Knowledge discovery for moderating collaborative projects

In today's global market environment, enterprises are increasingly turning towards collaboration in projects to leverage their resources, skills and expertise, and simultaneously address the challenges posed in diverse and competitive markets. Moderators, which are knowledge based systems have successfully been used to support collaborative teams by raising awareness of problems or conflicts. However, the functioning of a moderator is limited to the knowledge it has about the team members. Knowledge acquisition, learning and updating of knowledge are the major challenges for a Moderator's implementation. To address these challenges a Knowledge discOvery And daTa minINg inteGrated (KOATING) framework is presented for Moderators to enable them to continuously learn from the operational databases of the company and semi-automatically update the corresponding expert module. The architecture for the Universal Knowledge Moderator (UKM) shows how the existing moderators can be extended to support global manufacturing. A method for designing and developing the knowledge acquisition module of the Moderator for manual and semi-automatic update of knowledge is documented using the Unified Modelling Language (UML). UML has been used to explore the static structure and dynamic behaviour, and describe the system analysis, system design and system development aspects of the proposed KOATING framework. The proof of design has been presented using a case study for a collaborative project in the form of construction project supply chain. It has been shown that Moderators can "learn" by extracting various kinds of knowledge from Post Project Reports (PPRs) using different types of text mining techniques. Furthermore, it also proposed that the knowledge discovery integrated moderators can be used to support and enhance collaboration by identifying appropriate business opportunities and identifying corresponding partners for creation of a virtual organization. A case study is presented in the context of a UK based SME. Finally, this thesis concludes by summarizing the thesis, outlining its novelties and contributions, and recommending future research

Research in Business Process Management: A bibliometric analysis

It contains several growing subtopics such as process mining, process flexibility and process compliance. BPM is also highly relevant for numerous related fields, such as Business Intelligence, ERP systems or Knowledge Management. The growing number of publications and the variety of topics in BPM make it useful to apply bibliometric methods on this scientific field. With bibliometric methods, topical clusters, essential authors and the relationships between them can be discovered. In this work, the BibTechMon software from the Austrian Institute of Technology is utilized to perform the bibliometric analyses. As a novelty for the work with BibTechMon, data from Google Scholar is used as the basis of the analyses. The nature of Google Scholar data differs significantly from the data of other scientific databases. These differences lead to changes on how the bibliometric analyses can be performed. After these changes have been assessed, several bibliometric analyses in the BPM field and related fields are performed. As a result of these analyses, diverse topical clusters in BPM and its related fields could be discovered. Additionally, important authors for each cluster and for the BPM field as a whole were determined. In order to evaluate the results of the bibliometric analyses, I conducted an interview on BPM with Professor Reichert, who is an active researcher in the field. Subsequently, his statements are compared with the results of the bibliometric analyses and the match between the bibliometric analyses and his statements is assessed

Multi Agent Systems in Logistics: A Literature and State-of-the-art Review

Based on a literature survey, we aim to answer our main question: “How should we plan and execute logistics in supply chains that aim to meet today’s requirements, and how can we support such planning and execution using IT?” Today’s requirements in supply chains include inter-organizational collaboration and more responsive and tailored supply to meet specific demand. Enterprise systems fall short in meeting these requirements The focus of planning and execution systems should move towards an inter-enterprise and event-driven mode. Inter-organizational systems may support planning going from supporting information exchange and henceforth enable synchronized planning within the organizations towards the capability to do network planning based on available information throughout the network. We provide a framework for planning systems, constituting a rich landscape of possible configurations, where the centralized and fully decentralized approaches are two extremes. We define and discuss agent based systems and in particular multi agent systems (MAS). We emphasize the issue of the role of MAS coordination architectures, and then explain that transportation is, next to production, an important domain in which MAS can and actually are applied. However, implementation is not widespread and some implementation issues are explored. In this manner, we conclude that planning problems in transportation have characteristics that comply with the specific capabilities of agent systems. In particular, these systems are capable to deal with inter-organizational and event-driven planning settings, hence meeting today’s requirements in supply chain planning and execution