Enabling interoperable manufacturing knowledge sharing in PLM

Traditional approaches to integrated information sharing fall far short of meeting the requirements for the seamless sharing of knowledge to support enterprise activities through the product lifecycle. Recent advances in ontological approaches to manufacturing knowledge organisation is showing promise that a step change in knowledge sharing capability can be achieved from the application of rigorous logic based languages, combined with methods for modelling context relationships. This paper discusses the issues involved in providing an interoperable manufacturing knowledge sharing environment and proposes a manufacturing foundation ontology as a key requirement for interoperable manufacturing knowledge sharing

Towards an ontology-based platform-independent framework for developing KBE systems in the aerospace industry

Aerospace engineering is considered to be one of the most complex and advanced branches of engineering. The use of knowledge based engineering (KBE) technologies has played a major role in automating routine design activities in view of supporting the cost-effective and timely development of a product. However, technologies employed within KBE systems are usually platform-specific. The nature of these platform-specific models has significantly limited knowledge abstraction and reusability in KBE systems. This research paper presents a novel approach that illustrates the use of platform-independent knowledge models for the development of KBE systems in the aerospace industry. The use of semantic technologies through the definition of generic-purposed ontologies has been employed to support the notion of independent knowledge models that strengthens knowledge reusability in KBE systems. This approach has been validated qualitatively through experts’ opinion and its benefit realised in the abstraction, reusability and maintainability of KBE systems

Road2CPS priorities and recommendations for research and innovation in cyber-physical systems

This document summarises the findings of the Road2CPS project, co-financed by the European Commission under the H2020 Research and Innovation Programme, to develop a roadmap and recommendations for strategic action required for future deployment of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). The term Cyber-Physical System describes hardware-software systems, which tightly couple the physical world and the virtual world. They are established from networked embedded systems that are connected with the outside world through sensors and actuators and have the capability to collaborate, adapt, and evolve. In the ARTEMIS Strategic Research Agenda 2016, CPS are described as ‘Embedded Intelligent ICT Systems’ that make products smarter, more interconnected, interdependent, collaborative, and autonomous. In the future world of CPS, a huge number of devices connected to the physical world will be able to exchange data with each other, access web services, and interact with people. Moreover, information systems will sense, monitor and even control the physical world via Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things (HiPEAC Vision 2015). Cyber-Physical Systems find their application in many highly relevant areas to our society: multi-modal transport, health, smart factories, smart grids and smart cities amongst others. The deployment of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is expected to increase substantially over the next decades, holding great potential for novel applications and innovative product development. Digital technologies have already pervaded day-to-day life massively, affecting all kinds of interactions between humans and their environment. However, the inherent complexity of CPSs, as well as the need to meet optimised performance and comply with essential requirements like safety, privacy, security, raises many questions that are currently being explored by the research community. Road2CPS aims at accelerating uptake and implementation of these efforts. The Road2CPS project identifying and analysing the relevant technology fields and related research priorities to fuel the development of trustworthy CPS, as well as the specific technologies, needs and barriers for a successful implementation in different application domains and to derive recommendations for strategic action. The document at hand was established through an interactive, community-based approach, involving over 300 experts from academia, industry and policy making through a series of workshops and consultations. Visions and priorities of recently produced roadmaps in the area of CPS, IoT (Internet of Things), SoS (System-of-Systems) and FoF (Factories of the Future) were discussed, complemented by sharing views and perspectives on CPS implementation in application domains, evolving multi-sided eco-systems as well as business and policy related barriers, enablers and success factors. From the workshops and accompanying activities recommendations for future research and innovation activities were derived and topics and timelines for their implementation proposed. Amongst the technological topics, and related future research priorities ‘integration, interoperability, standards’ ranged highest in all workshops. The topic is connected to digital platforms and reference architectures, which have already become a key priority theme for the EC and their Digitisation Strategy as well as the work on the right standards to help successful implementation of CPSs. Other themes of very high technology/research relevance revealed to be ‘modelling and simulation’, ‘safety and dependability’, ‘security and privacy’, ‘big data and real-time analysis’, ‘ubiquitous autonomy and forecasting’ as well as ‘HMI/human machine awareness’. Next to this, themes emerged including ‘decision making and support’, ‘CPS engineering (requirements, design)’, ‘CPS life-cycle management’, ‘System-of-Systems’, ‘distributed management’, ‘cognitive CPS’, ‘emergence, complexity, adaptability and flexibility’ and work on the foundations of CPS and ‘cross-disciplinary research/CPS Science’

Lean, agile, resilient and green supply chain management interoperability assessment methodology

Dissertação para obtenção de grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão Industrial (MEGI)Supply Chain Management has become a tactic asset for the current global competition situation. Innovative strategies such as Lean, Agile, Resilient and Green emerged as a response, requiring high levels of cooperation and of great complexity. However, the strategic alignment of operations with partners in supply chains is affected by lack of interoperability. The present work provides a framework to enhance SC competitiveness and performance by assessing interoperable SCM Practices applied in automotive industry. Through a pragmatic interoperability approach, this methodology describes in detail the form of application using analytical hierarchical process (AHP) and Fuzzy sets as support decision making models, ensuring a systematic approach to the analysis of interoperability with appropriate criteria for assessment of situations that require high levels of collaboration between partners. Through a case study in a Portuguese automaker, it was possible to test the methodology and analyse which areas lack interoperability in the implementation of SCM practices

NEGOSEIO: framework for the sustainability of model-oriented enterprise interoperability

