Carlos Coutinho

NEGOSEIO: A framework for negotiations toward Sustainable Enterprise Interoperability

Abstract With the rise of the Internet, competitiveness is pressuring enterprises to build better solutions with fewer resources, following new trends and supporting new platforms and methodologies. On the other hand, legislation and regulations are updating frequently and deeply, and demanding rapid compliance from enterprises. These frequent business changes shake all the interoperability links between the enterprises, leading to periods of adaptation where business operation is not possible. The urge to rapidly regain interoperability often leads to unfounded, poorly-chosen solutions, which lead to inefficiency and rework. This paper proposes that the best way to have a strong interoperable environment is to perform constant, periodic maintenance operations in order to adapt enterprises to their surrounding ecosystem. It introduces NEGOSEIO, a framework that promotes continuous improvement and adaptation towards the management of interoperability on enterprise systems, and which has negotiations as a core mechanism to handle inconsistencies and solutions for the detected interoperability problems. Following this approach, enterprises shall become more adaptable to changes and external factors, consequently developing resilient and efficient interactions with its supply chain. The paper validates the framework with its application in a real business case of aerospace mission design on the European Space Agency (ESA).

A Framework for Sustainable Interoperability of Negotiation Processes

Abstract The rise of new service-oriented technologies drives new ways to perform interoperability between companies, even in areas not directly connected to the enterprise core business. This paper proposes a framework to model and support sustainable interoperability of parallel and concurrent negotiations among organisations acting in the same industrial market, using a service-oriented platform. The underlying complexity is to model the dynamic environment where multi-attribute and multi-participant negotiations are racing over a set of heterogeneous resources. The metaphor Interaction Abstract Machines (IAMs) is used to model the parallelism and the non-deterministic aspects of the negotiation process, and a model-driven, cloud-based, service-oriented platform is proposed to manage a sustainable interoperability of the operating environment.

Service-based negotiation for advanced collaboration in enterprise networks

Information systems support organisations to achieve greater efficiency by automating their activities. Nowadays, in the actual competitive and global business context, the advent of enterprise networking has been challenging collaboration, coordination and continuous interactions among dissimilar information systems to adapt and improve them. Sustainability of interoperability among heterogeneous systems regarding sharing information and knowledge in a collaborative dynamic environment is hard to achieve and maintain. This paper proposes a service-based negotiation framework for advanced collaboration in enterprise networks, as a solution to improve the sustainability of interoperability within enterprise information systems. Validation in industrial scenario is presented and discussed.

Cloud-based negotiation for sustainable enterprise interoperability

Competition and high ICT availability have driven enterprises to evolve by creating business nests where several enterprises gather their specialisations in the building of complete and fully-featured solutions. These business organisations are particularly important when regarding SMEs, and tend to be very dynamic with frequent inclusion of new enterprises. These enterprises thus need to develop dedicated business areas to handle the seeking for new partnerships, with its inherent need for interoperation, while maintaining the interoperability regarding the current ones. With a growing number of players and changes, this will rapidly lead to a non-interoperability scenario within the business network. This paper proposes a collaborative framework to support negotiations towards interoperability of organisations acting in a same industrial market, using a model-driven, cloud-based platform and services. The paper then specifies the application of the framework in a real-case scenario.

Collaborative negotiation for ontology-driven enterprise businesses

The requirements from a globalised world demand that enterprises not only shift their paradigm from product-centrism to component-centrism on integrated products, potentiating the need for tight interoperability dependencies, but also that the product specifications and concepts are fully understood by customers and providers in a transparent manner that surpasses the barriers of language, culture and technology. This paper presents the NEGOSEIO framework, which enables service-based interoperability between parties, closely integrated with semantics and business understanding via the use of reference ontologies in the quest for achieving a stronger interoperability liaison. The papers validation and discussion is performed in its application on the ontology negotiation of business environments in the scope of the EU-funded FP7 project TIMBUS for digital preservation of resources and enduring business continuity.

