Pedro Maló

Harmonising technologies in conceptual models representation

The lack of interoperability among systems, applications, and services has been hindering collaboration between organisations raising the need for integration and cooperation between multiple standard business objects and application protocols. ISO 10303-STEP has been acknowledged by most of the industrial companies as the most important family of standards for the integration and exchange of product data under the manufacturing domain. However, STEP standards use technologies unfamiliar to most application developers. This paper presents a platform for the harmonisation of technologies used in the representation and implementation of conceptual models, showing how different standard models and technologies can be unified for industrial benefits, enabling organisations to take the most from all of them. This work results from the research developed and validated in the scope of international research projects involving partners from USA, Europe, Canada, and Australia, under the scope of the IMS SMART-fm, ATHENA IP, and INTEROP NoE European research projects.

A framework for STEP-based harmonization of conceptual models

Information and communications technology combined with the use of open-standards can be a very powerful tool to improve enterprise competitiveness. Organizations have been searching for flexible integrated environments to better manage their services and product life cycle, where their software applications could be easily integrated independently of the platform in use. This paper proposes a standard-based framework to support data model integration and interoperability at meta-level. Through its usage, integration between legacy systems, applications and services could be eased, thus stimulating collaboration between organizations

AP236-XML: A Framework for Integration and Harmonization of STEP Application Protocols

Today, organizations have to deal with the integration of applications across company borders, and must support collaboration of business processes between organizations in networked environments that are seamless, flexible and interoperable. This characteristic of horizontality, where one application embraces more than one domain of activity, is frequently found and raises the need for integration and cooperation between multiple standard application protocols and business objects. However, a standard for data representation cannot cove the whole range of activities one application needs to handle. This paper contributes by proposing a framework that supports interoperability in distributed heterogeneous networked environments, assisting in the integration of reference models described following dissimilar methodologies. This framework assists in the automatic mapping between ISO10303 STEP, UML and XML models. The proposed work results from research developed and validated in the scope of the IMS SMART-fm project (www.smart-fm.funstep.org , www.ims.org ), involving partners from USA, Europe, Canada and Australia, using emerging approaches for modeling and technology.Copyright

Self-Organised Middleware Architecture for the Internet-of-Things

Presently, middleware technologies abound for the Internet-of-Things (IoT), directed at hiding the complexity of underlying technologies and easing the use and management of IoT resources. The middleware solutions of today are capable technologies, which provide much advanced services and that are built using superior architectural models, they however fail short in some important aspects: existing middleware do not properly activate the link between diverse applications with much different monitoring purposes and many disparate sensing networks that are of heterogeneous nature and geographically dispersed. Then, current middleware are unfit to provide some system-wide global arrangement (intelligence, routing, data delivery) emerging from the behaviors of the constituent nodes, rather than from the coordination of single elements, i.e. self-organization. This paper presents the SIMPLE self-organized and intelligent middleware platform. SIMPLE middleware innovates from current state-of-research exactly by exhibiting self-organization properties, a focus on data-dissemination using multi-level subscriptions processing and a tiered networking approach able to cope with many disparate, widespread and heterogeneous sensing networks (e.g. WSN). In this way, the SIMLE middleware is provided as robust zero-configuration technology, with no central dependable system, immune to failures, and able to efficiently deliver the right data at the right time, to needing applications.

Integrated solution to support enterprise interoperability at the business process level on e-Procurement

Major trend in the global market is the increasing collaboration among enterprises during the entire product life-cycle, motivated by business drivers like cost reduction, efficiency, flexibility and the focus on core competencies. New solutions in e-Procurement of raw and semi-finished materials are likely to be developed in the coming years, as stakeholders realize the significant benefits of a seamless collaboration supported on interoperable ICT systems.

