Systematische Analyse des aktuellen Forschungsstandes von Prozessmodellen im Kontext der Industrie 4.0

Die Schlagwörter Smart Factory, Cloud-Computing sowie Internet-of-Things sind in den ver-gangenen Jahren in den Fokus von Wirtschaft und Politik gerückt. Sie stehen für einen ver-meintlichen Paradigmenwandel, der sogenannten vierten industriellen Revolution, die im deutschsprachigen Raum unter dem Konzept der „Industrie 4.0“ bekannt ist. Die vorliegende Masterarbeit gibt einen umfassenden Überblick über die aktuellen Verständ-nisse von Prozessmodellen und deren mögliche Anwendungen im Zusammenhang mit den Themen dieser vierten industriellen Revolution. Ziel der Arbeit ist es, mit Hilfe einer systema-tischen Analyse der aktuellen Fachliteratur verschiedene Prozessmodellierungsansätze im Kontext der Industrie 4.0 zu identifizieren und zu präsentieren. In diesem Zusammenhang wird eine Untersuchung über den zeitlichen Verlauf von Publikationen, über die unterschiedlichen Themenschwerpunkte der wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen und der Relevanz für die je-weiligen Forschungsgebiete durchgeführt. Vor dem Hintergrund der Industrie 4.0 sollen die Untersuchungsergebnisse momentane An-wendungsgebiete der Prozessmodellierung in Unternehmen und Forschungsbemühungen der Wissenschaft aufzeigen, sowie weitere potenzielle Applikationen und offene Fragen untersu-chen

Lazy Services: A Service Oriented Architecture based on Incremental Computations and Commitments

A service oriented architecture (SOA) aims to structure complex distributed systems in terms of re-usable components, called services. To guarantee a good service interoperability these services must be weakly coupled and their description must be separated from their implementations. The interface of a service provides information on how it can be invoked: the logical location where it can be invoked, the supported communication protocol and the types of its input (parameters) and output (result). Traditionally, a service can only be invoked when its parameters are fully defined and, symmetrically, these services only return their results after they have been totally processed. In this paper, we promote a more liberal view of services by allowing them to consume their data lazily (i.e., as they need it) and produce their results incrementally (i.e., as they are produced). We develop this notion as 'lazy services' by building up from the model of guarded attributed grammars that was recently introduced in the context of distributed collaborative systems. We abstract from this model and limit somewhat its expressiveness so that it can comply more broadly to SOA principles. We introduce an improvement on subscription management to optimize the distributed implementation of lazy services

A business process model for blockchain-based South African real estate transactions

The real estate transaction process has been described as inefficient and technologically outdated due to numerous stakeholders and predominantly paper-based operations. Despite the apparent bottlenecks in the current process, the implementation of new technology into the real estate sector has lagged. Several attempts have been made to modernise and digitise the business process but committed integration of assisting technology has lacked attention. This study examined the applicability and potential integration of blockchain technology into the business process of South African real estate transactions. Blockchain’s novelty means that research in this space, especially within South Africa, is limited. Of the research that has been conducted, no models of the business processes for South African or blockchain-based real estate transactions have been constructed. This study provides two business process models, illustrating the two different processes. The main contribution of this paper was an integrated business process model, illustrating how the various processes and stakeholder interactions for South African blockchain-based real estate transactions are conducted on one transaction platform, common to all participating stakeholders. This platform was named the South African Blockchain Land Exchange System (SABLES), which manages and facilitates these transactions in their entirety from start to finish. This model depicts an enhanced business process that provides increased security, transparency, and speed. These benefits will be realised by those who register, adopt, and transact on the platform. Through in-depth interviews, the integrated business process model was assessed. The findings produced a final and combined thematic map, representing the main themes of the analysed interview data, namely blockchain implementation strategies, business process applicability, information technology assimilation, current transaction context, and PropTech 3.0 success factors. The discussion revealed that the current transaction process lacks technological innovation, which increases pressure on the conveyancing role. It was also revealed that there is not only a need within the industry, but a desire, for newer technologies to assist the transaction process. In order to streamline and improve efficiency, business processes should leverage digital records and data, and strive for a solution beyond digitisation, achieving digitalisation. Digitalisation recognises digital documents as official and legal documents as opposed to simply being digital back-ups. This, coupled with the business process models, represent theoretical contributions

An Approach to Automatically Distribute and Access Knowledge within Networked Embedded Systems in Factory Automation

