George Dragoi

Internet/Intranet/Extranet-Based Systems in the CESICED Platform for Virtual Product Development Environment

Development teams involved in the product development are often geographically and temporally distributed. There is a high level of outsourcing in the actual product development efforts. In order to achieve a market objective that otherwise could be out of reach, enterprises, which do not have the complete knowledge for developing all the components needed for their products, need to outsource the development of specific parts; in this way a cooperation with other enterprises working in the same industrial sector starts. It is then possible to say that enterprises give rise to a special type of virtual enterprise(VE), in which each company maintains the greatest flexibility and business independence. This paper presents a vision of next generation engineering working environments and describes a core information technology which future systems can be built on. This paper gives an overview of the new Web Services technology based of the IBM Rational Software solutions, discusses the critical issues of the virtual product development, presents the roles of the virtual teams, and build a general architecture of a CESICED experimental platform for training, research and consulting in the new digital economy, located in the PREMINV center at the University Politehnica of Bucharest.

Professional Risk Assessment Using Virtual Enterprise Network Support for Knowledge Bases Development

The paper presents some recent researches results based on the concept of collaborative infrastructure, in order to unify existing standards for supply chain management and to provide the support in various decision making process in manufacturing supply networks. Intended to facilitate and enhance the required knowledge management processes the proposed collaborative infrastructure, based on a virtual enterprise network, is expected to promote the development of the business services sector using a new product lifecycle paradigm according with the greater need for software tools for risk estimation. We focus on the professional risk assessment (PRA) as part of risk management process (RMP) and how the risk level can be established in collaborative infrastructures depending on probability and severity of consequences. A case study is presented to show PRA at the SMEs level.

New Perspectives of Virtual Teams’ Collaboration

This article describes new perspectives in virtual teams’ collaboration, to underline the actual trends and to identify their future development. These will be used for product lifecycle projects management and to diminish/avoid risks, to harmonize team members’ competencies (compatibility issues) to attend success in project development. The tools used for communication and real time research-work will increase companies’ competitiveness by optimizing the resources dedicated to different projects, teams and management systems. To improve the productivity and to facilitate the communication between projects team members, the new approach of virtual teams is based on the use of complex software platforms to improve collaborative design, learning and work processes.

Virtual enterprise network general architecture

In order to achieve a market objective that otherwise could be out of reach, enterprises, which do not have the complete knowledge for developing all the components needed for their products, need to outsource the development of specific parts; in this way a cooperation with other enterprises working in the same industrial sector starts. It is then possible to say that enterprises give rise to a special type of virtual enterprise (VE), in which each company maintains the greatest flexibility and business independence. The concepts of a VE enabled by a new generation of internet/intranet/extranet-based services are discussed in this article. This work analyzes the network architecture for a large enterprise, geographically dispersed (seen as VE) as support for virtual project development.

The Preminv Platform for Training in Management and Engineering for Virtual Enterprise

In the paper we define a hardware-software structure named “Platform for Training in Management and Engineering for Industrial Virtual Enterprises (PREMINV)”, needed to train students, the future engineers, who must be able to work in the virtual enterprise (VE), imposed by the globalization of the manufacturing and competition. We emphasis on special skills requirements by the new VE environment. For this purpose is used the portal concept, referred to as Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) because provides the infrastructure for a much more active and personalized interactions with the user than a typical web site. There are presented the components of an EIP and the products that provides a portal framework for registration and integration of applications and data stores, using Internet/Extranet/Intranet infrastructures.

Integrative Research Approach for a Risk Evaluation Ontology Design

The present article describes a systemic approach to better support the decision making process by creating a tool based on an ontology for integrative analysis of health and safety risks that can occur in a workplace activity development. The designed ontology creates the possibility to show and characterize the potential work accidents and/or diseases and decide better for an appropriate preventive or corrective measure. The ontology is a structure in four chapters/sub-ontologies (human being subsystem, work duty subsystem, machine subsystem and work environment subsystem) and its content allows the classification of all the concepts used in the health and safety risk evaluation process (risk characterization, impact, health problems, measures etc.), including important relationships between the concepts. In addition, each class will be enriched with different properties that will be used for defining the decision-making tool, to better identify the significant health and safety aspects in a risk evaluation process and to appreciate their impact in order to provide efficient/effectiveness corrective measures (for eliminating or minimizing risk impact). The research results will increase companies’ competitiveness by optimizing the resources dedicated to different management systems.