Sustainable interoperability on space mission feasibility studies

The evolution of ICT towards fast and robust data exchange promoted the blooming of successful technical and business concepts like cloud computing and virtualisation of enterprise assets. The escalation of service providers enabled the specialisation of enterprises (particularly SMEs) and the building of provider networks. This move from enterprise-concentric to service-dispersed strategies is leading to concerns about reaching and maintaining the interoperability between customer-provider pairs and their associated business networks. This is particularly true in the aerospace industry: a highly-competitive and demanding business supported by numerous applications, which may be general-purposed, specific, proprietary or open-sourced, all needing to be interoperable with the lowest impact on the business itself. This paper addresses the need for improving the sustainability of enterprise interoperability via the application of negotiations, with the objective of reducing the impact of changes and achieving the best solutions in the interoperability between the enterprises and their surrounding environment. It proposes a framework that features a negotiation mechanism for the management of changes towards the sustainability of the seamless business-to-business interactions, and describes its application on the real business case of the ESA-CDF space mission feasibility studies.

Negotiations Framework for Monitoring the Sustainability of Interoperability Solutions

The competition inherent to globalisation has led enterprises to gather in nests of specialised business providers with the purpose of building better applications and provide more complete solutions. This, added to the improvements on the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), led to a paradigm shift from product-centrism to service-centrism and to the need to communicate and interoperate. Traditional segments like banking, insurance and aerospace subcontract a large number of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that are undergoing this change, and must ensure the criticality and accuracy of their business is not affected or impacted in any way. This paper proposes a methodology and a framework that provide critical businesses a control mechanism over the interoperability solutions in place on their subcontracted enterprises, imposing negotiations which formalise the solutions applied. It then focuses on its application on the business case of the Concurrent Design Facility of the European Space Agency (ESA-CDF).

Digital preservation of business assets as a risk management strategy

The effect of a new globalised world where technologies and methodologies mature rapidly is a constant change in business paradigms and assets. Tools, technology and formats become easily deprecated and replaced by others, and legal and licensing affairs are subject to constant legislation changes. Hence, a business seeking to preserve its assets for long term becomes very prone to problems of this nature. This paper presents an approach to analyse the risks coming from various sources which may affect enterprise business continuity, discussing the problems and issues relevant to it, and proposing long-term digital preservation as a mitigation action to handle some of these determined risks, and the implementation of a framework to support these concepts, in the context of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) TIMBUS project.

Ontology Enriched Framework for Cloud-based Enterprise Interoperability

The globalised world has entered the service era, where an enterprise is connected to the entire world, producing and consuming services using the internet. Virtualisation and service provisioning are paradigms that rule the interoperation of the world today. However, this interoperability mostly relies on a set of agreed message syntax exchanges, agreements that are fragile and limited in their scope, and it lacks a proper framework that can manage the sustainability of a networked Enterprise Interoperability (EI) environment. After presenting the problem and the research questions concerned with cloud-based EI, the paper presents the actual practices and research challenges on EI identified needs, addressing ontology, negotiation and cloud-based aspects for sustainability in EI. Then it proposes an ontology-enriched framework for cloud-based EI, and discusses on its validation in an industrial scenario.

Agents and rules for the negotiation of interoperability solutions

Competitiveness in the specialised and diversified global markets keeps pushing enterprises to abandon their traditional product centrism and instead concentrate their efforts in very narrow specialisation fields, relying on networks of other providers that are able to fulfil their needs towards the development of complete solutions. In that vision, given the heterogeneity of the globalised collaborations and the constant demand for change, innovation, and compliance to more exigent rules, it becomes very difficult for enterprises to cope with the pace of change. This paper proposes the implementation of a framework based on agents and rules to achieve solid and stable integration of solutions, via the use of a strong and formal negotiation mechanism. This negotiation will be the basis for increasing the enterprise interoperability in the supply chain for the development of solutions.