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

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

Enterprise design information: the key to improved competitive advantage

Changes occur very quickly within competitive business environments, and successful companies need to respond quickly by producing and delivering improved products and services, or by changing their business strategies and operational systems. Such changes may require redesign of resources, processes, strategies or organizational structures within the enterprise. Redesign is an expensive and risky process. This paper reports on how information models, databases and support tools, can be used to reduce uncertainty, by modelling the desired enterprise, and predicting its performance, before costly physical implementations are undertaken. Thus, management can gain valuable insight into the potential efficiency and performance capabilities of the redesigned enterprise, and minimize the risks associated with change. An overview is provided of an information-centred, multi-view design system to facilitate and accelerate the design or redesign of manufacturing enterprises. The design system includes both an information model, to store details of the proposed enterprise, and multiple design tools to support both the building and evaluation of the model. The design tools enable the model to be viewed in different ways, thus emphasizing and clarifying particular aspects of the design, and enabling the potential performance of the designed enterprise to be predicted

Textual data mining for industrial knowledge management and text classification: a business oriented approach

Textual databases are useful sources of information and knowledge and if these are well utilised then issues related to future project management and product or service quality improvement may be resolved. A large part of corporate information, approximately 80%, is available in textualdata formats. TextClassification techniques are well known for managing on-line sources of digital documents. The identification of key issues discussed within textualdata and their classification into two different classes could help decision makers or knowledge workers to manage their future activities better. This research is relevant for most text based documents and is demonstrated on Post Project Reviews (PPRs) which are valuable source of information and knowledge. The application of textualdatamining techniques for discovering useful knowledge and classifying textualdata into different classes is a relatively new area of research. The research work presented in this paper is focused on the use of hybrid applications of textmining or textualdatamining techniques to classify textualdata into two different classes. The research applies clustering techniques at the first stage and Apriori Association Rule Mining at the second stage. The Apriori Association Rule of Mining is applied to generate Multiple Key Term Phrasal Knowledge Sequences (MKTPKS) which are later used for classification. Additionally, studies were made to improve the classification accuracies of the classifiers i.e. C4.5, K-NN, Naïve Bayes and Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The classification accuracies were measured and the results compared with those of a single term based classification model. The methodology proposed could be used to analyse any free formatted textualdata and in the current research it has been demonstrated on an industrial dataset consisting of Post Project Reviews (PPRs) collected from the construction industry. The data or information available in these reviews is codified in multiple different formats but in the current research scenario only free formatted text documents are examined. Experiments showed that the performance of classifiers improved through adopting the proposed methodology

Managing corporate memory on the semantic web

Corporate memory (CM) is the total body of data, information and knowledge required to deliver the strategic aims and objectives of an organization. In the current market, the rapidly increasing volume of unstructured documents in the enterprises has brought the challenge of building an autonomic framework to acquire, represent, learn and maintain CM, and efficiently reason from it to aid in knowledge discovery and reuse. The concept of semantic web is being introduced in the enterprises to structure information in a machine readable way and enhance the understandability of the disparate information. Due to the continual popularity of the semantic web, this paper develops a framework for CM management on the semantic web. The proposed approach gleans information from the documents, converts into a semantic web resource using resource description framework (RDF) and RDF Schema and then identifies relations among them using latent semantic analysis technique. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated through empirical experiments conducted on two case studies. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

Ontology mapping using description logic and bridging axioms

In the last decade various proposals have been made to promote fruitful and efficient collaboration among small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the form of virtual enterprises (VEs). The success of VEs depends on seamless interoperability of knowledge and data sharing. Ontology implementation is becoming an essential and successful tool for VE operation but commonly ontology mapping is also required to achieve interoperability. The current state of the art in ontology mapping indicates that mapping systems require a great deal of human intervention as mapping brings various types of conflicts and inconsistencies. The ontology mapping method proposed in this paper uses description logic (DL) based bridging axioms between the ontologies. Atomic concept level similarity has been taken as input to establish the complex concepts and roles level mapping. Manufacturing and marketing enterprise ontologies are considered and their mapping has been demonstrated as an example of the proposed mapping process. © 2012 Elsevier B.V

Managing reuse in manufacturing system modelling and design: a value net approach

In the past, reuse programs have assumed that technical solutions would overcome barriers to effective reuse. However, recent retrospectives of reuse programs show that organizational factors can greatly affect the implementation of a reuse program. Reuse is often approached as an independent collection of tools and techniques, and the technical and non-technical aspects are commonly examined separately. This research proposes that all the factors affecting reuse are interdependent and therefore should be studied simultaneously. It is therefore very important that all elements and relationships are identified and documented in a structured, clear manner. The concept of value nets, based on game theory has been identified as a means of capturing the different factors involved in the reuse driven software process. The value net is a useful model for viewing multiple interactions from various perspectives. The value net of the reuse-driven software development process is a map of the various factors and players identified in the reuse process, and the interactions occurring between the players. Hence the reuse value net helps in identifying the important factors that can provide the points of leverage to make the reuse process more efficient

A manufacturing system engineering ontology model on the semantic web for inter-enterprise collaboration

This paper investigates ontology-based approaches for representing information semantics and in particular the World Wide Web. A general manufacturing system engineering (MSE) knowledge representation scheme, called an MSE ontology model, to facilitate communication and information exchange in inter-enterprise, multi-disciplinary engineering design teams has been developed and encoded in the standard semantic web language. The proposed approach focuses on how to support information autonomy that allows the individual team members to keep their own preferred languages or information models rather than requiring them all to adopt standardized terminology. The MSE ontology model provides efficient access by common mediated meta-models across all engineering design teams through semantic matching. This paper also shows how the primitives of Web Ontology Language (OWL) can be used for expressing simple mappings between the mediated MSE ontology model and individual ontologies

Description logic-based knowledge merging for concrete- and fuzzy- domain ontologies

Enterprises, especially virtual enterprises, are nowadays becoming more knowledge intensive and adopting efficient knowledge management systems to boost their competitiveness. The major challenge for knowledge management for virtual enterprises is to acquire, extract and integrate new knowledge with the existing source. Ontologies have been proved to be one of the best tools for representing knowledge with class, role and other characteristics. It is imperative to accommodate the new knowledge in the current ontologies with logical consistencies as it is tedious and costly to construct new ontologies every time after acquiring new knowledge. This article introduces a mechanism and a process to integrate new knowledge into the current system (ontology). Separate methods have been adopted for fuzzy- and concrete-domain ontologies. The process starts by finding the semantic and structural similarities between the concepts usingWordNet and description logic. Description logic–based reasoning is used next to determine the position and relationships between the incoming and existing knowledge. The experimental results provided show the efficacy of the proposed method