Gradient-descent training for phase-based neurons

This paper offers details on a particular type of Complex Valued Neural Networks, which are Artificial Neural Networks that accept complex-valued inputs and use complex numbers for the values of the internal parameters. The functioning in the complex numbers domain grants CVNNs more computational power than classical ANNs. Phase-Based Neurons (PBNs) are simple CVNNs which use for the internal weights complex numbers with the modulus 1, the only adaptable parameters being the phases. We describe in this paper an improved method for PBNs training, showing its performance in learning linearly non-separable logical functions.

A Knowledge Management Framework as Knowledge Bases Development Support to Professional Risk Assessment in SMEs

The market situation of the European countries is the following: 99% of companies in the EU are small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) – companies with a maximum of 250 employees and a maximal turnover of € 50 million. In the European Union (Europe have 23 million SMEs and 41 000 large companies) SMEs employ more than 65% of all employees. During past years, SMEs have created 80 % of the new jobs in the EU (IP/08/1003, Brussels, 25th June 2008). SMEs meet the multiple economic, technical and social functions, such as:  Generate the greater part of GDP in each country, usually between 55% 95%;  Provide jobs for majority of employment;  Produce a large percentage of the applicable technical innovations in the economy;  Have the highest market dynamism in the economy, a situation evidenced by the evolution of their number, the volume of turnover and size of employment, higher sensitivity to large companies;  Produce products and services at lower costs than large companies, the main factor causing this difference are lower costs;  Show high flexibility and adaptability to market requirements and changes favored by smaller size, faster decision-making process, specifically the entrepreneur and his direct involvement in ongoing activities;  Are the seeds for future large firms, particularly in new areas of the economy, etc. The SMEs research development activities, products development, new technologies implementation (see figure 1) presupposes knowledge and assumption of multiple risks. As a result of a new product development paradigm, there is a greater need for software tools to risk estimation. The risk evaluation sustains SMEs in the uncertainties elimination in the development strategy and management policies (see figure 2). Estimation, evaluation and control of the occupational risk represent prerequisites for grounding and for a continual support of the decision that has been previously taken on occupational safety in a working system (Vasilescu et al., 2008; Tint et al., 2009). However, in the last time, a lot of research in the field of knowledge management is dedicated to large companies or international concerns and the small and medium-sized

Virtual Enterprise Network based on IPSec VPN Solutions and Management

Informational society construction can’t be realized without research and investment projects in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In the 21st century, all enterprises have a local area network, a virtual private network, an Intranet and Internet, servers and workstations for operations, administration and management working together for the same objective: profits. Internet Protocol Security is a framework of open standards for ensuring private communications over public networks. It has become the most common network layer security control, typically used to create a virtual private network. Network management represents the activities, methods, procedures, and tools (software and hardware) that pertain to the operation, administration, maintenance, and provisioning of networked systems. Therefore, this work analyses the network architecture for an enterprise (industrial holding) geographically dispersed. In addition, the paper presents a network management solution for a large enterprise us

Automatic contour detection from dental CBCT DICOM data

The algorithm described in this paper is part of a program supporting the process of teeth contour detection, segmentation and 3D reconstruction. The data is taken from dental conical tomographies. Automatic contour detection starts by filtering the image according to an adaptive threshold. The region of interest is established and the tooth contour is determined using the possible edge directions. The applied method is innovative for the contour detection, because it exploits the domain knowledge, where each tooth (incisor, canine, premolar, molar) has a certain shape. For touching teeth, the delimitation is automatically performed by drawing a line using the Bresenham algorithm. The algorithm will further contribute to the determination and treatment of teeth pathologies.