Wenxin Mu

Supporting interoperability of collaborative networks through engineering of a service-based Mediation Information System MISE 2.0

The Mediation Information System Engineering project is currently finishing its second iteration (MISE 2.0). The main objective of this scientific project is to provide any emerging collaborative situation with methods and tools to deploy a Mediation Information System (MIS). MISE 2.0 aims at defining and designing a service-based platform, dedicated to initiating and supporting the interoperability of collaborative situations among potential partners. This MISE 2.0 platform implements a model-driven engineering approach to the design of a service-oriented MIS dedicated to supporting the collaborative situation. This approach is structured in three layers, each providing their own key innovative points: (i) the gathering of individual and collaborative knowledge to provide appropriate collaborative business behaviour (key point: knowledge management, including semantics, exploitation and capitalisation), (ii) deployment of a mediation information system able to computerise the previously deduced collaborative processes (key point: the automatic generation of collaborative workflows, including connection with existing devices or services) (iii) the management of the agility of the obtained collaborative network of organisations (key point: supervision of collaborative situations and relevant exploitation of the gathered data). MISE covers business issues (through BPM), technical issues (through an SOA) and agility issues of collaborative situations (through EDA).

Information Systems design for emerging ecosystems

This article presents a model-driven approach to improve interoperability into emerging ecosystems. This approach proposes to design a Mediation Information System (MIS) dedicated to deal with exchanged data, shared services and collaborative processes. The MIS design crosses the different abstraction layers (business, logic and technological) and exploits at each level the associated models to build the models of the next level. This article presents the involved models (dedicated to the CIM, PIM and PSM levels of the MDE approach) and the transition mechanisms between levels.

A methodology proposal for collaborative business process elaboration using a model-driven approach

Business process management (BPM) principles are commonly used to improve processes within an organisation. But they can equally be applied to supporting the design of an Information System (IS). In a collaborative situation involving several partners, this type of BPM approach may be useful to support the design of a Mediation Information System (MIS), which would ensure interoperability between the partners’ ISs (which are assumed to be service oriented). To achieve this objective, the first main task is to build a collaborative business process cartography. The aim of this article is to present a method for bringing together collaborative information and elaborating collaborative business processes from the information gathered (by using a collaborative situation framework, an organisational model, an informational model, a functional model and a metamodel and by using model transformation rules).

Collaborative process cartography deduction based on collaborative ontology and model transformation

With an increasing background in inter-enterprise collaboration and interoperability, the automatic deduction of collaborative business processes is increasingly being viewed as a crucial research subject. The common solution is believed to involve either semantic ontologies or metamodeling, which can be combined with semantic algorithms or transformation rules. However, from the viewpoint of enterprises, the modeling of collaborative processes should be software integrated and can be changed to workflow. The design of the targeted collaborative process model does not fit the need. This has led to a lack of concepts and transformation rules for the ontology or metamodel. In this paper, a new collaborative process model called collaborative process cartography is designed. Related collaborative ontology and its knowledge-expanding rules have also been updated. Collaborative ontology contains essential concepts for the collaborative situation and includes the rules and algorithms for process deduction. A prototype for the supporting tools is also provided.

An Ontology Based Collaborative Business Service Selection - Contributing to Automatic Building of Collaborative Business Process

With the world wide inter-enterprise collaboration and interoperability background, automatic collaborative business process deduction might be seen as a crucial researching subject. We design a methodology of deducing collaborative process by only collecting collaborative objectives and partners’ business services. The two key problems are: (i) selecting corresponding business services for a set of collaborative objectives; (ii) ordering business services with serializations and parallelization. This paper aims to present solution of business service selection. In order to solve the problem, we defined a collaborative ontology, which contains numerous instances of business services and processes of MIT process handbook. The collaborative ontology contains essential concepts in collaborative situation, and owns process deducing rules and algorithms. We provide a brief illustration of implementation within a SaaS toolkit called Mediator Modeling 2ool.

