Jenny A. Harding

Supporting Adaptive Enterprise Collaboration through Semantic Knowledge Services

The next phase of enterprise interoperability will address the sharing of knowledge within a Virtual Organisation (VO) to the mutual benefit of all VO partners. Such knowledge will be a driver for new enhanced collaborative enterprises, able to achieve the global visions of enterprise interoperability. This paper outlines the approach to be followed in the SYNERGY research project which envisages the delivery of Collaboration Knowledge services through interoperability service utilities (ISUs): trusted third parties offering web-based, pay-on-use services. The aim of SYNERGY is to enhance support of the networked enterprise in the successful, timely creation of, and participation in, collaborative VOs by providing an infrastructure and services to discover, capture, deliver and apply knowledge relevant to collaboration creation and operation. The proposed approach aims to (a) provide semantic ontology-based modelling of knowledge structures on collaborative working; (b) develop a service-oriented self-adaptive solution for knowledgebased collaboration services; and (c) facilitate the testing and evaluation of the efficiency and effectiveness of the solution in concrete case studies.

A framework for collaboration moderator services to support knowledge based collaboration

Knowledge sharing is a major challenge for collaborative networks and is essential to improve the productivity and quality of decisions taken by both collaborative networks and their member organisations. A critical aspect of effective knowledge sharing within virtual organizations (VOs) is the identification of the most appropriate knowledge for reuse or exploitation in a particular context, as this requires efficient tools and mechanisms for its identification, sharing or transfer. Additionally, partners need to be aware of when knowledge needs to be shared, the implications of doing so and when their decisions are likely to affect other partners within the collaboration. Therefore, tools and methods are needed for identification, acquisition, maintenance and evolution of knowledge and to support effective knowledge sharing which includes awareness of possible consequences of actions and increased awareness of other partner’s needs during the collaboration. The Collaboration Moderator Services (CMS) are designed to address these issues relating to knowledge based collaboration by providing a set of functionalities to raise users’ awareness of opportunities, problem areas and lessons learnt from and during collaborations. This paper presents the system architecture and specifications of the CMS within the context of the SYNERGY system, whose purpose is to offer interoperable service utilities to help enterprises plan, setup and run complex knowledge collaborations. The CMS are designed to support both individual organizations and collaborations as a whole throughout the VO lifecycle and the different functionalities provided by CMS to achieve this are discussed in this paper.

Knowledge management and supporting tools for collaborative networks

Knowledge management and supporting tools for collaborative networks Alok K. Choudhary a , Jenny Harding b , Luis M. Camarinha-Matos c , S.C. Lenny Koh d & Manoj K. Tiwari e a Logistics and Supply Chain Management Research Centre, Management School, The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom b Wolfson School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Loughborough University, United Kingdom c Faculty of Sciences and Technology, New University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal d Logistics and Supply Chain Management Research Centre, Management School, The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom e Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal, India Published online: 01 Feb 2013.

Extending product lifecycle management for manufacturing knowledge sharing

Product lifecycle management provides a framework for information sharing that promotes various types of decision-making procedures. For product lifecycle management to advance towards knowledge-driven decision support, then this demands more than simply exchanging information. There is, therefore, a need to formally capture best practice through-life engineering knowledge that can be fed back across the product lifecycle. This article investigates the interoperable manufacturing knowledge systems concept. Interoperable manufacturing knowledge systems use an expressive ontological approach that drives the improved configuration of product lifecycle management systems for manufacturing knowledge sharing. An ontology of relevant core product lifecycle concepts is identified from which viewpoint-specific domains, such as design and manufacture, can be formalised. Essential ontology-based mechanisms are accommodated to support the verification and sharing of manufacturing knowledge across domains. The work has been experimentally assessed using an aerospace compressor disc design and manufacture example. While it has been demonstrated that the approach supports the representation of disparate design and manufacture perspectives as well as manufacturing knowledge feedback in a timely manner, areas for improvement have also been identified for future work.

Enterprise Interoperability IV

Enterprise Interoperability is the ability of an enterprise or organisation to work with other enterprises or organisations without special effort. It is now recognised that interoperability of systems and thus sharing of information is not sufficient to ensure common understanding between enterprises. Knowledge of information meaning and understanding of how is to be used must also be shared if decision makers distributed between those enterprises in the network want to act consistently and efficiently. Industrys need for Enterprise Interoperability has been one of the significant drivers for research into the Internet of the Future. EI research will embrace and extend contributions from the Internet of Things and the Internet of Services, and will go on to drive the future needs for Internets of People, Processes, and Knowledge.

A Manufacturing Foundation Ontology for Product Life Cycle Interoperability

This paper presents the idea of a proposed Manufacturing Foundation Ontology (MFO) aimed at acting as a basis for the Product Life Cycle (PLC) interoperability. MFO is aimed to have the provision for introducing interoperability not only across departments but across organization as well. The proposed idea shows the development of a MFO in several layers and various levels in those layers. The foundation ontology will act as a basis for building Interoperable knowledge bases or ‘World Models’ from a library of formally defined concepts in a heavy weight ontology. MFO must be flexible enough to allow organizations to be able to model their own domains with the flexibility to use the terms they want. Rules and axioms governing each and every concept add rigour to the semantics of the MFO and restrict the use of concepts to facilitate interoperability with a minimum effect on flexibility to model.

A framework for ontology based decision support system for e-learning modules, business modeling and manufacturing systems

This paper identifies how ontology models can be vigorously used to define semantics and relationships in representing objects/modules for e-learning, business modeling support and manufacturing processing details. Further extraction of these relations by intelligent decision-support systems using data mining as a tool is discussed. The paper envisages the possibility of establishing a common solution platform for product development and customization leading to increased profitability and better resource utilization. It showcases ways to link these different ontological models leading to cross platform compatibility. It also tries to explore manufacturer-customer relationship and using them to provide quality analysis methods for further improvement in the product processing model.

A Manufacturing Core Concepts Ontology for Product Lifecycle Interoperability

This paper proposes a manufacturing core concepts ontology (MCCO) aimed at providing support for product life cycle interoperability. The potential focus of the work is interoperability across the production and design domains of product lifecycle. A core set of manufacturing concepts and their key relationships are identified in MCCO. Semantics are captured formally through heavyweight logic using rigorous rules and axioms. Three different levels of specialization have been identified according to the degree of specialization required. Each level provides an immediate route to interoperability for the concepts specialized from that level. MCCO enable knowledge sharing across design and production domains through core concepts. A successful initial experimental implementation has been done to demonstrate the working of MCCO.

Gap analysis of ontology mapping tools and techniques

Mapping between ontologies provides a way to overcome any dissimilarities in the terminologies used in two ontologies. Some tools and techniques to map ontologies are available with some semi-automatic mapping capabilities. These tools are employed to join the similar concepts in two ontologies and overcome the possible mismatches.Several types of mismatches have been identified by researchers and certain overlaps can easily be seen in their description. Analysis of the mapping tools and techniques through a mismatches framework reveals that most of the tools and techniques just target the explication side of the concepts in ontologies and a very few of them opt for the conceptualization mismatches. Research therefore needs to be done in the area of detecting and overcoming conceptualization mismatches that may occur during the process of mapping. The automation and reliability of these tools are important because they directly affect the interoperatbility between different knowledge sources.

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.