Process Oriented Collaboration in Grid-Environments: A Case Study in the Construction Industry

This paper addresses the process-oriented collaboration based on a grid-based platform for the support of virtual organizations (VO), illustrated on the example of the construction industry. Distributed, organizational and IT-structures of teams involved in vintage complex projects cannot be managed with conventional methods in an appropriate manner. Both using a grid platform and grid-based services, in conjunction with semantic methods for consistency saving and goal-oriented process management can increase the efficiency of collaboration processes in large-scale projects. A hybrid grid- and web service-based architecture for the next generation of VO service and a gateway solution was developed integrating the process-oriented perspective and prototypically implemented. The problem, as well as the solution on the basis of the hybrid system architecture combing the benefits of the cutting-edge technologies, the methodical concept for modeling VO processes and their automated execution on a grid platform are discussed in detail

New generation web services as an infrastructure for virtual organization management

This PhD dissertation discusses various possibilities for communication and collaboration in virtual organizations with the help of ICT tools and Web 2.0 services. The work defends the thesis that the Web 2.0 services present appropriate grounds for efficient communication and collaboration, but they require additional development in some fields. The dissertation enlightens the problem of communication from the viewpoint of civil engineering and sociology, identifies a model of communication in civil engineering, investigates the effect of organization structure on communication, and presents the difference in the topology of communication links between traditional and ICT approaches to collaboration. It is shown that the existing ICT systems generally do not support the informal communication. Therefore the existing social, technological and business trends in the field of information and communication technologies for collaboration are investigated. Because of the comparison with the existing surveys and the assessment of the impact of technological populism on knowledge workers in civil engineering, a survey focused on our research agenda is conducted. It shows that the barriers for an extensive ICT usage are still represented mainly by the general attitude suggesting that the old ways of performing tasks have worked well throughout the years and changes are not necessary. The final section presents the design of the architecture of the informal and distributed ICT system for collaboration based on theoretic grounds and results obtained from the survey on the ICT usage in the Slovene construction industry. We have created the prototype which indirectly supports the hypothesis

Semantic Grid Technologies in Computer Integrated Construction

Important goal of computer science in civil engineering projects is to facilitate dynamic collaboration among the companies, improvements of services and reuse of programs, data, information and knowledge. Civil engineering has some specific requirements concerning computer applications, which arise from the irrepeatability and scale of particular civil engineering products, processes and collaborating groups. Internet technologies are basis for linking processes in all construction phases, which leads to computer integrated construction. Computing grid, or shortly grid is a service infrastructure, which is being developed to facilitate infinite and seamless sharing of widely distributed, heterogeneous resources, hence, contributing towards the solution of complex engineering problems. A hypothesis of this work is that the grid can become viable platform for computer integrated construction, if semantic technologies are used for its development, i.e. ontologies and metadata, information, ontology and resource broker grid services. The hypothesis is tested by developing an ontology that defines the concept of a grid resource to describe specific resources in a grid environment. The aforementioned grid services are included in the design of a grid system, and are developed and deployed in a test bed. The test bed allows for the execution of complex grid applications, which take the form of workflows. It is shown that the ontology and the metadata about grid resources are useful when enabling, discovering, selecting and dynamically integrating resources on the grid. This approach yields several improvements against existing systems: a higher level of abstraction when developing and executing innovative and powerful engineering applications, greater flexibility, resource utilization and security, which is very important for dynamic collaboration within virtual organizations