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

A semi-automated system for interoperability assessment: an ontology- based approach

International audienceA plethora of approaches to assess the ability of companies to interoperate can be found in the literature. Nevertheless, most of the current assessment approaches are following manual-conducted processes, which can be laborious, time-consuming and costly. Therefore, this paper aims at developing a knowledge-based system for supporting an interoperability assessment process using an ontology as its knowledge model. The resulting system allows identifying potential interoperability problems and related solutions based on the knowledge model including information of the assessed enterprise(s). A real business case is presented for evaluating the proposed approach

FCA modelling for CPS interoperability optimization in Industry 4.0

International audienceCyber-Physical Systems (CPS) lead to the 4-th Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) that will have benefits of high flexibility of production, easy and so more accessible participation of all involved parties of business processes. The Industry 4.0 production paradigm is characterized by autonomous behaviour and intercommunicating properties of its production elements across all levels of manufacturing processes so one of the key concept in this domain will be the semantic interoperability of systems. This goal can benefit of formal methods well known various scientific domains like artificial intelligence, machine learning and algebra. So the current investigation is on the promising approach named Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to structure the knowledge and to optimize the CPS interoperability

An ontology for interoperability assessment: a systemic approach

International audienceEnterprise Interoperability is a requirement for ensuring an effective collaboration within a network of enterprises. Therefore, interoperability should be continuously assessed and improved for avoiding collaboration issues. To do so, an interoperability assessment can be performed by the concerned enterprises. Such an assessment provides an overview of the enterprise systems' strengths and weaknesses regarding interoperability. A plethora of assessment approaches are proposed in the literature. The majority of them focus on one single aspect of interoperability. In general, to have a holistic view of the assessed systems, i.e. consider different aspects, enterprises have to apply different approaches. However, the application of multiple approaches may cause redundancy and confusion when assessing the same system using different metrics and viewpoints. Therefore, this article is to propose an ontology for interoperability assessment. The main objective of such an ontology is to provide a sound description of all relevant concepts and relationships regarding an interoperability assessment. Inference rules are also provided for reasoning on interoperability problems. A case study based on a real enterprise in presented to evaluate the proposed ontology

Interopérabilité et partage de connaissances

National audienceL'interopérabilité vise à accroître la capacité de systèmes et d'organisations hétérogènes à coordonner leurs activités de manière efficace. A travers six articles sélectionnés par leur qualité mais aussi leur complémentarité, ce numéro spécial établit des liens multiples entre les problématiques d'interopérabilité et de partage de connaissances. Il constitue ainsi une invitation à l'interaction entre différentes communautés scientifiques dans un but d'enrichissement mutuel

A multi-agents based E-maintenance system with case-based reasoning decision support

International audienceToday, one challenge of a manufacturer is to maintain with the consumer, the expected service of the supplied product during the whole product life cycle, no matter where the product and the consumer are located. The combination of modern information processing and communication tools, commonly referred to as Tele-service, offers the technical support required to implement this remote service maintenance. However, this technical support is insufficient to face new remote maintenance decision-makings which requires not only informational exchanges between customers and suppliers but also cooperation and negotiation based on the sharing of different complementary and/or contradictory knowledge. It requires an evolution from Tele-service to E-service and e-Maintenance in particular where the maintenance decision-making results from collaboration of maintenance processes and experts to form a DAI environment. For this purpose, a Problem-Oriented Multi-Agent-Based E-Service System (POMAESS) is introduced in this paper. The protocol of negotiation for multi agents and the CBR-based decision support function within this system are discussed, emphasised at the service maintenance problem solving. A prototype system based on these methodologies is developed to demonstrate the feasibility

