Collaborative networked organizations: Status and trends in manufacturing

Collaborative networked organizations represent an important paradigm to help manufacturing companies cope with the challenges of market turbulence. Through collaboration, assisted by ICT, companies extend their “reach ability space” and participate in agile value creation networks. After a brief summary of the main concepts and collaborative forms, this article presents a survey of the recent advances and suggests main research challenges for various focus areas. A list of emerging collaborative forms in different domains and their characterization are introduced. Among these forms, the customer involvement in innovation networks is discussed as a particularly relevant example for manufacturing.     

POPEYE: providing collaborative services for ad hoc and spontaneous communities

Next generation collaborative systems will offer mobile users seamless and natural collaboration amongst a diversity of agents, within distributed, knowledge-rich and virtualized working environments. This ambitious goal faces numerous challenges from the underlying communication infrastructure to the high level application services, with the aim to provide services with the appropriate quality (such as persistence, synchronization, and security). Most currently available tools supporting collaboration address either rather traditional and rigid intra-organizational collaboration scenarios or, at the opposite, completely free and unstructured open communities’s interactions. Emerging dynamic, flexible and ad hoc collaboration schemes are hardly or not supported at all. The POPEYE framework offers collaborative services for applications that aim to enable spontaneous collaboration over P2P wireless ad hoc groups, where fixed infrastructure is not a prerequisite, where virtual communities can emerge spontaneously and share data with the appropriate quality of service for business applications (persistence, synchronization, security, etc.).     

A framework for virtual organization creation in a breeding environment

Effectiveness in the process of creating virtual organizations (VO) is an important pre-condition for having a truly dynamic VOs, in response to collaboration opportunities in fast changing market contexts. A realistic approach to materialize agility in VO creation is defined under the assumption of a VO Breeding Environment (VBE), that guarantees the preparedness of its members to quickly get engaged in collaboration processes. After a survey of past approaches and a characterization of the VBE concept, a discussion of the process and suggested functionalities towards a VO creation framework are presented in this context. Finally a list of supporting tools is described and future research challenges are pointed out.     

Collaborative virtual geographic environments: A case study of air pollution simulation

The integration of high dimensional geo-visualization, geo-data management, geo-process modeling and computation, geospatial analysis, and geo-collaboration is a trend in GIScience. The technical platform that matches the trend forms a new framework unlike that of GIS and is conceptualized in this paper as a collaborative virtual geographic environment (CVGE). This paper focuses on two key issues. One is scientific research on CVGE including the concept definition and the conceptual and system framework development. The other is a prototype system development according to CVGE frameworks for air pollution simulation in the Pearl River Delta. The prototype system integrates air pollution source data, air pollution dispersion models, air pollution distribution/dispersion visualization in geographically referenced environments, geospatial analysis, and geo-collaboration. Using the prototype system, participants from geographically distributed locations can join in the shared virtual geographic environment to conduct collaborative simulation of air pollution dispersion. The collaborations supporting this simulation happen on air pollution source editing, air pollution dispersion modeling, geo-visualization of the output of the modeling, and geo-analysis.     

Constructing social systems through computer-mediated communication

The question of whether computer-mediated communication can support the formation of genuine social systems is addressed in this paper. Our hypothesis, that technology creates new forms of social systems beyond real-life milieus, includes the idea that the technology itself may influence how social binding emerges within online environments. In real-life communities, a precondition for social coherence is the existence of social conventions. By observing interaction in virtual environments, we found the use of a range of social conventions. These results were analysed to determine how the use and emergence of conventions might be influenced by the technology. One factor contributing to the coherence of online social systems, but not the only one, appears to be the degree of social presence mediated by the technology. We suggest that social systems can emerge by computer-mediated communication and are shaped by the media of the specific environment.     

Collaborative virtual learning environments: design and evaluation

E-learning systems have gone through a radical change from the initial text-based environments to more stimulating multimedia systems. Such systems are Collaborative Virtual Environments, which could be used in order to support collaborative e-learning scenarios. The main aim of this paper is to aid educational designers in selecting, designing and evaluating three dimensional collaborative virtual environments in order to gain the pedagogical benefits of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. Therefore, this paper initially discusses the potential of three dimensional networked virtual environments for supporting collaborative learning. Furthermore, based on a two-step platform selection process this paper (a) presents and compares three dimensional multi-user virtual environments for supporting collaborative learning and (b) validates the most promising solution against a set of design principles for educational virtual environments. According to these principles, an educational environment has been implemented on top of the selected platform in order to support collaborative e-learning scenarios. The design of this environment is also presented. In addition, this paper presents the results of three small scale studies carried out in a tertiary education department, to assess the educational environment. This environment has been evaluated based on a hybrid evaluation methodology for uncovering usability problems, collecting further requirements for additional functionality to support collaborative virtual learning environments, and determining the appropriateness of different kinds of learning scenarios.

