A Product Oriented Modelling Concept: Holons for systems synchronisation and interoperability

Nowadays, enterprises are confronted to growing needs for traceability, product genealogy and product life cycle management. To meet those needs, the enterprise and applications in the enterprise environment have to manage flows of information that relate to flows of material and that are managed in shop floor level. Nevertheless, throughout product lifecycle coordination needs to be established between reality in the physical world (physical view) and the virtual world handled by manufacturing information systems (informational view). This paper presents the "Holon" modelling concept as a means for the synchronisation of both physical view and informational views. Afterwards, we show how the concept of holon can play a major role in ensuring interoperability in the enterprise context

Understanding the Impact of the Cultural Factors on Hospital Information System Acceptance: A Literature Review and Proposal of a New Model

The behavioural intention to accept information system technologies remains an interesting research field for information system management specialists and researchers. However, the cultural dimension has rarely been treated by researchers in the healthcare context. This paper focuses on identifying the impact of national culture on users’ intention to accept the Hospital Information System in public healthcare establishments in Morocco. Thus, we propose a research model which is based on a strong literature review, taking into consideration the previous studies’ recommendations and limitations. The proposed model was developed through the extension of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1989), by Hofstede’s cultural dimensions

A transactional approach for cross-organizational cooperation

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Due to the popularization of Internet, virtual enterprises are expected to become commonplace on the WEB. The concept of virtual enterprise depicts the idea that many applications are the result of cross-organisational cooperation between several actors, playing different roles, who build a relational system which is structured by a common objective. Virtual enterprises can be short- or long-lived. The objective of our work is to develop a framework to install and to support cooperation betwen the partners of a virtual enterprise, with a particular focuss on concurrent engineering applications, and especially on co-design activities. We have chosen a transactional approach which releases programmers from the burden of interaction programming, and this approach has been implemented in a distributed manner using a cooperation model requesting a partner to negotiate cooperation patterns with its direct neighbours

A Negotiation Model for CSCW

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. internationale./http://www.springerlink.comInternational audienceThe aim of this paper is to present our model for a generic and flexible negotiation service and its implementation in Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) environments. Within a cooperative work environment, users naturally need negotiation support mechanisms to study possible alternatives in group decision making. The objective of our work is to build a negotiation model independent of any particular application field. Contrary to studied models, our model focuses on formalizing the negotiation from three points of view: exchanged information between the agents to negotiate (the language), the way this information is exchanged (the protocol), and the internal behavior of an agent (the tactics). In addition to a separation of the problems involved in each one of these three facets of the negotiation, this approach allows also a greater flexibility than traditional systems dedicated to one kind of problems. We chose to use a transactional approach based on speech acts to develop our axiom based negotiation model which has been implemented as a negotiation service in our CSCW environment DisCOO. After the tackled problem presentation, we will expose the state of the art, then the proposed negotiation formal model, and, finally, the implementation

Cooperation Models in Co-Design

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture.Due to the popularization of Internet, cooperative applications of project-enterprise type are expected to become commonplace on the WEB. By project-enterprise, we understand short-lived concurrent engineering enterprises which are created by aggregating several partners around a project and for the duration of this project. They require new technologies to organize their short duration networks. For this purpose, this paper introduces a flexible approach to build cooperation support software by assembling basic generic cooperation bricks. It shows how such a cooperation policy is implemented in a secure way thanks to a flexible transaction model. Our approach is illustrated through an example taken in the AEC domain

Apport de l'approche MDA pour une interopérabilité sémantique : Interopérabilité des systèmes d'information d'entreprise

National audienceIn the last few years, many works have been done in order to ensure interoperability between applications. Enterprise applications integration and the opening of information systems towards integrated access have been the main motivation for the interest around systems interoperability. In this Paper, an MDA based approach for interoperability is proposed. The MDA is an approach for systems development, which increases the power of models in that work. It provides a means for using models for better understanding, designing, constructing, deploying, operating, maintaining and modifying systems. The three primary goals of MDA are portability, interoperability and reusability. In this paper we apply the MDA as a formal base that supports our approach for interoperability between different information system

DisCOO, a really distributed system for cooperation

Article dans revue scientifique avec comité de lecture.The design or realization of any consequent project implies the involvement of several people, and sometimes even of several teams or companies. In addition to the fact that they all work on the same project, the various actors cooperate and collaborate. Indeed the realization of any project is not simply a succession of steps carried out by one actor at a time, but is the result of cooperating actors aiming at the realization of a common goal. It is the concept of concurrent engineering. Concurrent engineering requires cooperation between the various actors and exchange of the data produced by each one of them. More and more are companies using the Internet for data exchanges, the various actors are no longer forced to work in the same geographical place. One speaks then about virtual enterprise or project-enterprise if joint work lasts as long as a project. However, it is not enough just to exchange data for working together, it is also necessary to control and manage these exchanges. Collaboration involving some concurence in the work of several actors, the production of various versions of the ex-changed documents implies a control of these exchanges. The objective of this article is the description of a really distributed system for cooperation. The overall philosophy of our system is the distribution of the exchanges control and the access to the exchanged data in a standard way. The paper's kernel is the formalization of the exchanges control. Adopting a transactional approach for the realization of our system for cooperation, we formalize our cooperative trans-actional system and our distributed criterion of correction (DisCOO-serializability) in ACTA. We use a support example to illustrate our discourse and to apply this formalization to a con-crete case. We supplement description by the presentation of the DisCOO prototype (realized in Java and Prolog upon an ORB) which implements our system

