Interoperability Maturity Model: Orchestrator Tool for Platform Ecosystems

The orchestration of platform ecosystems is becoming increasingly complex due to the growing number of players, complementary services and technological innovations. Interoperability is an important prerequisite for convincing customer journeys as well as functional and quality-assured data exchange and offers increasing potential for automation, especially with the help of machine learning or artificial intelligence. The interoperability maturity model developed in this study can be used as a conceptual framework to measure the interoperability of current and future platform ecosystem components and complements. The model, developed as an artifact of design science research, was evaluated using an iterative approach with orchestrators of health data platforms and their ecosystem. The results suggest that it can contribute to achieving and sustaining integrated value chains with multiple actors and diverse technologies, and can be used to assess the interoperability of care chains (e.g., care scenarios such as diabetes or cardiac insufficiency) and guide future interoperability considerations

Towards The Internet Of Production – How To Increase Data Sharing For Successful Supply Chain Collaboration

Numerous start-ups and now even some major corporates are currently trying to improve visibility and foresight in the manufacturing industry through connected supply chains, or in other words, through increased data sharing. This study strives to support companies in leveraging the potential of increased data sharing in supply chain collaborations. Despite the great potential of digitizing manufacturing and automated data sharing throughout the supply chain, most companies are not yet able or willing to implement this kind of openness. The main reason for this lack of transparency in the supply chain is the high complexity and high cost of the required interfaces. In practice, instead of automated and extensive data sharing, companies exchange spreadsheets and PDFs with minimum information. This study supports companies in the pre-stage before automated data sharing is technically implemented. We find that building trustful relationships is a necessary step towards extended and automated data sharing. Moreover, we find that social capital provides a means to partially compensate for a lack of automation in terms of shortening lead times and dealing with disruptions. Introducing a supply chain collaboration typology and showcasing descriptive and qualitative results for 36 firms, we show how to navigate the frontend of the Internet of Production

Framework for a business interoperability quotient measurement model

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova da Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão Industrial (MEGI)Over the last decade the context of Interoperability has been changing rapidly. It has been expanding from the largely technically focused area of Information Systems towards Business Processes and Business Semantics. However, there exists a need for more comprehensive ways to define business interoperability and enable its performance measurement as a first step towards improvement of interoperability conditions between collaborating entities. Through extensive literature reviews and analysis of European Research initiatives in this area, this dissertation presents the State of the Art in Business Interoperability. The objective of this dissertation is to develop a model that closely captures the factors that are responsible for Business Interoperability in the context of Collaborative Business Processes. This Business Interoperability Quotient Measurement Model (BIQMM), developed in this dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to capture the key elements responsible for collaboration performance. Through the quantification of the relevance of each element to the particular collaboration scenario in question, this model enables a quantitative analysis of Business Interoperability, so that an overall interoperability score can be arrived at for enhanced performance measurements.Finally, the BIQMM is applied to a business case involving Innovayt and LM Glassfiber to demonstrate its applicability to different collaboration scenarios