Communication support for Petri nets based distributed controllers

This paper addresses the distributed execution of IOPT Petri nets models supported by a network of distributed controllers. Each controller is associated with a sub-model. Submodels use communication channels to exchange events allowing global evolution. Whenever controllers are interconnected through some kind of network, communication channels are implemented by communication nodes associated with each distributed controller. Communication nodes are characterized in terms of layers and buffers allowing their use with different types of communication and topologies. Their usage in a simple application example composed by a network of distributed controllers interconnected through a serial ring topology network is presented. Arduino boards are used as implementation platforms for proof-of-concept purposes.

A training curriculum in collaboration for engineering management

The core functions of engineering management involve forecasting and planning, organizing, directing, coordinating, controlling, communicating and motivating. Underlying to an effective and efficient realization of such so- called processing elements of management is the notion of collaboration. Collaboration is the process of shared creation through which a group of entities enhances capabilities of each other. Thus, mastering collaboration in its many forms is key for the engineer manager successful professional engagement. Collaboration, enabled by technology, can be seen at least in two dimensions: Interoperability, for businesses to work together seamlessly, by enabling interactions with each other across enterprise boundaries; and Collaborative Working, for ensuring that employees have at their fingertips the information, applications, services needed for team-work. By combining both, the first capturing the systems perspective and former addressing human interaction aspects, one is able to grasp the competences and skills of Collaboration. This paper presents a dynamic curriculum for advanced training on Collaboration, by integrating Interoperability and Collaborative Working paradigms, organized in three training curricula following the typical career path of engineers. Equipped with such abilities, supported by traditional components of management, professionals can drive improved management of engineering and engineering processes leading to efficiency, differentiation and innovation towards growth.

Multilingual on-line dictionary breaking the language barriers in the advent of open markets

The furniture manufacturing is one of the biggest industries in the world employing the largest number of persons and playing an important role in worldwide economics. In the advent of open markets and globalization, the cultural barrier presented by language can challenge business success. A multilingual dictionary provides an important service for the industry, making easier the communication between trades in different speaking regions. The online dictionary is the support for multilingual repository of terms and related lexical mechanisms, necessary for a correct understanding and translation between different languages. It represents a harmonization effort in nomenclature and terminologies for all actors of disperse professional areas. New system architectures concepts are in the foundation of the work hereby presented, like the emerging Web-services technology that realizes the openness of the solution, on four-tier software architecture. Dictionary has been developed in the scope of IMS SMART-fm project and accessible via http://www.smart-fm.funstep.org/.

ARMOUR: Large-scale experiments for IoT security & trust

The IoT is composed of a global network of heterogeneous devices that exchange information with each other. In this kind of scenarios, the number of smart objects is increasingly high, which enhances the possibility of attacks that compromise security, privacy and trust of the exchanged information. Thus, the need to provide duly tested, benchmarked and certified security and trust solutions for large-scale IoT arises in order to solve these risks. In this direction, this paper presents ARMOUR, a research project in which a methodology to experiment, validate and certify different technological solutions in large-scale conditions is defined. Additionally, a set of bootstrapping, group sharing and software programming experiments is proposed, on which different tests will be executed with the purpose to verify their security and trust in IoT scenarios.

Interoperability Repository System for the Internet-of-Things

The Internet-of-Things is a dynamic global network infrastructure where physical and virtual things communicate and share information amongst themselves. Plug-and-Interoperate is an approach that allows heterogeneous things to plug (into data) and seamlessly exchange information within the environment. To allow that, Plug-and-Interoperate needs to have the comprehension about the existing interoperability information. For this, the interoperability information needs to be duly organized. However, and in the Internet-of-Things, this presents major challenges. First, it is difficult to index all interoperability information due to the things heterogeneity (many and different languages and formats) and due to the dynamics of the system (disparate things entering/leaving the environment at all times). Also, that the environment can be used with much different purposes, which hinders the way on how the interoperability information should be organized. So, an architecture of an Interoperability Repository System is presented, in order to organize all interoperability information in this kind of environments. The solution handles heterogeneous interoperability information and allows users to add a User Space to the repository in order to customize it to specific needs. It also provides a notification mechanism in order to notify users of new or updated interoperability information.