This thesis presents a novel approach for automatically distribute and access knowledge within factory automation systems built by networked embedded systems. Developments on information, communication and computational technologies are making possible the distribution of tasks within different control resources, resources which are networked and working towards a common objective optimizing desired parameters. A fundamental task for introducing autonomy to these systems, is the option for represent knowledge, distributed within the automation network and to ensure its access by providing access mechanisms. This research work focuses on the processes for automatically distribute and access the knowledge.Recently, the industrial world has embraced service-oriented as architectural (SOA) patterns for relaxing the software integration costs of factory automation systems. This pattern defines a services provider offering a particular functionality, and service requesters which are entities looking for getting their needs satisfied. Currently, there are a few technologies allowing to implement a SOA solution, among those, Web Technologies are gaining special attention for their solid presence in other application fields. Providers and services using Web technologies for expressing their needs and skills are called Web Services. One of the main advantage of services is the no need for the service requester to know how the service provider is accomplishing the functionality or where the execution of the service is taking place. This benefit is recently stressed by the irruption of Cloud Computing, allowing the execution of certain process by the cloud resources.The caption of human knowledge and the representation of that knowledge in a machine interpretable manner has been an interesting research topic for the last decades. A well stablished mechanism for the representation of knowledge is the utilization of Ontologies. This mechanism allows machines to access that knowledge and use reasoning engines in order to create reasoning machines. The presence of a knowledge base allows as clearly the better identification of the web services, which is achievable by adding semantic notations to the service descriptors. The resulting services are called semantic web services.With the latest advances on computational resources, system can be built by a large number of constrained devices, yet easily connected, building a network of computational nodes, nodes that will be dedicated to execute control and communication tasks for the systems. These tasks are commanded by high level commanding systems, such as Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) modules. The aforementioned technologies allow a vertical approach for communicating commanding options from MES and ERP directly to the control nodes. This scenario allows to break down monolithic MES systems into small distributed functionalities, if these functionalities use Web standards for interacting and a knowledge base as main input for information, then we are arriving to the concept of Open KnowledgeDriven MES Systems (OKD-MES).The automatic distribution of the knowledge base in an OKD-MES mechanism and the accomplishment of the reasoning process in a distributed manner are the main objectives for this research. Thus, this research work describes the decentralization and management of knowledge descriptions which are currently handled by the Representation Layer (RPL) of the OKD-MES framework. This is achieved within the encapsulation of ontology modules which may be integrated by a distributed reasoning process on incoming requests. Furthermore, this dissertation presents the concept, principles and architecture for implementing Private Local Automation Clouds (PLACs), built by CPS.The thesis is an article thesis and is composed by 9 original and referred articles and supported by 7 other articles presented by the author

INForum 2017: Atas do Nono Simpósio de Informática

Este volume contém as atas da 9.a edição do Simpósio em Informática, INForum 2017, a qual decorreu no Pavilhão de Exposições de Aveiro, em Aveiro, conjuntamente com o TechDays 2017, nos dias 12 e 13 de outubro de 2017. (...

Service level agreement specification for IoT application workflow activity deployment, configuration and monitoring

PhD ThesisCurrently, we see the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) within various domains such as healthcare, smart homes, smart cars, smart-x applications, and smart cities. The number of applications based on IoT and cloud computing is projected to increase rapidly over the next few years. IoT-based services must meet the guaranteed levels of quality of service (QoS) to match users’ expectations. Ensuring QoS through specifying the QoS constraints using service level agreements (SLAs) is crucial. Also because of the potentially highly complex nature of multi-layered IoT applications, lifecycle management (deployment, dynamic reconfiguration, and monitoring) needs to be automated. To achieve this it is essential to be able to specify SLAs in a machine-readable format. currently available SLA specification languages are unable to accommodate the unique characteristics (interdependency of its multi-layers) of the IoT domain. Therefore, in this research, we propose a grammar for a syntactical structure of an SLA specification for IoT. The grammar is based on a proposed conceptual model that considers the main concepts that can be used to express the requirements for most common hardware and software components of an IoT application on an end-to-end basis. We follow the Goal Question Metric (GQM) approach to evaluate the generality and expressiveness of the proposed grammar by reviewing its concepts and their predefined lists of vocabularies against two use-cases with a number of participants whose research interests are mainly related to IoT. The results of the analysis show that the proposed grammar achieved 91.70% of its generality goal and 93.43% of its expressiveness goal. To enhance the process of specifying SLA terms, We then developed a toolkit for creating SLA specifications for IoT applications. The toolkit is used to simplify the process of capturing the requirements of IoT applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the toolkit using a remote health monitoring service (RHMS) use-case as well as applying a user experience measure to evaluate the tool by applying a questionnaire-oriented approach. We discussed the applicability of our tool by including it as a core component of two different applications: 1) a contextaware recommender system for IoT configuration across layers; and 2) a tool for automatically translating an SLA from JSON to a smart contract, deploying it on different peer nodes that represent the contractual parties. The smart contract is able to monitor the created SLA using Blockchain technology. These two applications are utilized within our proposed SLA management framework for IoT. Furthermore, we propose a greedy heuristic algorithm to decentralize workflow activities of an IoT application across Edge and Cloud resources to enhance response time, cost, energy consumption and network usage. We evaluated the efficiency of our proposed approach using iFogSim simulator. The performance analysis shows that the proposed algorithm minimized cost, execution time, networking, and Cloud energy consumption compared to Cloud-only and edge-ward placement approaches