David Tchoffa

Digital factory system for dynamic manufacturing network supporting networked collaborative product development

During the last years, important research investments have been made by Airbus Group Innovations for the establishment of sustainable Product and Process data interoperability based on open standards. Driven successively by concurrent engineering, collaborative product design in the virtual enterprise or digital behavorial aircraft, it was capitalize through the establishment of a federative interoperability framework. Driven by factory of the future-related research, the dynamic manufacturing network (DMN) concept enriched the framework, which aims at providing agile infrastructure for networked collaborative product development. For such networks, protocols based on open eBusiness product lifecycle management (PLM) standards for exchange and sharing of product and process data between the implied organizations, their processes and the technical enteprise applications supporting these processes are needed This paper presents a new way of combining model-based enterprise platform engineering, model-driven architecture, and system engineering in order to adress the establishment of a sustainable interoperability within DMN. Based on relevant litterature interoperability issues, this paper describes the new approach, which relies on the association of effective existing technologies coupled with research results on the fields of model-driven engineering (MDE), enterprise interoperability, system engineering and PLM. The new approach relies on the concept of digital factory system (DFS) coupled with DMN in order to produce sustainable and agile collaborative infrastructure for manufacturing digital ebusiness ecosystem. The approach is then illustrated through use case coming from the IMAGINE project and an outline is provided on how it will be used and developed further for the assessment of PLM standards and their implementation in the Standard Interoperability PLM project at IRT-Systemx.

Dynamic Manufacturing Network, PLM Hub and Business Standards Testbed

Current trends in manufacturing enterprises dealing with complex systems are usage of System Engineering, Product Life Cycle management and systematic utilization of computer aided solutions for all engineering or management activities. In such a context, sustainable and agile infrastructure for emerging digital ecosystems is required, based on open eBusiness PLM standards supporting exchange, sharing and long term archiving of digital models describing behavioural products and implied organizations. This paper will present some new ways to deal with interoperability in such a context, based on Dynamic Manufacturing Networks, constituted by a network of partner enterprises, of enterprise applications involved in the cross-organizational collaboration processes and of the underlying ICT systems. The approach will consist in qualifying such a network to support a portfolio of cross organizational processes supported by a PLM Hub, in particular in terms of interoperabilty and in terms of security, and to map it with available capabilities used by the actual collaboration participants. Then it will be possible to define the efforts required by the partners in order to be able to participate to a given kind of collaboration, making then it possible to participate in any other future collaboration where the partner will play the same role. Doing so, interoperabilty can be established in a continuous and smooth way, allowing all the digital business ecosystem community to build together their interoperability maturity. This approach is completed by the ellaboration of an associated testbed for eBusiness PLM standards allowing the community to accelerate development of required standards as well as their implementation, being by software product solutions or by industrial processes and methods. The principles will be exposed, as well as illustrations coming from research projects such as IMAGINE or IRT-SystemX SIP projects.

Model Based Enterprise Modeling for Testing PLM Interoperability in Dynamic Manufacturing Network

When willing to prepare and to build operational Product Life cycle Management interoperability within a Dynamic Manufacturing Network (DMN) in a mature digital business ecosystem such as Aeronautic, Space and Defense, the approaches proposed by the Enterprise Application Interoperability are insufficient when willing to address the existing interoperability brakes Some of these brakes have been addressed in project such as IMAGINE and SIP@SystemX, allowing to experiment innovative way of using standards based enterprise modeling and also to identify some additional gaps for applying model base enterprise modeling to PLM interoperability within a DMN. After defining the business and the scientific contexts, the paper describes this new approach which consists in federating the usage of several PLM, Business, Information and ICT standard through the usage of an enterprise modeling standardized language, ArchiMate, and associated modeling tool Archi created using ArchiMate as an EMF DSL. The defined methodology is based on producing a set of DMN blueprints and associated templates. Then, through model to model transformation, other more detailed models using more specialized languages are created and used for software component generation and deployment enterprise hub platform based on standards. Using the methodology, the associated framework and the developed resulting from our research activity, we are now able to prepare and build interoperability within a DMN. Ability of preserving investment performed with the legacy and reducing risks associated to future evolution was demonstrated through IMAGINE Aeronautic Lab experimentation within SIP. Such experimentation also highlighted some issues related to model based engineering in such a context, and allowed identifying needs for new extensions of the federative PLM interoperability framework for Collaborative Networked Product Development initiated during the ATHENA project. It will be addressed in future work.

Decision aid in software maintenance

Abstract Recently, software maintenance was transformed into a major preoccupation on improving the software performances. Software maintenance depends on customer or user requirements. A requirement is translating into a minor change, but it is more costly to implement than to anticipate. Under such circumstances a study of the software performances could provide useful information, especially when the system is complex and sophisticated. This paper focuses on how to ensure the quality of software during its exploitation so as to improve software maintenance procedures.

Quality operating of information systems and service level agreement

ISO 9126 defines the quality of software features and sub features, and presents itself as a model of international consensus. There are two features of computer applications in operations that deserve our attention: the availability and the response time. In our research, we limit ourselves to the unavailability. The purpose of this paper is to show that, to better manage the unavailability of an Information System, one must implement a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with a good system of measurement of Performance Indicators. A good definition of performance indicators is needed and a good method of measurement also. The control of unavailability depends on the method used for statistical process. It seems to be the cheaper and easiest way to stabilize the system and to obtain a lasting satisfaction of the end customer.

Decision Analysis in Management of Industrial Incidents

Abstract Distributed systems are characterized by heterogeneity and also by multiple applications often interdependent whose programming is done by separate teams with no communications between them. Dysfunctions and problems that occur in these systems have multiple and important consequences. Difficulties encountered during discovering origins and causes of these problems are proportional with user information quality demand. In this paper a method to manage incidents in information systems using decision analysis is proposed.