Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective

This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective

From Design to Production Control Through the Integration of Engineering Data Management and Workflow Management Systems

At a time when many companies are under pressure to reduce "times-to-market" the management of product information from the early stages of design through assembly to manufacture and production has become increasingly important. Similarly in the construction of high energy physics devices the collection of (often evolving) engineering data is central to the subsequent physics analysis. Traditionally in industry design engineers have employed Engineering Data Management Systems (also called Product Data Management Systems) to coordinate and control access to documented versions of product designs. However, these systems provide control only at the collaborative design level and are seldom used beyond design. Workflow management systems, on the other hand, are employed in industry to coordinate and support the more complex and repeatable work processes of the production environment. Commercial workflow products cannot support the highly dynamic activities found both in the design stages of product development and in rapidly evolving workflow definitions. The integration of Product Data Management with Workflow Management can provide support for product development from initial CAD/CAM collaborative design through to the support and optimisation of production workflow activities. This paper investigates this integration and proposes a philosophy for the support of product data throughout the full development and production lifecycle and demonstrates its usefulness in the construction of CMS detectors.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figure

An approach to control collaborative processes in PLM systems

Companies that collaborate within the product development processes need to implement an effective management of their collaborative activities. Despite the implementation of a PLM system, the collaborative activities are not efficient as it might be expected. This paper presents an analysis of the problems related to the collaborative work using a PLM system. From this analysis, we propose an approach for improving collaborative processes within a PLM system, based on monitoring indicators. This approach leads to identify and therefore to mitigate the brakes of the collaborative work

Context-Aware Information Retrieval for Enhanced Situation Awareness

In the coalition forces, users are increasingly challenged with the issues of information overload and correlation of information from heterogeneous sources. Users might need different pieces of information, ranging from information about a single building, to the resolution strategy of a global conflict. Sometimes, the time, location and past history of information access can also shape the information needs of users. Information systems need to help users pull together data from disparate sources according to their expressed needs (as represented by system queries), as well as less specific criteria. Information consumers have varying roles, tasks/missions, goals and agendas, knowledge and background, and personal preferences. These factors can be used to shape both the execution of user queries and the form in which retrieved information is packaged. However, full automation of this daunting information aggregation and customization task is not possible with existing approaches. In this paper we present an infrastructure for context-aware information retrieval to enhance situation awareness. The infrastructure provides each user with a customized, mission-oriented system that gives access to the right information from heterogeneous sources in the context of a particular task, plan and/or mission. The approach lays on five intertwined fundamental concepts, namely Workflow, Context, Ontology, Profile and Information Aggregation. The exploitation of this knowledge, using appropriate domain ontologies, will make it feasible to provide contextual assistance in various ways to the work performed according to a user’s taskrelevant information requirements. This paper formalizes these concepts and their interrelationships

Simulation Models for Analyzing the Dynamic Costs of Process-aware Information Systems

Introducing process-aware information systems (PAIS) in enterprises (e.g., workflow management systems, case handling systems) is associated with high costs. Though cost estimation has received considerable attention in software engineering for many years, it is difficult to apply existing approaches to PAIS. This difficulty particularly stems from the inability of existing estimation techniques to deal with the complex interplay of the many technological, organizational and project-driven factors which emerge in the context of PAIS. In response to this problem, this paper proposes an approach which utilizes simulation models for investigating the dynamic costs of PAIS engineering projects. We motivate the need for simulation, discuss the development and execution of simulation models, and give an illustrating example. The present work has been accomplished in the EcoPOST project, which deals with the development of a comprehensive evaluation framework for analyzing PAIS engineering projects from a value-based perspective

Event-Oriented Dynamic Adaptation of Workflows: Model, Architecture and Implementation

