Supporting Interoperability of Virtual Factories

The manufacturing industry is entering a new era. This emerging era starts with the integration of new ICT technologies and collaboration applications into traditional manufacturing practices and processes, such as manufacturing 2.0. Manufacturing 2.0 has been conceptualised as a system that goes beyond the factory floor, and paradigms of “manufacturing as an ecosystem” have emerged. The virtual factory is one of the important concepts and foundations central to the realization of future manufacturing. In this paper, we take a look into the current research on virtual factories and propose a new approach to improve interoperability through the integration of different proprietary, legacy and existing solutions

Incident Notification Process as BPaaS for Electicity Supply Systems

Business Process Management (BPM) systems have been deployed in many large organizations to improve their business effectiveness and efficiency. Cloud based BPM systems have provided SMEs using BPM in a pay-per-use manner. Previous work has focused on looking at cloud based BPM from the perspectives of distribution of data, activity or/and business engine and related issues, such as scalability of system, security of data, distribution of data and activities. To achieve business agility business process collaboration needs to seamlessly connect local BPM systems and cloud based BPM systems. In this paper we look at BPM in the cloud from a new user perspective, how process models can be handled in the cloud for the fast pace of change of business collaborations. The paper proposes a distribution solution in which at the design time, the shared process model can be discovered from a process repository, and adapted to local needs; at run-time a process is distributed. A real world case is used to explain our design and implementation. Collaborative process for incident notifications is built to work across different organizations

Resilience Analysis of Service Oriented Collaboration Process Management systems

Collaborative business process management allows for the automated coordination of processes involving human and computer actors. In modern economies it is increasingly needed for this coordination to be not only within organizations but also to cross organizational boundaries. The dependence on the performance of other organizations should however be limited, and the control over the own processes is required from a competitiveness perspective. The main objective of this work is to propose an evaluation model for measuring a resilience of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) collaborative process management system. In this paper, we have proposed resilience analysis perspectives of SOA collaborative process systems, i.e. overall system perspective, individual process model perspective, individual process instance perspective, service perspective, and resource perspective. A collaborative incident and maintenance notification process system is reviewed for illustrating our resilience analysis. This research contributes to extend SOA collaborative business process management systems with resilience support, not only looking at quantification and identification of resilience factors, but also considering ways of improving the resilience of SOA collaborative process systems through measures at design and run-time

Supporting Collaborative Business Processes: a BPaaS Approach.

Collaborative business processes are increasingly driven by business flexibility and agility. Cloud-based business process management services have provided small medium enterprises (SMEs) with a pay-per-use manner for their daily business needs, i.e. some simple business process applications, e.g. salesforce provides cloud-based CRM to boost SMEs' sales. This raises the question how cloud-based business process management solutions can support the fast pace of change of business collaborations among business partners? For example, collaborative processes for managing industrial incidents are short term, low frequency processes. This paper proposes an architecture meta-model, which is used to design the concrete architecture and to further analyse the performance of the proposed solution. A real world case of collaborative processes for incident and maintenance notifi cations is used to explain the design and implementation of the cloud-based solution for supporting collaborative business processes. Service improvement of the new solution and computing power costs are analysed accordingly

A Cloud Based Data Integration Framework

Virtual enterprise (VE) relies on resource sharing and collaboration across geographically dispersed and dynamically allied businesses in order to better respond to market opportunities. It is generally considered that effective data integration and management is crucial to realise the value of VE. This paper describes a cloud-based data integration framework that can be used for supporting VE to discover, explore and respond more emerging business opportunities that require instant and easy resource access and flexible on-demand development in a customer-centric approach. Motivated by a case study discussing power incident management in the Spanish Electricity System, an effective on-demand application is also implemented to demonstrate how to use this framework to solve real world problems

Generic Continuity of Operations/Continuity of Government Plan for State-Level Transportation Agencies, Research Report 11-01

The Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (HSPD-20) requires all local, state, tribal and territorial government agencies, and private sector owners of critical infrastructure and key resources (CI/KR) to create a Continuity of Operations/Continuity of Government Plan (COOP/COG). There is planning and training guidance for generic transportation agency COOP/COG work, and the Transportation Research Board has offered guidance for transportation organizations. However, the special concerns of the state-level transportation agency’s (State DOT’s) plan development are not included, notably the responsibilities for the entire State Highway System and the responsibility to support specific essential functions related to the State DOT Director’s role in the Governor’s cabinet. There is also no guidance on where the COOP/COG planning and organizing fits into the National Incident Management System (NIMS) at the local or state-level department or agency. This report covers the research conducted to determine how to integrate COOP/COG into the overall NIMS approach to emergency management, including a connection between the emergency operations center (EOC) and the COOP/COG activity. The first section is a presentation of the research and its findings and analysis. The second section provides training for the EOC staff of a state-level transportation agency, using a hybrid model of FEMA’s ICS and ESF approaches, including a complete set of EOC position checklists, and other training support material. The third section provides training for the COOP/COG Branch staff of a state-level transportation agency, including a set of personnel position descriptions for the COOP/COG Branch members

Privacy In The Smart Grid: An Information Flow Analysis

Project Final Report prepared for CIEE and California Energy Commissio

Renewable Integration in Balancing and Ancilliary Services Market in the EU Markets

Over the past decade, Wind Power has experienced tremendous growth all throughout the world, whether that be due to its lack of CO2 emissions or because of the falling costs that make renewable technologies competitive with conventional generation, this trend shows no signs of halting any time soon. As such, renewable energy penetration is expected to keep increasing and as a result of the intermittent nature of these technologies an increased strain will be placed on the global electrical system. This will cause and increase in the importance of the ancillary services and balancing markets as these mechanisms ensure the continued stability of our systems. Wind production forecasts are not perfect and the producers must pay for the imbalance they cause, this paper focuses on a comparative analysis of several mechanisms that can be used as a way of reducing this imbalance cost, from the perspective of a wind energy producer. These mechanisms are the provision of ancillary services, the participation in the intraday market and the application of electricity storage systems. This analysis is carried out for a few European markets, they are then compared as a way of understanding which design elements are more favorable to the inclusion of renewable energy generation