Collaborative signal processing for target tracking in distributed wireless sensor networks

Target tracking, especially visual target tracking, in complex situations is challenging, which is always performed in single-view system. Because of the conflict between resolution and tracking range, however, single-view tracking is not robust and accurate. This paper presents a distributed multi-view tracking system using collaborative signal processing (CSP) in distributed wireless sensor networks (DWSNs). In the proposed tracking system, target detection and classification algorithms are based on single-node processing and target tracking is performed in sink node, whereas target localization algorithm is carried out by CSP between multisensor. For conquering the disadvantages of client/server based centralized data fusion, a progressive distributed data fusion are proposed. Finally, an indoor target tracking experiment is illustrated, and then tracking performance, execution time and energy consumption of progressive distributed data fusion are compared with client/server based centralized data fusion. Experimental results demonstrate that the CSP based distributed multi-view tracking system in DWSNs can accomplish multi-target extraction, classification, localization, tracking and association quickly and accurately with little congestion, energy consumption and execution time.     

Collaborative environments for the learning of design: a model and a case study in Domotics

Design plays a central role in a range of subjects at different educational levels. Students have to acquire the knowledge necessary for the execution of tasks that enable them to construct an artefact or model that can be tested by simulation and that satisfies some requirements and verifies some constraints. They achieve this by means of a design process. In some design domains there is a lack of teaching tools from a learner-centred perspective. Moreover, when these domains are complex, the design problems that the students have to solve during their learning process require the design activity to be carried out in group. In response to this situation, we have developed a design model and a collaborative learning method. Using this conceptual framework, we have built a collaborative environment for the learning of domotical¹ design by means of complex problem solving, with an emphasis on synchronous collaboration for work distribution, discussion, design in shared surfaces and simulation. This environment has already been evaluated and used in real teaching experiences.     

Virtual interpersonal touch: Haptic interaction and copresence in collaborative virtual environments

As digital communication becomes more commonplace and sensory rich, understanding the manner in which people interact with one another is crucial. In the current study, we examined the manners in which people touch digital representations of people, and compared those behaviors to the manner in which they touch digital representations of nonhuman objects. Results demonstrated that people used less force when touching people than other nonhuman objects, and that people touched the face with less force than the torso area. Finally, male digital representations were touched with more force than female representations by subjects of both genders. We discuss the implications of these data to the development of haptic communication systems as well as for a methodology of measuring the amount of copresence in virtual environments.

Collaborative learning as a collective competence when students use the potential of meaning in asynchronous dialogues

The aim of this study is to examine and to describe how student teachers engaged in courses in web-based learning environments over a period of 40-weeks develop a collective competence to collaborate. The collective competence of collaboration is defined as the level of learning ability a group of students express when using dialogues as a tool for their own and other’s learning in a web-based learning environment. The students’ contributions to the course assignments, the group responses and the collaborative discussions and dialogues were analysed and interpreted based on Bakhtin’s and Rommetveit’s theories on dialogic interactions and meaning potentials. The results describe three different levels at which students use dialogues as a tool for learning when they collaborate within the group.     

Influences of haptic communication on a shared manual task

With the advent of new haptic feedback devices, researchers are giving serious consideration to the incorporation of haptic communication in collaborative virtual environments. For instance, haptic interactions based tools can be used for medical and related education whereby students can train in minimal invasive surgery using virtual reality before approaching human subjects. To design virtual environments that support haptic communication, a deeper understanding of humans′ haptic interactions is required. In this paper, human′s haptic collaboration is investigated. A collaborative virtual environment was designed to support performing a shared manual task. To evaluate this system, 60 medical students participated to an experimental study. Participants were asked to perform in dyads a needle insertion task after a training period. Results show that compared to conventional training methods, a visual-haptic training improves user′s collaborative performance. In addition, we found that haptic interaction influences the partners′ verbal communication when sharing haptic information. This indicates that the haptic communication training changes the nature of the users′ mental representations. Finally, we found that haptic interactions increased the sense of copresence in the virtual environment: haptic communication facilitates users′ collaboration in a shared manual task within a shared virtual environment. Design implications for including haptic communication in virtual environments are outlined.     

Collaborative joins in a pervasive computing environment

We present a collaborative query processing protocol based on the principles of Contract Nets. The protocol is designed for pervasive computing environments where, in addition to operating on limited computing and battery resources, mobile devices cannot always rely on being able to access the wired infrastructure. Devices, therefore, need to collaborate with each other in order to obtain data otherwise inaccessible due to the nature of the environment. Furthermore, by intelligently using answers cached by peers, devices can reduce their computation cost. We show the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating performance of devices querying for data while moving in a citylike environment.Received: 28 July 2003, Accepted: 26 March 2004, Published online: 8 July 2004Edited by: K. Ramamritham     

GriF: A Grid framework for a Web Service approach to reactive scattering

Grid empowered calculations are becoming an important advanced tool indispensable for scientific advances. The possibility of simplifying and harmonizing the work carried out by computational scientists using a Web Service approach is considered here. To this end, a new Collaborative Grid Framework has been developed and tested. As a study case a three dimensional reactive scattering code dealing with atom-diatom systems has been considered. To this end an extended study of the energy dependence of the electronically adiabatic reactivity of N+N₂ has been performed on the EGEE Grid.     

