Rubén Darío Franco

A reusable structural design for mobile collaborative applications

Architecting mobile collaborative applications has always been a challenge for designers. However, counting on a structural design as a reference can help developers to reduce risks and efforts involved in system design. This article presents a reusable architecture which helps modeling the communication and coordination services required by mobile collaborative applications to support collaboration among users. This architecture has been used as a basis for the design of several mobile systems. Two of them are presented in this article to show the applicability of the proposal to real world collaborative systems.

Supporting Structural and Functional Collaborative Networked Organizations Modeling with Service Entities

This work focuses on the Service Entities definition as an approach that may help to support structural and functional Collaborative Networked Organizations (CNO) modeling, when VOs are engineered inside Virtual Breeding Environments Management Systems (VMS). Manbree is an undergoing development which is intended to provide an integrated framework for CNO modeling and execution based on that approach and it is briefly described at the final section.

V-CHAIN: Migrating from Extended to Virtual Enterprise within an Automotive Supply Chain

V-CHAIN objective is to migrate from an Extended Enterprise to a Virtual Enterprise organizational model. Its aim is to improve the overall Scheduling and Sequencing Business Process performance by means of a virtual operator deployment that takes charge of process monitoring and execution.

Performance measurement for e-business enterprises

E-business involves a fundamental change in business because it changes business foundations. Thus, companies that are trying to develop e-business capacities need to evaluate whether their current systems for managing enterprises are adequate when new business models appear. This paper considers weaknesses noted by different authors regarding the current performance measurement models and reviews some recent models to discover their suitability in e-business Models. A new system able to facilitate the definition of performance indicators for e-business companies is defined. The Model takes into account high level concepts (customers, strategies, stakeholders, etc) and operational concepts (information, resources, functions and roles) developing an integrated model. The Model is supported by IE-GIP (Enterprise Integration - Business Processes Integrated Management - acronyms in Spanish) methodology and CIMOSA concepts.

A collaborative scheduling GA for products-packages service within extended selling chains environment

The theory of network coordination provides theoretical foundations to explain how companies can overcome organizational boundaries and constraints to jointly manage business processes across their selling chains. In particular, this work focuses on Collaborative Scheduling, a collaboration process whereby selling chain trading partners activate either on-line or off-line inter-firm coordination mechanisms to jointly plan production activities in order to deliver the final products to end customers each one of them, being the delivery date as close to the date desired as possible. The problem of collaborative scheduling is formally defined by means of a mathematical model. In the model, the defined objective function has the goal to minimize the total weighted tardiness of the package of products acquired by the clients to be delivered in a specific date. The delivery date of each Product-Package is conditioned by the latest date established by each supplier for each product that forms part of the same one. Besides, having different process times for each product and different penalties for each Product-Package, each supplier can offer a different mix of additional products with different due date. Due to the complexity of the problem a Genetic Algorithm has been the approach taken for its resolution. The GA elements and procedures are defined and the parameters are tuned. Although the major contribution of this work focuses on the algorithmic development of a proposal in the context of operations research that could help to solve the problem also is discussed the environment in which this occurs and that justifies our interest. In order to validate the proposed solutions diverse configurations are presented and the results obtained by means of the GA and some heuristics rules are compared.

Towards a Modeling Framework for Service-Oriented Digital Ecosystems

Reference modeling for collaborative networks has been identified as a key topic in consolidating this new scientific discipline. Earlier contributions on this field have provided a solid initial framework and they are considered starting points for this work. Based on two well-known approaches, the CIMOSA and ARCON modeling frameworks, what this work proposes is a set of modeling constructs for CNO modeling under a service-orientation perspective. Service Entities are incorporated as a third approach that may be considered if service ecosystems are being modeled.

Supporting Mobile Virtual Team’s Coordination with SOA-Based Active Entities

The use of IT solutions to support preparedness, response and recovery process has been envisioned as a possible way to improve the support for collaboration among the actors participating in mobile teams operating under constrained scenarios. Software applications supporting mobility have typically been conceived as functional extensions of centralized enterprise systems hosted on corporate servers. However, in this work, we focus on those mobile scenarios which go one step further in terms of interoperability requirements. This proposal aims to support the design, deployment and execution of ad-hoc collaborative business processes (workflows) in mobile networks, operating under constrained conditions and taking advantage of the Active Entity (AE) concept.

IDR: A Proposal for Managing Inter-Organizational Business Processes by Using Web-Services Oriented Architectures

Collaborative Networked Organizations are gaining more attention from research bodies and academics as an emergent form of conducting business.

Open Ecosystems, Collaborative Networks and Service Entities Integrated Modeling Approach

This paper introduces an integrated modeling approach that has been used to design and implement the ColNet platform. ColNet is the result of creating an integrated system, supporting distributed business processes design and execution in a Collaborative Network (CN) belonging to an Open Ecosystem (VBE). The work has been carried out as a part of the FP7 REMPLANET European Project, which aims at providing methods and tools for better decision-making in non-hierarchical collaborative networks. The functional alignment of Open Service Ecosystems, Collaborative Networks and Services Entities lifecycles is adopted as main functional requirements for the platform design and implementation while, at the same time, they raise an integrated modeling need. Both constitute the underlying approach followed when designing and implementing ColNet and are briefly described here.

ColNet Platform: Resilient Collaborative Networks through Interoperability

Operational resilience is aimed at providing the structural and functional agility that is required in non-hierarchical decision making collaborative networks (CN). In supporting such operational requirements, sound IT platforms are also needed. This paper introduces the Colnet platform, an undergoing development of the EU-funded FP7 Remplanet Project. The proposed architecture is based on the integration of three lifecycles, namely: Remplanet Ecosystem, CN and Organizational lifecycles. The platform takes advantage of an integrated interoperability approach based on processes, services and data perspectives in ensuring a performant collaboration level inside the nerwork.