Property specification,process verification,and reporting – A case study with vehicle-commissioning processes

Testing in the automotive industry is supposed to guarantee that vehicles are shipped without any flaw. Respective processes are complex, due to the variety of components and electronic devices in modern vehicles. To achieve error-free processes, their formal analysis is required. Specifying and maintaining properties the processes must satisfy in a user-friendly way is a core requirement on any verification system. We have observed that there are few property templates that testing processes must adhere to, and we describe these templates. They depend on the context of the processes, e.g., the components of the vehicle or testing stations. We have developed a framework that instantiates the templates of properties at verification time and then verifies the process against these instances. To allow an automatic verification we develop a transformation of the commissioning process to a Petri net. Using a novel approach, we are able to report the found violations to the user in a user-friendly way. Our empirical evaluation with the industrial partner has shown that our framework does detect property violations in processes. From expert interviews we conclude that our framework is user-friendly and well suited to operate in a real production environment.     

Integrating open innovation and business process innovation: Insights from a large-scale study on a transition economy

Open innovation and business process innovation (BPI) have been investigated by their respective research communities for decades. However, the important relationship between externally focused open innovation and internally implemented BPI is currently unexplored, particularly in transition economies. The main purpose of this study is to contribute toward closing this important research gap. This study describes the main findings of a research study of innovation practices of 224 companies operating in a transition economy.We propose and validate a comprehensive model of integrative innovation and offer some important insights into the relationship between externally focused R&D collaboration and a firm's internal process innovation.     

Enhancing scalability and accuracy of recommendation systems using unsupervised learning and particle swarm optimization

Recommendation system has been a rhetoric area and a topic of rigorous research owing to its application in various domains, from academics to industries through e-commerce. Recommendation system is useful in reducing information overload and improving decision making for customers in any arena. Recommending products to attract customers and meet their needs have become an important aspect in this competitive environment. Although there are many approaches to recommend items, collaborative filtering has emerged as an efficient mechanism to perform the same. Added to it there are many evolutionary methods that could be incorporated to achieve better results in terms of accuracy of prediction, handling sparsity as well as cold start problems. In this paper, we have used unsupervised learning to address the problem of scalability. The recommendation engine reduces calculation time by matching the interest profile of the user to its partitioned and even smaller training samples. Additionally, we have explored the aspect of finding global neighbours through transitive similarities and incorporating particle swarm optimization (PSO) to assign weights to various alpha estimates (including the proposed α₇) that alleviate sparsity problem. Our experimental study reveals that the particle swarm optimized alpha estimate has significantly increased the accuracy of prediction over the traditional methods of collaborative filtering and fixed alpha scheme.     

Practical access control management for distributed collaborative editors

The project summarized in this article aims at developing techniques to support access control in Real-Time Distributed Collaborative Editors (RCE). The ever-increasing role of RCE in academic, industry and society comforts the expansion of data sharing and raises growing concerns about controlling access to this data. Indeed, RCE allow for a human–computer–human interaction in a decentralized fashion. Thus, access control for RCE requires a careful design since they need dynamic access changes and low latency access to shared document while maintaining its consistency.In this article, we propose a flexible access control model where the shared document and its authorization policy are replicated in the local memory of each user. To deal with latency and dynamic access changes, we use an optimistic access control technique in such a way that enforcement of authorizations is retroactive. Our model is generic enough to be deployed on the top of the most of existing logging-based collaborative systems. Indeed, it does not entail overheads and it does not affect the convergence of the shared document. We show that naive coordination between updates of both copies can create security holes on the shared document, by permitting illegal modifications or rejecting legal modifications and present our solutions to avoid these problems. Finally, we present a prototype for managing authorizations in collaborative editing work in a decentralized fashion. Thus our model may be deployed easily on mobile devices over P2P networks.     