Special section Industry 4.0: Challenges for the future in manufacturing

International audienceThe sensing enterprise is a digital business innovation concept making Cyber-Physical Systems, service-oriented architectures and advanced human-computer interactions converge, supporting a more agile, flexible, and proactive management of unexpected events in today’s global value networks. In essence, it concerns the adoption of future Internet technologies in virtual enterprises. Translating this concept to a general approach to smart systems (smart manufacturing, smart cities, smart logistics, etc.), requires new capabilities by next-generation information systems to perform sensing, modelling, and interpretation of “any” signal from the real world, thus providing the systems with higher flexibility and possibilities for reconfiguration (Panetto et al. 2016). Intuitively, a sensing system requires resources and machineries to be constantly monitored, configured, and easily controlled by human operators. All these functions, and much more indeed, are now implemented by the so-called (Industrial) Internet of Things or Cyber-Physical Systems. With the advent of the new cyber-physical system design paradigm, the number and diversity of systems that need to work together in the future enterprises have significantly increased (Weichhart et al. 2016). This trend highlights the need to shift from the classic central control of systems, towards systems interoperability as a capability to control, sense, and perceive distributed and heterogeneous systems and their environments, as well as to purposefully and socially act upon their perceptions. Such a shift could have important consequences on the future architecture design of the control of these systems. The emergence of cloud-based technologies will also have a significant impact on the design and implementation of cyber-physical systems; using such novel technologies, collaborative engineering practises will increase globally, thus enabling a new generation of small-scale industrial organizations to function in an information-centric manner and enabling industry 4.0 transformations (Cimini, et al, 2017). The potential of such technologies in fostering a leaner and more agile approach towards engineering is very high. Engineers and engineering organizations no longer have to be restricted to the availability of advanced processing capabilities, as they can adopt a ‘pay as you go’ approach, which will enable them to access and use software resources for engineering activities from any remote location in the world

Ingénierie d'entreprise et de système d'information dirigée par les modèles : quels usages ?

Présenté dans le cadre de la session de l'axe Organisation des JN-MACSCette communication se propose de présenter les enjeux scientifiques d'une démarche d'ingénierie d'entreprise dirigée par les modèles pour la conception, l'intégration et l'usage de systèmes dans le contexte de la modélisation d'entreprise et des systèmes d'information. En effet, un projet d'ingénierie d'entreprises fait apparaître notamment deux types de compétences : des compétences métier et des compétences en modélisation des systèmes, indépendamment du fait qu'il s'agisse de systèmes opérant, de pilotage ou d'information. Les premières relèvent de connaissances générées et mobilisées en entreprise : ce type de connaissances peut être lié aux fonctions de l'entreprise (comptabilité, finance, production,...), et peut se spécialiser si nécessaire selon différents domaines d'activités. Les secondes reposent sur une approche systémique et cherchent à proposer des outils, langages et modèles plus génériques facilitant l'expression, l'organisation, l'intégration et le déploiement des compétences métier. Le challenge scientifique est ainsi de mettre à disposition des langages et des outils de modélisation adaptés à chaque projet de modélisation d'entreprise, et ce malgré l'hétérogénéité des compétences métier et la pluridisciplinarité des domaines. Ce challenge possède deux dimensions : d'une part, celle de la capacité de la modélisation à outiller les démarches métier, ce qui nécessite la définition et la formalisation de leurs invariants ; d'autre part, l'étude des conditions d'usages des modèles dans la pratique, toujours évolutive et incertaine, des métiers de l'entreprise

Ontology-based model-driven patterns for notification-oriented data-intensive enterprise information systems

International audienceIn the fourth industrial revolution, the current Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) are facing a set of new challenges raised by the applications of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT). In this scenario, a data-intensive EIS involves networks of physical objects with sensing, data collection, transmission and actuation capabilities, and vast endpoints in the cloud, thereby offering large amounts of data. Such systems can be considered as a multidisciplinary complex system with strong interrelations between the involved components. In order to cope with the big heterogeneousness of those physical objects and their intrinsic information, the authors propose a notification-based approach derived from the so-called Notification Oriented Paradigm (NOP), a new rule and event driven approach for software and hardware specification and execution. However, the heterogeneity of those information and their interpretation relatively to an evolving context impose the definition of model-driven patterns based on some formal knowledge modelled by a set of skill-based ontologies. Thus, the paper focuses on the open issue related to the formalisation of such ontology-based patterns for their verification, ensuring the coherence of the whole set of data in each contextual engineering domain involved in the EIS

Towards smart assessment: A metamodel proposal

International audienceAssessment initiatives in organisations are focused on the evaluation of organisational aspects aiming to obtain a critic view of their status. The assessment results are used to lead improvement programs or to serve as base for comparative purposes. Assessment approaches may comprise complex tasks demanding a large amount of time and resources. Moreover, assessment results are highly dependent on the assessment input, which may have a dynamic nature due to the constant evolution of organisations. The assessment results should be adaptable to these changes without much effort whilst being able to provide efficient and reliable results. Therefore, providing smart capabilities to the assessment process or to systems in charge of performing assessments represents a step forward in the search for more efficient appraisal processes. This work proposes a metamodel defining the elements of a Smart Assessment, which is guided by elements related to the smartness concept such as knowledge, learning, reasoning and inferring capabilities. The metamodel is further specialized considering a Business Process In-teroperability Smart Assessment scenario