Collaborative web search: a robustness analysis

Collaborative web search utilises past search histories in a community of like-minded users to improve the quality of search results. Search results that have been selected by community members for past queries are promoted in response to similar queries that occur in the future. The I-SPY system is one example of such a collaborative approach to search. As is the case with all open systems, however, it is difficult to establish the integrity of those who access a system and thus the potential for malicious attack exists. In this paper we investigate the robustness of the I-SPY system to attack. In particular, we consider attack scenarios whereby malicious agents seek to promote particular result pages within a community. In addition, we analyse robustness in the context of community homogeneity, and we show that this key characteristic of communities has implications for system robustness.     

Service networks with multichannel nodes in a random environment

Service networks with multichannel nodes of semi-Markovian type are considered. The parameters of a source of demands depend on the state of the Markovian random environment. For the process of servicing demands, the conditions of existence of a stationary mode are found, and the properties of stationary distribution in terms of spectral characteristics of the routing matrix are investigated. Translated from Kibernetika i Sistemnyi Analiz, No. 1, pp. 167–172, January–February, 2000.     

The design and realization of CoViD: a system for collaborative virtual 3D design

Many important decisions in the design process are made during fairly early on, after designers have presented initial concepts. In many domains, these concepts are already realized as 3D digital models. Then, in a meeting, the stakeholders for the project get together and evaluate these potential solutions. Frequently, the participants in this meeting want to interactively modify the proposed 3D designs to explore the design space better. Today’s systems and tools do not support this, as computer systems typically support only a single user and computer-aided design tools require significant training. This paper presents the design of a new system to facilitate a collaborative 3D design process. First, we discuss a set of guidelines which have been introduced by others and that are relevant to collaborative 3D design systems. Then, we introduce the new system, which consists of two main parts. The first part is an easy-to-use conceptual 3D design tool that can be used productively even by naive users. The tool provides novel interaction techniques that support important properties of conceptual design. The user interface is non-obtrusive, easy-to-learn, and supports rapid creation and modification of 3D models. The second part is a novel infrastructure for collaborative work, which offers an interactive table and several large interactive displays in a semi-immersive setup. It is designed to support multiple users working together. This infrastructure also includes novel pointing devices that work both as a stylus and a remote pointing device. The combination of the (modified) design tool with the collaborative infrastructure forms a new platform for collaborative virtual 3D design. Then, we present an evaluation of the system against the guidelines for collaborative 3D design. Finally, we present results of a preliminary user study, which asked naive users to collaborate in a 3D design task on the new system.     

Enhancing empathy instruction using a collaborative virtual learning environment for children with autistic spectrum conditions

Empathy is an essential part of normal social function that people with autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) lack. This study uses the intervention of enhancing empathy via 3D animated scenarios of empathy in a virtual learning environment to help those deficient in empathy. Specifically, this study explores the understanding of empathy, perspective-taking and the performance of understanding of empathy via a collaborative virtual learning environment (CVLE) - empathy system. The study, which used CVLE - 3D empathy systems and three participants diagnosed with ASCs, conducted multiple baseline research for evidence of improved understanding of empathy via system usage. This experimental study lasted 5 months and the experimental results indicate that using the CVLE 3D empathy system had significant and positive effects on participant use of empathy, both within the CVLE 3D empathy system and in terms of maintaining learning in understanding empathy.     

Neural networks applied to a large biological database to analyse dairy breeding patterns

The paper recounts the investigation of a dairy sire prediction capability based on Cascade Correlation neural networks to study influences relating the performance of offspring to their parents. The context of the problem is the artificial insemination breeding program for the Australian dairy industry. The networks are used to screen observed information in the database to relate it to best combinations of dam and sire. The voluminous data is quite noisy and is subject to genetic and environmental influences. The intention is to extract linear and nonlinear relationships from among the input variables without specifying their form. A number of scenarios are employed which recast the data into different forms. In particular, it was discovered that the problem could be restructured and the data supplemented with transformed data to produce succinct input patterns of manageable dimensionality, which allowed for a substantially improved predictive capability. It was then found that reasonable daughter predictions could be obtained of about 10%, as measured by her milk production. Results are compared with those obtained using two alternate neural network methods. Crude statistical methods are employed to evaluate the performance of the neural networks.