Workflow management is widely accepted as a core technology to support long-term business processes in heterogeneous and distributed environments. However, conventional workflow management systems do not provide sufficient flexibility support to cope with the broad range of failure situations that may occur during workflow execution. In particular, most systems do not allow to dynamically adapt a workflow due to a failure situation, e.g., to dynamically drop or insert execution steps. As a contribution to overcome these limitations, this dissertation introduces the agent-based workflow management system AgentWork. AgentWork supports the definition, the execution and, as its main contribution, the event-oriented and semi-automated dynamic adaptation of workflows. Two strategies for automatic workflow adaptation are provided. Predictive adaptation adapts workflow parts affected by a failure in advance (predictively), typically as soon as the failure is detected. This is advantageous in many situations and gives enough time to meet organizational constraints for adapted workflow parts. Reactive adaptation is typically performed when predictive adaptation is not possible. In this case, adaptation is performed when the affected workflow part is to be executed, e.g., before an activity is executed it is checked whether it is subject to a workflow adaptation such as dropping, postponement or replacement. In particular, the following contributions are provided by AgentWork: A Formal Model for Workflow Definition, Execution, and Estimation: In this context, AgentWork first provides an object-oriented workflow definition language. This language allows for the definition of a workflow\u92s control and data flow. Furthermore, a workflow\u92s cooperation with other workflows or workflow systems can be specified. Second, AgentWork provides a precise workflow execution model. This is necessary, as a running workflow usually is a complex collection of concurrent activities and data flow processes, and as failure situations and dynamic adaptations affect running workflows. Furthermore, mechanisms for the estimation of a workflow\u92s future execution behavior are provided. These mechanisms are of particular importance for predictive adaptation. Mechanisms for Determining and Processing Failure Events and Failure Actions: AgentWork provides mechanisms to decide whether an event constitutes a failure situation and what has to be done to cope with this failure. This is formally achieved by evaluating event-condition-action rules where the event-condition part describes under which condition an event has to be viewed as a failure event. The action part represents the necessary actions needed to cope with the failure. To support the temporal dimension of events and actions, this dissertation provides a novel event-condition-action model based on a temporal object-oriented logic. Mechanisms for the Adaptation of Affected Workflows: In case of failure situations it has to be decided how an affected workflow has to be dynamically adapted on the node and edge level. AgentWork provides a novel approach that combines the two principal strategies reactive adaptation and predictive adaptation. Depending on the context of the failure, the appropriate strategy is selected. Furthermore, control flow adaptation operators are provided which translate failure actions into structural control flow adaptations. Data flow operators adapt the data flow after a control flow adaptation, if necessary. Mechanisms for the Handling of Inter-Workflow Implications of Failure Situations: AgentWork provides novel mechanisms to decide whether a failure situation occurring to a workflow affects other workflows that communicate and cooperate with this workflow. In particular, AgentWork derives the temporal implications of a dynamic adaptation by estimating the duration that will be needed to process the changed workflow definition (in comparison with the original definition). Furthermore, qualitative implications of the dynamic change are determined. For this purpose, so-called quality measuring objects are introduced. All mechanisms provided by AgentWork include that users may interact during the failure handling process. In particular, the user has the possibility to reject or modify suggested workflow adaptations. A Prototypical Implementation: Finally, a prototypical Corba-based implementation of AgentWork is described. This implementation supports the integration of AgentWork into the distributed and heterogeneous environments of real-world organizations such as hospitals or insurance business enterprises

An empirical learning-based validation procedure for simulation workflow

Simulation workflow is a top-level model for the design and control of simulation process. It connects multiple simulation components with time and interaction restrictions to form a complete simulation system. Before the construction and evaluation of the component models, the validation of upper-layer simulation workflow is of the most importance in a simulation system. However, the methods especially for validating simulation workflow is very limit. Many of the existing validation techniques are domain-dependent with cumbersome questionnaire design and expert scoring. Therefore, this paper present an empirical learning-based validation procedure to implement a semi-automated evaluation for simulation workflow. First, representative features of general simulation workflow and their relations with validation indices are proposed. The calculation process of workflow credibility based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is then introduced. In order to make full use of the historical data and implement more efficient validation, four learning algorithms, including back propagation neural network (BPNN), extreme learning machine (ELM), evolving new-neuron (eNFN) and fast incremental gaussian mixture model (FIGMN), are introduced for constructing the empirical relation between the workflow credibility and its features. A case study on a landing-process simulation workflow is established to test the feasibility of the proposed procedure. The experimental results also provide some useful overview of the state-of-the-art learning algorithms on the credibility evaluation of simulation models

Adaptive Process Management in Cyber-Physical Domains

The increasing application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging cyber-physical domains beyond business computing (e.g., personalized healthcare, emergency management, factories of the future, home automation, etc.) has led to reconsider the level of flexibility and support required to manage complex processes in such domains. A cyber-physical domain is characterized by the presence of a cyber-physical system coordinating heterogeneous ICT components (PCs, smartphones, sensors, actuators) and involving real world entities (humans, machines, agents, robots, etc.) that perform complex tasks in the “physical” real world to achieve a common goal. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable, and processes enacted in cyber-physical domains must be robust to unexpected conditions and adaptable to unanticipated exceptions. This demands a more flexible approach in process design and enactment, recognizing that in real-world environments it is not adequate to assume that all possible recovery activities can be predefined for dealing with the exceptions that can ensue. In this chapter, we tackle the above issue and we propose a general approach, a concrete framework and a process management system implementation, called SmartPM, for automatically adapting processes enacted in cyber-physical domains in case of unanticipated exceptions and exogenous events. The adaptation mechanism provided by SmartPM is based on declarative task specifications, execution monitoring for detecting failures and context changes at run-time, and automated planning techniques to self-repair the running process, without requiring to predefine any specific adaptation policy or exception handler at design-time

Exploring the Dynamic Costs of Process-aware Information Systems through Simulation

Introducing process-aware information systems (PAIS) in enterprises (e.g., workflow management systems, case handling systems) is associated with high costs. Though cost evaluation has received considerable attention in software engineering for many years, it is difficult to apply existing evaluation approaches to PAIS. This difficulty particularly stems from the inability of these techniques to deal with the complex interplay of the many technological, organizational and project-driven factors which emerge in the context of PAIS engineering projects. In response to this problem this paper proposes an approach which utilizes simulation models for investigating costs related to PAIS engineering projects. We motivate the need for simulation, discuss the design and execution of simulation models, and give an illustrating example