Collaborative networks: A pillar of digital transformation

UID/EEA/00066/2019 POCI-01-0247-FEDER-033926The notion of digital transformation encompasses the adoption and integration of a variety of new information and communication technologies for the development of more efficient, flexible, agile, and sustainable solutions for industrial systems. Besides technology, this process also involves new organizational forms and leads to new business models. As such, this work addresses the contribution of collaborative networks to such a transformation. An analysis of the collaborative aspects required in the various dimensions of the 4th industrial revolution is conducted based on a literature survey and experiences gained from several research projects. A mapping between the identified collaboration needs and research results that can be adopted from the collaborative networks area is presented. Furthermore, several new research challenges are identified and briefly characterized.publishe

An environment to support negotiation and contracting in collaborative networks

During the last years, manufacturing and service industries faced a global change in the production paradigm. They have to continuously adapt their operating principles in reaction to new business or collaboration opportunities, where a natural reaction is a shift to a new business paradigm with the creation of strategic alliances for product or services development, but also for innovative and emergent business services design. On one hand, the process of creating such alliances can be rather simple if organizations share the same geographical and cultural context. But on the other hand, considering different conditions, there might be a low success rate in the creation of successful consortia. One known reason for such low rate are the delays resulting from negotiations in the establishment of collaboration commitments, represented by contracts or agreements, which are crucial in the creation of such alliances. The collaborative networks discipline covers the study of networks of organizations specially when supported by computer networks. This thesis contributes with research in this field describing the creation process of virtual organizations, and proposing a negotiation support environment to help participants in the negotiation of the consortia creation process and in the co-design of new business services. A negotiation support environment is therefore proposed and described with its main requirements, adopted negotiation protocol, conceptual architecture, models, and software environment. To demonstrate the feasibility of the implementation of the proposed systems, a proof-ofconcept software prototype was implemented and tested using some specific scenarios. This thesis work has been validated adopting a methodology that includes: (i) validation in the research community; (ii) validation in a solar industry network; and (iii) validation by comparison analysis

Behavioral Norms in Virtual Organizations

Part 2: Behaviour and CoordinationInternational audienceVirtual Organizations (VOs) consist of groups of agents that collaborate towards achieving their specified goals. VO Partners are independent, autonomous, and heterogeneous, thus often exhibiting complex behaviors in co-working. Frictional behavior demonstrated by even a few partners, may cause drastic results and total failure of the VO. Therefore, it is necessary to model and analyze VO partners’ behavior. This paper introduces the VO Supervision Assistance Tool (VOSAT), developed based on leveraging partners’ commitments/promises, to monitor partners’ behavior against the synergetic norms in the VO. For this purpose, three kinds of behavioral norms are defined, including: socio-legal norms, functional norms, and activity-related norms. Additionally, a fuzzy norm is introduced to indicate agents’ trustworthy behavior. The functionalities supported in VOSAT enable the VO coordinator with identifying the high risk tasks and the weak or weakest points in the flow of VO planned operations. It further assists the coordinator with finding suitable candidate partners for handling the exceptions that arise during the VO operation phase. These in turn improve the success rate of the VOs