces a great effort to drill down from the vision and the promises of wireless and mobile technologies and provide practical application solutions. Research and development include data gathering and omni-directional transfer of vital information, integration of human machine interface technology into handheld devices and personal applications, security and interoperability of date and integration with hospital legacy systems and electronic patient record. The ongoing evolution of wireless technology and mobile device capabilities is changing the way healthcare providers interact with information technologies. The growth and acceptance of mobile information technology at the point of care, coupled with the promise and convenience of data on demand, creates opportunities for enhanced patient care and safety. The developments presented in this section demonstrate clearly the innovation aspects and trends towards user oriented applications

Integration of Cutting-Edge Interoperability Approaches in Cyber-Physical Production Systems and Industry 4.0

Interoperability in smart manufacturing refers to how interconnected cyber-physical components exchange information and interact. This is still an exploratory topic, and despite the increasing number of applications, many challenges remain open. This chapter presents an integrative framework to understand common practices, concepts, and technologies used in trending research to achieve interoperability in production systems. The chapter starts with the question of what interoperability is and provides an alternative answer based on influential works in the field, followed by the presentation of important reference mod4els and their relation to smart manufacturing. It continues by discussing different types of interoperability, data formats, and common ontologies necessary for the integration of heterogeneous systems and the contribution of emerging technologies in achieving interoperability. This chapter ends with a discussion of a recent use case and final remarks

Ship product modelling

This paper is a fundamental review of ship product modeling techniques with a focus on determining the state of the art, to identify any shortcomings and propose future directions. The review addresses ship product data representations, product modeling techniques and integration issues, and life phase issues. The most significant development has been the construction of the ship Standard for the Exchange of Product Data (STEP) application protocols. However, difficulty has been observed with respect to the general uptake of the standards, in particular with the application to legacy systems, often resulting in embellishments to the standards and limiting the ability to further exchange the product data. The EXPRESS modeling language is increasingly being superseded by the extensible mark-up language (XML) as a method to map the STEP data, due to its wider support throughout the information technology industry and its more obvious structure and hierarchy. The associated XML files are, however, larger than those produced using the EXPRESS language and make further demands on the already considerable storage required for the ship product model. Seamless integration between legacy applications appears to be difficult to achieve using the current technologies, which often rely on manual interaction for the translation of files. The paper concludes with a discussion of future directions that aim to either solve or alleviate these issues

Specification of the PERFoRM architecture for the seamless production system reconfiguration

The world is assisting to the fourth industrial revolution, with several domains of science and technology being strongly developed and, specially, being integrated with each other, allowing to build evolvable complex systems. Data digitization, big-data analysis, distributed control, Industrial Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems and self-organization, amongst others, are playing an important role in this journey. This paper considers the best practices from previous successful European projects addressing distributed control systems to develop an innovative architecture that can be industrially deployed. For this purpose, a particular design process has to be addressed in order to consider the requirements and functionalities from various use cases. To investigate the known practices, four use cases are enlighted in this paper, which cover a wide spectrum of the European industrial force, as well as industrial standards to support a smooth migration from traditional systems to the emergent distributed systems.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The evaluation of E-business related technologies in the Railway Industry

For the purposes of this paper, e-business is defined as: "the performance, automisation and organisation of transactions, or chains of them, and the gathering and publishing of data, electronically over a communication protocol" Little research has been conducted either into how e-business technology can be successfully evaluated, or into the associated costs and benefits specifically related to the transportation and railway industries. Based upon a review of the current literature and a series of interviews held with railway operators, track managers and transportation customers from the Australian Fortune 100, the paper puts forward a framework for the evaluation of e-business investments within the railway industry. The research reported here is aimed at developing a flexible interface that enables the decision maker to assess and evaluate a wide variety of complex interacting variables. The proposed approach uses a variety of evaluation methods, as opposed to searching for a single "best" approach. Additionally, an attempt is being made to include the complex interaction between the implementation of the new technology and the changing organisational setting. A model is proposed using fuzzy logic to handle incomplete and uncertain knowledge; as well as to combine criteria within a conceptual model from which "real-worth" evaluations can be performed. This model provides a systematic approach to guide the decision maker in the deployment of e-business and emerging technologies in the industry. After discussing the main findings from a literature review on the use of evaluation frameworks in IT related projects, the paper deals with the proposed framework in detail. The use of empirical data, which was obtained transportation customers to help define the main framework factors, is also discussed. Finally, the paper summarises the main implications for rail freight of customers’s perceptions and stated needs in the e-business domain