BIM communication waste

Developments in Information and Communication Technology can bring about significant improvements in the efficiency of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction and Facilities Management industry. Building Information Modelling (BIM), is a term which encompasses a type of software but more importantly a set of processes which, at their core, support an approach for integrated project delivery enabled by interoperable software systems. The last three years have seen intensified and coordinated adoption of BIM in the UK mainly as a result of the mandate of the UK government. One facet of these developments is the growing need for BIM collaboration tools which can interoperate effectively with the various BIM software systems, support the required standards and codes of practice and provide for requirements of construction project information production and management such as model-based workflows, model-based communication, model-based procurement, role-based data access and role-based privileges. The pre-requisites for collaboration can be broadly divided into two categories: (1) coordination of information and responsibilities, and (2) communication. This research recognizes the strong focus of recent and ongoing efforts to provide for coordination and aims to support the communication aspect. Additionally, successful collaborative practice results from (1) the "softer" or "human-aspect" issues: collaborative culture, software training and adherence to protocols as well as from (2) the provision of appropriate, intuitive and configurable collaboration tools and, more generally, digital collaboration environments. This research focuses on the latter. Despite efforts from a variety of software-as-a-service (SaaS) collaboration tool vendors to achieve dominance in the market, there is still uncertainty as to what type of solutions would best support BIM collaboration. Additionally, there is considerable variation in software configurations and a lack of a universally applicable method for evaluating the communication capabilities of BIM collaboration tools in a meaningful way. Vendors lack a robust conceptual framework to guide the long-term development of their tools and evaluate them. The process of requirements engineering, which in this context involves a diversity of stakeholders and involves projects at different BIM maturity levels would benefit significantly from a robust, context-specific conceptual model-ontology. The aim of this research is to produce a context-specific conceptual model-ontology which can support the discourse of requirements engineering and provide a robust and widely applicable framework for evaluating the communication capabilities of BIM collaboration tools. It is anticipated that this would help reduce BIM communication waste . To meet this aim, BIM collaboration tools were studied from five perspectives: 1.Users: their opinions, requirements and requests were collected through an online questionnaire survey. 2.Vendor: their perspective was captured through semi-structured interviews. 3.Schemata for interoperability: effectiveness of tools and schemata was evaluated through analysis of software by data fidelity study and scenario-based testing. 4.Tool use: patterns of digitally-enabled communication were explored through an analysis of communication data and meta-data collected from a collaboration tool. 5.Tool improvement: a successful approach in improving a collaboration tool was examined through the development of a context-specific requirements engineering process. This process was evaluated through semi-structured interviews with collaboration tool implementation consultants. Each perspective helped produce more specific requirements from the model as well as elements of the model itself. The end result was the Model for communication waste in BIM process interactions (WIMBIM). WIMBIM has the BIM process transmission as the fundamental unit of analysis and focuses on BIM communication waste and how it results from sub-optimal collaboration tools and schemata. The ultimate purpose of WIMBIM is to support the development of technology which would reduce this waste. This model was converted into a communicable format and was related to BIM standards to aid contextualization and gap identification. To evaluate the validity and utility of this model, interviews with BIM experts were conducted, and the proposed model was found to be a valid approach to address aspects of BIM waste, which is not usually examined and could potentially complement the existing model for BIM maturity. Additionally, the model provides a useful lens for further academic research into BIM collaboration tools

An approach to open virtual commissioning for component-based automation

Increasing market demands for highly customised products with shorter time-to-market and at lower prices are forcing manufacturing systems to be built and operated in a more efficient ways. In order to overcome some of the limitations in traditional methods of automation system engineering, this thesis focuses on the creation of a new approach to Virtual Commissioning (VC). In current VC approaches, virtual models are driven by pre-programmed PLC control software. These approaches are still time-consuming and heavily control expertise-reliant as the required programming and debugging activities are mainly performed by control engineers. Another current limitation is that virtual models validated during VC are difficult to reuse due to a lack of tool-independent data models. Therefore, in order to maximise the potential of VC, there is a need for new VC approaches and tools to address these limitations. The main contributions of this research are: (1) to develop a new approach and the related engineering tool functionality for directly deploying PLC control software based on component-based VC models and reusable components; and (2) to build tool-independent common data models for describing component-based virtual automation systems in order to enable data reusability. [Continues.

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

OPEN ARCHITECTURE PLATFORMS FOR THE CONTROL OF ROBOTIC SYSTEMS AND A PROPOSED REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE MODEL

This paper presents advantages of using open architecture for the real-time control of robot manipulators, parallel kinematics machine tools and other multi-axis machining systems. In order to increase their competitiveness, companies need to follow the global economy requirements. The constant incorporation of new technologies into existing controllers and reduction in the development time and costs are the main objectives. An open architecture control (OAC) concept appears as a solution to deal with these requirements. This article explains the rationale for the development of OAC systems, presents the major international activities which propose various approaches to OACs and a series of controllers that have been developed using this design philosophy at the Lola Institute