A linear time layout algorithm for business process models

The layout of a business process model influences how easily it can be understood. Existing layout features in process modeling tools often rely on graph representations, but do not take the specific properties of business process models into account. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that is based on a set of constraints which are specifically identified toward establishing a readable layout of a process model. Our algorithm exploits the structure of the process model and allows the computation of the final layout in linear time. We explain the algorithm, show its detailed run-time complexity, compare it to existing algorithms, and demonstrate in an empirical evaluation the acceptance of the layout generated by the algorithm. The data suggests that the proposed algorithm is well perceived by moderately experienced process modelers, both in terms of its usefulness as well as its ease of use.     

The implementation of an activity-based costing collaborative planning system for semiconductor backend production

While the market turns to an environment with low profit margins for semiconductor backend operations, it is hard for an independent firm to survive today. Forming strategic alliances or integrating an enterprise's internal firms by means of collaborative planning/operations to gain competitive advantage is inevitable. This paper presents the development of an activity-based costing collaborative production planning system (ABC/CPPS) to help production planners to estimate the manufacturing profit of semiconductor backend turnkey (combined IC assembly and testing) operational services at the early stage of order release to production line in a collaborative context. The estimation is under the real constraints of production resources. A predicate/transition net (Pr/Tr net) is used to simulate and implement the activity-based costing (ABC) model with the dynamic characteristics of a production line incorporated. A financial measure, profit, is used to supplement and indicate the consequence of the planning result and link the view to the enterprise's financial vision.     

Structural elements of coordination mechanisms in collaborative planning processes and their assessment through maturity models: Application to a ceramic tile company

Maturity is defined as a measure to evaluate the capabilities of an organization in regards to a certain discipline. The Collaborative Planning Process is a very complex process and Coordination mechanisms are especially relevant in this field to align the plans of the supply chain members. The objective of this paper is to develop a maturity model and a methodology to perform assessment for the Structural Elements of Coordination Mechanisms in the Collaborative Planning Process. Structural elements are specified in order to characterize coordination mechanisms in a collaborative planning context and they have been defined as key areas to be assessed by the maturity model. The identified structural elements are: number of decision-makers, collaboration level, interdependence relationships nature, interdependence relationships type, number of coordination mechanisms, information exchanged, information processing, decision sequence characteristics and stopping criteria. Structural elements are assessed using the scheme of five levels: Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Managed and Optimized. This proposal has been applied to a ceramic tile company and the results are also reported.     

Timing-based business models for flexibility creation in the electric power sector

Energy policies in many countries push for an increase in the generation of wind and solar power. Along these developments, the balance between supply and demand becomes more challenging as the generation of wind and solar power is volatile, and flexibility of supply and demand becomes valuable. As a consequence, companies in the electric power sector develop new business models that create flexibility through activities of timing supply and demand. Based on an extensive qualitative analysis of interviews and industry research in the energy industry, the paper at hand explores the role of timing-based business models in the power sector and sheds light on the mechanisms of flexibility creation through timing. In particular we distill four ideal-type business models of flexibility creation with timing and reveal how they can be classified along two dimensions, namely costs of multiplicity and intervention costs. We put forward that these business models offer ‘coupled services’, combining resource-centered and service-centered perspectives. This complementary character has important implications for energy policy.     

A semantic approach to a framework for business domain software systems

In enterprise firms, enormous amounts of electronic documents are generated by business analysts and other business domain application users. Applications that use these documents are often driven by business logic that is hard-coded together with application logic. One approach to the separation of business logic from applications is to create and maintain business and information extraction rules in an external, user-friendly format. The drawback of such an externalization is that the business rules, usually, do not have machine interpretable semantics. This situation often leads to misinterpretation of domain analysis documents, which can inhibit the productivity of computer-assisted analytical work and the effectiveness of business solutions. This paper proposes an ontology and rule-based framework for the development of business domain applications, which includes semantic processing of externalized business rules and to some extent externalization of application logic. The creation of external information extraction rules by the business analyst is a cumbersome and time consuming task. In order to overcome this problem, the framework also includes a rule learning system to semi-automate the generation of information extraction rules from source documents with the help of manual annotations. The main idea behind the work presented in this paper is to re-engineer very large enterprise information systems to adapt to Semantic Web computing techniques. The work presented in this paper is inspired by an industrial project.