Implementing collaboration moderator service to support various phases of virtual organisations

Research into moderators, which support collaborative teams by proactively making team members aware of actions or potential problems which may affect them, began in the 1990s, in the context of supporting collaborations during concurrent engineering projects. This paper provides a background to the evolution of moderators and explores their role in supporting virtual organisations. A collaboration moderator (CM) is an evolution of earlier moderators and is capable of behaving differently for different types of users and therefore caters for the varying requirements of individual users depending on the roles they have in the collaborations. This paper describes the architecture and components of a CM from an implementation perspective. Prototype CMs have been developed during the EU-funded SYNERGY project, and two use cases for which the prototype CMs were implemented as a service (a Pre-Creation use case and an Operational use case) are also discussed in this paper

An information-centric approach to enterprise modelling for product recovery

Recovery of used products and materials is becoming a field of rapidly growing importance. The scope and scale of product recovery have expanded tremendously over the past decade. Recent changes in government legislation in various countries and increasing customer awareness towards greener products have forced the manufacturers to rethink their business strategies. This has also resulted in new business opportunities in the area of remanufacturing and a large number of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have appeared in the recovery industry. These SMEs include reprocessing and recycling companies as well as freight forwarders and warehousing companies. Recovery firms have to deal with customer demands and returns that are largely dependant on the state of the art in technology. They change without any warnings and unfortunately a third party recovery firm has little control over them as compared to an original equipment manufacturer (OEM). In such situations, these companies must not only quickly adapt to the changes but also continuously evolve to survive in the market. They have to be versatile, changeable and able to quickly redesign and modify their own facilities and processes to cope with the changing situations. This paper presents an information–centred formal model for product recovery enterprises to aid the designers with modelling and evaluation tools to enable progressive design of the enterprise. The modelling exercise in this work involves description of the different views of the enterprise, namely strategic view, physical view, functional view and performance view. The analysis of the system (as part of the performance view) has been carried out using simulation

Modelling and optimisation of a product recovery network

An appropriate logistics network is an important element of the infrastructure of any product recovery company. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) constitute a major fraction of the product recovery industry with a different business objective and scale of operation from those of original equipment manufacturers. This paper addresses the network design issues for SMEs involved in product recovery activities. A mathematical formulation is presented in an SME context and a subsequent simulation model is developed. A genetic algorithm approach is presented for optimising the network for a single product scenario

Generating rules from data mining for collaboration moderator services

A Moderator is a knowledge based system that supports collaborative working by raising awareness of the priorities and requirements of other team members. However, the amount of advice a Moderator can provide is limited by the knowledge it contains on team members. The use of data mining techniques can contribute towards automating the process of knowledge acquisition for a Moderator and enable hidden data patterns and relationships to be discovered to facilitate the moderation process. A novel approach is presented, consisting of a knowledge discovery framework which provides a semi-automatic methodology to generate rules by inserting relationships discovered as a result of data mining into a generic template. To demonstrate the knowledge discovery framework methodology an application case is described. The application case acquires knowledge for a Moderator to make project partners aware of how to best formulate a proposal for a European research project by data mining summaries of successful past projects. Findings from the application case are presented

An application of a rule-based system towards resolving exception events of business processes within a small Virtual Organization

The motivation behind this research work is explained first within the context of a European Union funded project called “SYNERGY”. A business scenario of a small virtual organization is presented to discuss what happens if exception events occur within the life cycle of a business scenario, and how they could be resolved to enable the business to operate successfully. To investigate these aspects, the paper briefly explores the role of events within the context of “Collaboration Moderator Services” which aim to increase awareness between collaborative partners during the workflow of a business scenario and then suggests a possible remedy through the use of a rule-based system. A description of a methodology adopted for creation and capture of knowledge needed to resolve the exception events, transform the captured knowledge into rule-sets and implement them in a commercial rule-based system – “XpertRule” is given. Screen shots of this implementation are provided in the paper. Based on this implementation, the paper then concludes with a discussion

Prioritising tendering activities for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

The tendering process involves high costs, in terms of time and effort and therefore it is not desirable or sustainable to tender for projects unless the chances of winning are good. Small to medium sized companies do not have enough human resources to enable staff to be dedicated to the job of tending and monitoring market opportunities, and hence company officials have to fit in this job around their usual duties. This paper proposes a knowledge discovery and mining approach to assist the tender offer selection process. Knowledge discovery and mining assures identification and matching of the areas of interest and other criteria of selection of the tender offers, while multi–criteria decision making supports the consideration of other relevant factors for selection

A framework for collaboration moderator services to support knowledge based collaboration

Knowledge sharing is a major challenge for collaborative networks and is essential to improve the productivity and quality of decisions taken by both collaborative networks and their member organisations. A critical aspect of effective knowledge sharing within virtual organizations (VOs) is the identification of the most appropriate knowledge for reuse or exploitation in a particular context, as this requires efficient tools and mechanisms for its identification, sharing or transfer. Additionally, partners need to be aware of when knowledge needs to be shared, the implications of doing so and when their decisions are likely to affect other partners within the collaboration. Therefore, tools and methods are needed for identification, acquisition, maintenance and evolution of knowledge and to support effective knowledge sharing which includes awareness of possible consequences of actions and increased awareness of other partner’s needs during the collaboration. The Collaboration Moderator Services (CMS) are designed to address these issues relating to knowledge based collaboration by providing a set of functionalities to raise users’ awareness of opportunities, problem areas and lessons learnt from and during collaborations. This paper presents the system architecture and specifications of the CMS within the context of the SYNERGY system, whose purpose is to offer interoperable service utilities to help enterprises plan, setup and run complex knowledge collaborations. The CMS are designed to support both individual organizations and collaborations as a whole throughout the VO lifecycle and the different functionalities provided by CMS to achieve this are discussed in this paper