Un modèle d'interaction de services pour la coopération des procédés

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. nationale.National audienceLa conception ou la réalisation de tout projet un tant soit peu conséquent sous-entend l'implication d'un certain nombre de personnes, voire d'un certain nombre d'équipes ou d'entreprises. Ces entreprises interagissant et échangeant des données, de plus en plus via Internet et le "Web", on parle alors d'entreprise virtuelle. Cependant, il ne suffit pas simplement d'échanger des données pour travailler ensemble, il faut aussi contrôler et gérer ces échanges dans le cadre d'une démarche. Chaque entreprise possédant sa propre démarche et donc son propre procédé d'entreprise, la collaboration entre ces entreprises signifie l'interconnexion de ces procédés d'entreprise. Si plusieurs outils de coordination de travail existent, ils ont été développés pour les besoins internes d'une entreprise et sont mal adaptés à la collaboration inter-entreprises. L'approche qui nous a semblés la plus prometteuse pour l'interconnexion de procédés d'entreprises différentes et hétérogènes est l'approche orientée services. L'objectif de cet article est la description d'un modèle d'interaction de services pour l'interconnexion de procédés d'entreprise. Ce modèle se base sur le partage d'information entre services procédés et la coordination de services procédés. Dans cet article, après la description de l'approche orientée service, nous présenterons notre modèle d'interaction de services de manière formelle tout en nous servant d'un exemple support pour illustrer notre propos et appliquer cette formalisation à un cas concret. Nous présenterons enfin et de manière succincte comment ce modèle d'interaction de services procédés est mis en oeuvre au sein de notre prototype DISCOBLE (DIStributed CO-operation and Business prOcess on LinE) réalisé en Java au-dessus d'un bus CORBA

Dynamic Interconnection of Enterprise Workflow Processes

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. internationale./http://www.taylorandfrancis.co.uk/International audienceDue to business process automation development, process interconnection becomes an important matter. Actually, process interconnection mechanisms are indispensable to co-ordinate business processes within and beyond organisation boundaries, aiming, for instance, to strength awareness inside virtual enterprises, to facilitate multinational e-transactions, etc. Therefore, thinking and proposing mechanisms to ensure interconnection between organisational business processes is becoming a hot research topic. Actually, existing business process modelling and enactment systems (workflow systems, project management tools, shared agendas, to do lists, etc.) have been mainly developed to suit enterprise internal needs. Thus most of these systems are not adapted to inter-enterprise co-operation. As we are interested in workflow process integration, we aim, through this paper, to provide a model supporting dynamic inter-enterprise workflow process interconnection.We consider the interconnection of enterprise workflow processes as the management of a workflow of workflows in which several heterogeneous workflow management systems (WFMS) coexist. This paper introduces our process interconnection model, its implementation, and its validation through an experimentation

Un système coopératif basé sur les transactions

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. nationale.National audienceLa conception ou la réalisation de tout projet un tant soit peu conséquent sous-entend l?implication d?un certain nombre de personnes, voire d?un certain nombre d?équipes ou d?entreprises. Outre le fait qu?ils travaillent tous sur le même projet, les différents acteurs coopèrent et collaborent. En effet la réalisation de tout projet n?est pas faite en une succession d?étapes menées par un seul acteur mais par une synergie d?acteurs coopérant à la réalisation d?un but commun. C?est le concept même d?ingénierie concourante. Celle-ci nécessite une coopération entre les différents acteurs et un échange des données produite par chacun d?entre eux. De plus en plus d?entreprises utilisant internet pour l?échange de données, les différents acteurs ne sont alors plus soumis à l?obligation de travailler dans un même lieu géographique. On parle alors d?entreprise virtuelle ou d?entreprise-projet si le travail en commun dure le temps d?un projet. Cependant, il ne suffit pas simplement d?échanger des données pour travailler ensemble, il faut aussi contrôler et gérer ces échanges. La collaboration impliquant une certaine concourance dans le travail de plusieurs acteurs, la production de différentes versions des documents échangés implique un contrôle des échanges. L?objectif de cet article est la description d?un système de coopération réellement distribué. La philosophie globale de notre système est la distribution du contrôle des échanges et l?accès aux données échangées de manière standard. Adoptant une approche transactionnelle pour la réalisation de notre système de coopération, nous avons formalisés notre système transactionnel coopératif et notre critère de correction distribué (DisCOO-sérialisabilité). Dans cet article, nous nous servons d?un exemple support pour illustrer notre propos et appliquer cette formalisation à un cas concret. Nous présentons le prototype DisCOO (réalisé en Java et Prolog au-dessus d?un ORB) mettant en oeuvre notre système