Dissertation to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical and Computer Engineering(Industrial Information Systems)This dissertation tackles the problematic of Enterprise Interoperability in the current globally connected world. The evolution of the Information and Communication Technologies has endorsed the establishment of fast, secure and robust data exchanges, promoting the development of networked solutions. This allowed the specialisation of enterprises (particularly SMEs) and favoured the development of complex and heterogeneous provider systems. Enterprises are abandoning their self-centrism and working together on the development of more complete solutions. Entire business solutions are built integrating several enterprises (e.g., in supply chains, enterprise nesting) towards a common objective. Additionally, technologies, platforms, trends, standards and regulations keep evolving and demanding enterprises compliance. This evolution needs to be continuous, and is naturally followed by a constant update of each networked enterprise’s interfaces, assets, methods and processes. This unstable environment of perpetual change is causing major concerns in both SMEs and customers as the current interoperability grounds are frail, easily leading to periods of downtime, where business is not possible. The pressure to restore interoperability rapidly often leads to patching and to the adoption of immature solutions, contributing to deteriorate even more the interoperable environment. This dissertation proposes the adoption of NEGOSEIO, a framework that tackles interoperability issues by developing strong model-based knowledge assets and promoting continuous improvement and adaptation for increasing the sustainability of interoperability on enterprise systems. It presents the research motivations and the developed framework’s main blocks, which include model-based knowledge management, collaboration service-oriented architectures implemented over a cloud-based solution, and focusing particularly on its negotiation core mechanism to handle inconsistencies and solutions for the detected interoperability problems. It concludes by validating the research and the proposed framework, presenting its application in a real business case of aerospace mission design on the European Space Agency (ESA).FP7 ENSEMBLE, UNITE, MSEE and IMAGINE project

Sustainability of systems interoperability in dynamic business networks

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresCollaborative networked environments emerged with the spread of the internet, contributing to overcome past communication barriers, and identifying interoperability as an essential property to support businesses development. When achieved seamlessly, efficiency is increased in the entire product life cycle support. However, due to the different sources of knowledge, models and semantics, enterprise organisations are experiencing difficulties exchanging critical information, even when they operate in the same business environments. To solve this issue, most of them try to attain interoperability by establishing peer-to-peer mappings with different business partners, or use neutral data and product standards as the core for information sharing, in optimized networks. In current industrial practice, the model mappings that regulate enterprise communications are only defined once, and most of them are hardcoded in the information systems. This solution has been effective and sufficient for static environments, where enterprise and product models are valid for decades. However, more and more enterprise systems are becoming dynamic, adapting and looking forward to meet further requirements; a trend that is causing new interoperability disturbances and efficiency reduction on existing partnerships. Enterprise Interoperability (EI) is a well established area of applied research, studying these problems, and proposing novel approaches and solutions. This PhD work contributes to that research considering enterprises as complex and adaptive systems, swayed to factors that are making interoperability difficult to sustain over time. The analysis of complexity as a neighbouring scientific domain, in which features of interoperability can be identified and evaluated as a benchmark for developing a new foundation of EI, is here proposed. This approach envisages at drawing concepts from complexity science to analyse dynamic enterprise networks and proposes a framework for sustaining systems interoperability, enabling different organisations to evolve at their own pace, answering the upcoming requirements but minimizing the negative impact these changes can have on their business environment

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

Reference ontologies for interoperability across multiple assembly systems

The role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is crucial for future manufacturing organisations in order to support effective collaboration and information sharing. However, the contemporary ICT-based systems lack the required ability to adequately support interoperability across multiple domain systems. The capability of such ICT-based systems to interoperate is impeded by the semantic conflicts arising from loosely defined meanings and intents of the participating system concepts. The aim of this paper is to investigate the interoperability of assembly systems at multiple levels of concept specialisations using the concept of a formal reference ontology. Formal ontologies are providing a promising way to computationally capture the domain meanings which can subsequently provide a base to support interoperability across multiple systems and in our case multiple assembly systems. This paper takes the example of manufacturing bill of materials concept and three different domain-specific interpretations to explore and demonstrate the potential of formal reference ontologies to support interoperability

Hybrid Models as Transdisciplinary Research Enablers

This is the final version. Available on open access from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordModelling and simulation (M&S) techniques are frequently used in Operations Research (OR) to aid decision-making. With growing complexity of systems to be modelled, an increasing number of studies now apply multiple M&S techniques or hybrid simulation (HS) to represent the underlying system of interest. A parallel but related theme of research is extending the HS approach to include the development of hybrid models (HM). HM extends the M&S discipline by combining theories, methods and tools from across disciplines and applying multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary solutions to practice. In the broader OR literature, there are numerous examples of cross-disciplinary approaches in model development. However, within M&S, there is limited evidence of the application of conjoined methods for building HM. Where a stream of such research does exist, the integration of approaches is mostly at a technical level. In this paper, we argue that HM requires cross-disciplinary research engagement and a conceptual framework. The framework will enable the synthesis of discipline-specific methods and techniques, further cross-disciplinary research within the M&S community, and will serve as a transcending framework for the transdisciplinary alignment of M&S research with domain knowledge, hypotheses and theories from diverse disciplines. The framework will support the development of new composable HM methods, tools and applications. Although our framework is built around M&S literature, it is generally applicable to other disciplines, especially those with a computational element. The objective is to motivate a transdisciplinarity-enabling framework that supports the collaboration of research efforts from multiple disciplines, allowing them to grow into transdisciplinary research