An Ontology for Product-Service Systems

Industries are transforming their business strategy from a product-centric to a more service-centric nature by bundling products and services into integrated solutions to enhance the relationship between their customers. Since Product- Service Systems design research is currently at a rudimentary stage, the development of a robust ontology for this area would be helpful. The advantages of a standardized ontology are that it could help researchers and practitioners to communicate their views without ambiguity and thus encourage the conception and implementation of useful methods and tools. In this paper, an initial structure of a PSS ontology from the design perspective is proposed and evaluated

Value-driven partner search for <i>Energy from Waste</i> projects

Energy from Waste (EfW) projects require complex value chains to operate effectively. To identify business partners, plant operators need to network with organisations whose strategic objectives are aligned with their own. Supplier organisations need to work out where they fit in the value chain. Our aim is to support people in identifying potential business partners, based on their organisation’s interpretation of value. Value for an organisation should reflect its strategy and may be interpreted using key priorities and KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs may comprise any or all of knowledge, operational, economic, social and convenience indicators. This paper presents an ontology for modelling and prioritising connections within the business environment, and in the process provides means for defining value and mapping these to corresponding KPIs. The ontology is used to guide the design of a visual representation of the environment to aid partner search

原子力プラントのライフサイクル情報管理に基づく廃炉シミュレーションに関する研究

Tohoku University博士（情報科学）thesi

A Virtual factory data model as a support tool for the simulation of manufacturing systems

The design of a manufacturing systems is a complex and critical activity entailing decisions with an impact on a long time horizon and a major commitment of financial resources. Indeed, the modelling, simulation and evaluation of manufacturing systems are relevant activities both in the design and the operational phases of a factory. This paper grounds on the results of the Virtual Factory Framework (VFF) Project and addresses the use of an ontology based model of a production system to support the construction of a performance evaluation model

Reference ontologies to support the development of global production network systems

In competitive and time sensitive market places, organisations are tasked with providing product lifecycle management (PLM) approaches to achieve and maintain competitive advantage, react to change and understand the balance of possible options when making decisions on complex multi-faceted problems, global production networks (GPN) is one such domain in which this applies. When designing and configuring GPN to develop, manufacture and deliver product–service provision, information requirements that affect decision making become more complex. The application of reference ontologies to a domain and its related information requirements can enhance and accelerate the development of new product-service systems with a view towards the seamless interchange of information or interoperability between systems and domains. This paper presents (i) preliminary results for the capture and modelling of end-user information, (ii) an initial higher level reference core ontology for the development of reference ontologies and (iii) the formal logical modelling of Level 1 of the FLEXINET reference ontology using a Common Logic based approach

A Model-Based Approach to Comprehensive Risk Management for Medical Devices

The European medical technology industry consists of around 27,000 companies, more than 95% of them small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with over 675,000 employees [MEDT17]. In the European Union (EU) alone, medical devices constituted by far the biggest part of the medical technology (MedTech) sector with a market of 95 billion euros in annual sales in 2015 [EURO15].The European medical technology industry consists of around 27,000 companies, more than 95% of them small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with over 675,000 employees [MEDT17]. In the European Union (EU) alone, medical devices constituted by far the biggest part of the medical technology (MedTech) sector with a market of 95 billion euros in annual sales in 2015 [EURO15]

Enterprise Systems in Transition Economies: An Initial Literature Review

In spite of the fact that enterprise systems have become essential in modern organizations, there is a scarcity of research on this topic in the context of transition economies, defined as countries that are in the process of moving or have recently moved from a centrally planned economic system to a market-driven system. In this initial study, we conduct a review of 27 journal papers on enterprise systems in transition economies published in the years 2004-2014. We examine the research focus, research approach, and theoretical foundation. Based on the analysis of themes and current trends in the existing literature we identify gaps and propose opportunities for future research

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.In modern organisations business process modelling has become fundamental due to the increasing rate of organisational change. As a consequence, an organisation needs to continuously redesign its business processes on a regular basis. One major problem associated with the way business process modelling (BPM) is carried out today is the lack of explicit and systematic reuse of previously developed models. Enabling the reuse of previously modelled behaviour can have a beneficial impact on the quality and efficiency of the overall information systems development process and also improve the effectiveness of an organisation’s business processes. In related disciplines, like software engineering, patterns have emerged as a widely accepted architectural mechanism for reusing solutions. In business process modelling the use of patterns is quite limited apart from few sporadic attempts proposed by the literature. Thus, pattern-based BPM is not commonplace. Business process patterns should ideally be discovered from the empirical analysis of organisational processes. Empiricism is currently not the basis for the discovery of patterns for business process modelling and no systematic methodology for collecting and analysing process models of business organisations currently exists. The purpose of the presented research project is to develop a methodological framework for achieving reuse in BPM via the discovery and adoption of patterns. The framework is called Semantic Discovery and Reuse of Business Process Patterns (SDR). SDR provides a systematic method for identifying patterns among organisational data assets representing business behaviour. The framework adopts ontologies (i.e., formalised conceptual models of real-world domains) in order to facilitate such discovery. The research has also produced an ontology of business processes that provides the underlying semantic definitions of processes and their constituent parts. The use of ontologies to model business processes represents a novel approach and combines advances achieved by the Semantic Web and BPM communities. The methodological framework also relates to a new line of research in BPM on declarative business processes in which the models specify what should be done rather than how to ‘prescriptively’ do it. The research follows a design science method for designing and evaluating SDR. Evaluation is carried out using real world sources and reuse scenarios taken from both the financial and educational domains