A Proposal for Risk Identification Approach in Collaborative Networks Considering Susceptibility to Danger

The paper proposes a research framework for risk identification approach in collaborative networks dedicated to develop a formalizing, structured reference for risk identification and risk mitigation and explore an effective mechanism that can motivate diverse partners to manage risks collaboratively. The approach is based on a formalized vision of Danger/Risk/Consequence chain that is defined as the primary schema of the proposed methodology. The DRC chain indicates five risk-related concepts and their interrelationships, which is able to well describe risk-related collaborative contexts. Cascading effect in the concept chain are presented for further interpreting. Furthermore, a supply chain scenario of three use cases is given to illustrate the proposed framework.

Chinese Collaborative Software in Digital Transformation Era

China is witnessing a large number of digital transformation cases, spearheaded by business model innovation but also by the emergence of systems that in one way or another to support collaborative network organizations. This paper establishes an analysis framework for collaborative management systems of dynamic organization, based on the literature review of digital transformation and collaborative management. It then analyzes the fitness of two existing and leading collaborative management software provided in the Chinese market. For each of the two systems, the paper specifies the system requirements and the applied modeling methods. The connotation of traditional collaborative software is extended in terms of collaboration goals, scope, content, and methods, as well as product innovation through cases analysis. Meanwhile, it gives direction for future collaboration system modeling.

An ontology-based collaborative business service selection: contributing to automatic building of collaborative business process

With worldwide inter-enterprise collaboration and interoperability background, automatic collaborative business process deduction is a crucial researching subject. We have designed a methodology of deducing collaborative process by only collecting collaborative objectives and partners’ business services. The two key problems are (i) selecting corresponding business services for a set of collaborative objectives and (ii) ordering business services with serializations and parallelization. This paper aims to present a solution of business service selection and the following business process extraction. In order to solve the problem, we have defined a collaborative ontology, which contains numerous instances of business services and processes from the MIT process handbook. The collaborative ontology contains essential concepts in collaborative situations and process-deducing rules and algorithms. We provide a brief illustration of implementation within a SaaS toolkit called Mediator Modeling 2ool.

Automated deduction of cross-organizational collaborative business processes

Abstract Being able to implement efficient cross-organizational collaborations has become a key factor for enterprises to respond to emerging market opportunities. The business process management approach is commonly used to design cross-organizational collaborations. This type of business process aims at achieving specific collaborative objectives by addressing three main steps according to a top-down approach: (i) defining the business services that have to be performed to reach the objectives, (ii) finding the best set of partners to provide them and (iii) ordering the business services in an optimized way. While the resulting business processes are a cornerstone to support the interoperability among the partners of a collaboration, their design step remains often humanly-conducted and laborious. Moreover, seeking the “best” set of partners involves non-additive criteria such as the delivery time (i.e. business services can be performed in sequence or in parallel within the process). In this context, this paper presents a decision support system based on an Ant Colony Optimization algorithm to exploit collaborative knowledge gathered from companies on a dedicated platform (companies’ profile models registered to the platform and collaborative opportunity models) and deduce quasi-optimal collaborative business processes. A prototype that supports this system is also presented.

Collaborative Knowledge Framework for Mediation Information System Engineering

With the worldwide interenterprise collaboration and interoperability background, automatic collaborative business process deduction is crucial and imperative researching subject. A methodology of deducing collaborative process is designed by collecting collaborative knowledge. Due to the complexity of deduction methodology, a collaborative knowledge framework is defined to organize abstract and concrete collaborative information. The collaborative knowledge framework contains three dimensions: elements, levels, and life cycle. To better define the framework, the relations in each dimension are explained in detail. They are (i) relations among elements, which organize the gathering orders and methods of different collaborative elements, (ii) relations among life cycle, which present modeling processes and agility management, and (iii) relations among levels, which define relationships among different levels of collaborative processes: strategy, operation, and support. This paper aims to explain the collaborative knowledge framework and the relations inside.