Collaborative networks: A pillar of digital transformation

UID/EEA/00066/2019 POCI-01-0247-FEDER-033926The notion of digital transformation encompasses the adoption and integration of a variety of new information and communication technologies for the development of more efficient, flexible, agile, and sustainable solutions for industrial systems. Besides technology, this process also involves new organizational forms and leads to new business models. As such, this work addresses the contribution of collaborative networks to such a transformation. An analysis of the collaborative aspects required in the various dimensions of the 4th industrial revolution is conducted based on a literature survey and experiences gained from several research projects. A mapping between the identified collaboration needs and research results that can be adopted from the collaborative networks area is presented. Furthermore, several new research challenges are identified and briefly characterized.publishe

An environment to support negotiation and contracting in collaborative networks

During the last years, manufacturing and service industries faced a global change in the production paradigm. They have to continuously adapt their operating principles in reaction to new business or collaboration opportunities, where a natural reaction is a shift to a new business paradigm with the creation of strategic alliances for product or services development, but also for innovative and emergent business services design. On one hand, the process of creating such alliances can be rather simple if organizations share the same geographical and cultural context. But on the other hand, considering different conditions, there might be a low success rate in the creation of successful consortia. One known reason for such low rate are the delays resulting from negotiations in the establishment of collaboration commitments, represented by contracts or agreements, which are crucial in the creation of such alliances. The collaborative networks discipline covers the study of networks of organizations specially when supported by computer networks. This thesis contributes with research in this field describing the creation process of virtual organizations, and proposing a negotiation support environment to help participants in the negotiation of the consortia creation process and in the co-design of new business services. A negotiation support environment is therefore proposed and described with its main requirements, adopted negotiation protocol, conceptual architecture, models, and software environment. To demonstrate the feasibility of the implementation of the proposed systems, a proof-ofconcept software prototype was implemented and tested using some specific scenarios. This thesis work has been validated adopting a methodology that includes: (i) validation in the research community; (ii) validation in a solar industry network; and (iii) validation by comparison analysis

Negotiation Support for Co-design of Business Services

Part 3: Product-Service SystemsInternational audienceDuring the last years, manufacturing and service industries faced a global change in the production paradigm. Besides the manufactured products, companies also focus their attention on business services that can add value to their products, which often need to be provided by different entities, offering different competences/services that collaborate to achieve a service-enhanced product. In this context, the collaborative process of design and/or creation of new business services can also be improved if supported by a negotiation environment that facilitates the interaction among the various involved entities, and the process of modeling and reaching agreements. For that, this paper presents a support system for service co-design negotiation that facilitates the design of new business services under a collaborative perspective