ICT-based solution approach for collaborative delivery of customised products

© 2016 Taylor & Francis. Growing interest on business collaboration motivates todays industries, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to establish and manage dynamic and non-hierarchical business networks to respond to market opportunities with added business benefits. This business environment requires concurrent work and real-time information sharing between key business partners in order to design and develop customised products. The use of traditional communication media such as e-mail, phone and fax is not satisfactory to get real-time information and is time-consuming and most often ineffective. In such environments, an Information and Communication Technology (ICT)/Web-based technology supports real-time information sharing among networked SMEs for the collaborative design and manufacturing of customised products. This study proposes an innovative ICT platform supporting SMEs collaboration, through Web and the Internet of Things technologies, which follows the Net-Challenge conceptual approach and methodological guidelines for SMEs to form and operate virtual organisations for the collaborative development and delivery of customised products. The ICT Platform was assessed in three different industry domains, namely the textile and apparel, the footwear and the machine tools, respectively. This ICT solution promotes collaboration, with substantial advantages for SMEs including the reduction of costs and delivery time and improvement of the innovation potential

A preliminary formal specification of virtual organization creation with RAISE specification language

Recently, several flavors of Formal Methods (FMs) have been gaining industrial acceptance and production quality software tools have begun emerging. Domain Engineering (DE) has been introduced as one of outstanding ideas in software development. It serves form al methods that provide a rigorous, mathematical based framework (domain model) for specifying, defining, and verifying systems in the software development. The increasing demands for extended products and services along with advances in IT industry have motivated researchers to create Virtual Organizations (VOs) in order to better respond to business opportunities and produce qualitative services and products. The purpose of this paper is to describe Virtual Organization and Domain engineering with introducing formal methods especially RAISE as a formal method that has been used successfully on diverse applications. Then, a primary formal model is presented using RAISE method and its language (RSL) formula for the improvement of VO creation process. Formal model presented in this paper is provable to implement. It improves reusability and reliability in such environments.Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Experimentation of Rational Trust Evolution and Sustainability in Dynamic VOs

Part 10: Sustainability and TrustInternational audiencePiloted semi-automated mechanisms for monitoring and managing Virtual Organizations (VO) on the bases of established trust for collaboration that has already started need to be developed. Various researches in dynamic VOs have not established a semi-automated solution to manage the changing trustworthiness of the partners in the collaboration. The experimentation on semi-automated analysis of dynamic trustworthiness of VO indicates that a statistical standard deviation model promises more to be used to assess partners who sustained trust or failed to sustain trust in a period of time. This paper proposes a semi-automated TrustSEv (Trust Sustainability and Evolution) system for assessing partner’s trust sustainability in the VO during evolution phase. Further, the paper establishes a linear relationship between objective trust level of the individual partner constituting the VO, and the strength of the VO itself

A Novel Framework for Virtual Organization Creation on Cloud

Part 12: Collaboration PlatformsInternational audienceNowadays, virtual organizations (VOs) need to utilize new technologies in order to respond rapidly to collaboration opportunities. Cloud computing is a new paradigm that could leverage VO efficiency and flexibility whilst it could decrease VO expenditures and response time. Also, VO breeding environment (VBE) is an approach to create efficient VOs. Thus, combination of VBE and cloud computing may facilitate VOs creation and reactions to upcoming opportunities. This paper has proposed a framework to create VO on cloud environment, including three phases: creating and managing VBE on cloud, moving VBE on cloud and finally creating VO on cloud. The proposed framework may be considered as a solution to cope with VO requirements