Interoperability and Standards: The Way for Innovative Design in Networked Working Environments

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityIn today’s networked economy, strategic business partnerships and outsourcing has become the dominant paradigm where companies focus on core competencies and skills, as creative design, manufacturing, or selling. However, achieving seamless interoperability is an ongoing challenge these networks are facing, due to their distributed and heterogeneous nature. Part of the solution relies on adoption of standards for design and product data representation, but for sectors predominantly characterized by SMEs, such as the furniture sector, implementations need to be tailored to reduce costs. This paper recommends a set of best practices for the fast adoption of the ISO funStep standard modules and presents a framework that enables the usage of visualization data as a way to reduce costs in manufacturing and electronic catalogue design.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan

The Standard Problem

Crafting, adhering to, and maintaining standards is an ongoing challenge. This paper uses a framework based on common models to explore the standard problem: the impossibility of creating, implementing or maintain definitive common models in an open system. The problem arises from uncertainty driven by variations in operating context, standard quality, differences in implementation, and drift over time. Fitting work by conformance services repairs these gaps between a standard and what is required for interoperation, using several strategies: (a) Universal conformance (all agents access the same standard); (b) Mediated conformance (an interoperability layer supports heterogeneous agents) and (c) Localized conformance, (autonomous adaptive agents manage their own needs). Conformance methods include incremental design, modular design, adaptors, and creating interactive and adaptive agents. Machine learning should have a major role in adaptive fitting. Choosing a conformance service depends on the stability and homogeneity of shared tasks, and whether common models are shared ahead of time or are adjusted at task time. This analysis thus decouples interoperability and standardization. While standards facilitate interoperability, interoperability is achievable without standardization.Comment: Keywords: information standard, interoperability, machine learning, technology evaluation 25 Pages Main text word Count: 5108 Abstract word count: 206 Tables: 1 Figures: 7 Boxes: 2 Submitted to JAMI

New product development in an emerging economy: analysing the role of supplier involvement practices by using Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo technique

The research question is whether the positive relationship found between supplier involvement practices and new product development performances in developed economies also holds in emerging economies. The role of supplier involvement practices in new product development performance is yet to be substantially investigated in the emerging economies (other than China). This premise was examined by distributing a survey instrument (Jayaram’s (2008) published survey instrument that has been utilised in developed economies) to Malaysian manufacturing companies. To gauge the relationship between the supplier involvement practices and new product development (NPD) project performance of 146 companies, structural equation modelling was adopted. Our findings prove that supplier involvement practices have a significant positive impact on NPD project performance in an emerging economy with respect to quality objectives, design objectives, cost objectives, and “time-to-market” objectives. Further analysis using the Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm, yielding a more credible and feasible differentiation, confirmed these results (even in the case of an emerging economy) and indicated that these practices have a 28% impact on variance of NPD project performance. This considerable effect implies that supplier involvement is a must have, although further research is needed to identify the contingencies for its practices

Conformance Testing for the AUTOSAR Standard

International audienceThe paper presents why AUTOSAR conformance tests are required, what has been achieved, and how 3 car manufacturers will use conformance tests as part of their vehicle E/E engineering process. Important topics covered are the need for conformance testing when developing a standard, the relationship between conformance and interoperability, the need for interoperability of ECUs in a vehicle, and the need to avoid diverging implementation of a standard

Methodology for enterprise interoperability assessment

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresWith the evolution of modern enterprises and the increasing market competitiveness, the creation of ecosystems with large amounts of data and knowledge generally needing to be exchanged electronically, is arising. However, this enterprise inter and intra-connectivity is suffering from interoperability issues. Not visible when it is effective, the lack of interoperability poses a series of challenging problems to the industrial community, which can reduce the envisaged efficiency and increase costs. Those problems are mostly caused by misinterpretations of data at the systems level, but problems at the organizational and human levels may pose equivalent difficulties. Existing research and technology provides several frameworks to assist the development of collaborative environments and enterprise networks with well-defined methods to facilitate interoperability. Nonetheless, the interoperability process is not guaranteed and is not easily sustainable, changing upon frequent market and requirement variations. For these reasons, there is a need for a testing methodology to assess the capability of enterprises to cooperate at a certain point in time. This dissertation proposes a methodology to assess that capability, with a corresponding framework to evaluate the interoperability process, applying eliminatory tests to assess the structure of the organizations, the conceptual models and their implementation. This work contributes to increase the chances enterprises have of interoperating effectively, and enables the adoption of extraordinary measures to improve their current interoperability situation

Guidance for the development of accessibility evaluation tools following the Unified Software Development Process

Automated and semi-automated accessibility evaluation tools are key to streamline the process of accessibility assessment, and ultimately ensure that software products, contents, and services meet accessibility requirements. Different evaluation tools may better fit different needs and concerns, accounting for a variety of corporate and external policies, content types, invocation methods, deployment contexts, exploitation models, intended audiences and goals; and the specific overall process where they are introduced. This has led to the proliferation of many evaluation tools tailored to specific contexts. However, tool creators, who may be not familiar with the realm of accessibility and may be part of a larger project, lack any systematic guidance when facing the implementation of accessibility evaluation functionalities. Herein we present a systematic approach to the development of accessibility evaluation tools, leveraging the different artifacts and activities of a standardized development process model (the Unified Software Development Process), and providing templates of these artifacts tailored to accessibility evaluation tools. The work presented specially considers the work in progress in this area by the W3C/WAI Evaluation and Report Working Group (ERT WG