Web的协同商务信息系统解决方案

为实现协同商务链中企业内部或企业之间的信息共享和数据集成,提出了利用Web services构建协同商务信息平台系统.在讨论Web Services的体系架构和基本特征的基础上,从盟主企业、成员企业以及客户三角色详细描述了作为服务请求者、服务提供者以及服务消费者在协同商务信息系统体系架构中的主要功能.结合汽车行业,构建了基于Web Services的协同商务信息系统,描述了协同商务系统的信息功能,实现共享与优化配置企业内部以及企业之间信息与资源.     

Feasibility of online collaborative voltage stability control of power systems

The authors present the results of feasibility study of a novel concept of power system online collaborative voltage stability control. Online collaboration between power system controllers is proposed in order to enhance their overall performance and efficiency to cope with the increasing operational uncertainty of modern power systems. The framework of the proposed online collaborative voltage stability control is first presented, which is based on the deployment of multi-agent systems and real-time communication for online collaborative control. Then, two of the most important issues in implementing the proposed online collaborative voltage stability control are addressed: (1) Error-tolerant communication protocol for fast information exchange among multiple intelligent agents; (2) Deployment of multi-agent systems by using graph theory to implement power system post-emergency control. Results of testing the proposed online collaborative voltage stability control in the case of the 10-machine 39-node New England power system are presented. Results of a feasibility study by means of a simulation are given that take into consideration low-probability cascading faults in the power system.     

An integrated fuzzy approach for information technology planning in collaborative product development

Collaborative product development (CPD) processes are generally based on technological infrastructures. Various information technologies (IT) are proposed every day to facilitate collaboration, integration, co-design and co-development processes. In this highly uncertain environment, a systematic methodology is essential to plan the IT infrastructure needed to start and maintain a collaborative process. This study offers an integrated IT planning methodology combining fuzzy quality function deployment, fuzzy axiomatic design and fuzzy rule-based systems. The methodology is tested in a CPD case and the outcome presents an improvement path for IT for each of the collaborative parties.     

State-of-the-art technologies and methodologies for collaborative product development systems

In order to facilitate product realisation processes, presently, research is actively being carried out to develop methodologies and technologies to support geographically dispersed teams to organise collaborative design based on the quickly evolving information technologies. A number of research works and commercial systems have appeared to provide solutions for collaborative and distributed product development, and the practical applications are getting more pervasive and mature. In this paper, the recently related works are summarised from three aspects—visualisation-based collaborative systems, co-design collaborative systems and CE (concurrent engineering)-based collaborative systems. Around these aspects, about 100 papers and 30 commercial systems/international standards published or launched recently are discussed. The current research and development statuses and issues, underlying algorithms, mechanisms and system architectures, and the future trends and challenges are explained and compared in detail.     

基于智能控制器的网络遥操作体系结构及控制策略研究

遥操作技术的发展趋势是提高机器人的自主性。为实现这一目标，提出了一种基于Agent的网络遥操作体系结构，分析了Agent结构和功能，讨论了各个子系统的功能及相应策略，并且提出了系统整体控制策略。Agent可以主动适应环境和理解人的意图，从而提高了系统的智能，简化了系统结构，增强了系统的扩展性和通用性。最后，通过空间卫星舱更换晶体生长炉棒料实验进行了验证。     

Distributed knowledge sharing for collaborative product development

Product development is a knowledge-intensive activity in manufacturing enterprises. This paper analyses various forms of knowledge resources in the product development process and studies the representation scheme for them. Then a novel distributed knowledge sharing model is proposed for spreading and sharing knowledge among engineers in collaborative product development teams. In a collaborative team, engineers usually come from diverse disciplines; their demands for knowledge are also different from each other. The proposed knowledge sharing model could deliver the proper knowledge to the engineers who may need them. Moreover, our model is based on the engineers’ personal knowledge repositories rather than the centralised team knowledge repository in the collaborative team. The proposed model could bring out an efficient and proactive way for knowledge sharing among engineers in the product development process. The efficiency and usability of the proposed model are validated by experiments referring to the knowledge sharing in a real-world collaborative team of a manufacturing enterprise.     

Weaving an agent-based Semantic Grid for distributed collaborative manufacturing

The development and maintenance of distributed collaborative manufacturing systems is faced with increasing challenges caused by the technical difficulties and ontological issues in distributed computing, resource integration and knowledge sharing over heterogeneous computing platforms. This paper presents an agent-based Semantic Grid for distributed manufacturing collaboration across ubiquitous virtual enterprises. A hierarchy of autonomous, adaptive agents forming a ‘super peer’ based peer-to-peer network is laid out in the Semantic Grid to provide, in an open, dynamic, loosely coupled and scalable manner, the service publication, discovery and reuse for management of applications that need to utilise Grid resources. The operation and experimental evaluation of the system are presented to validate the implementation of the proposed approach.     

Towards augmenting cyber-physical-human collaborative cognition for human-automation interaction in complex manufacturing and operational environments

The importance of augmenting human-technology collaborative cognition has been envisioned as one of the fundamental ways to bolster human cognition through human-automation interaction in complex manufacturing and operational environments. The focus on collaborative cognition entails a human-automation mutual adaption strategy for augmenting team cognition and collective intelligence. This paper provides an overview of augmenting collaborative cognition from an analytic and model-based decision-making perspective. Aiming to advance basic research for understanding human cognition augmentation, the fundamental and applied aspects of creating mathematical and computational models are discussed in regard to cognitive state sensing and assessment, human-automation interaction adaption and control, as well as group decision making in human-automation systems. A research roadmap towards cyber-physical-human analysis is deliberated to reveal a variety of opportunities of developing novel methods for enhancing affective cognition and perception learning, trust dynamics modelling, human cognitive performance prediction, as well as human-automation interaction optimisation.     

Combining social network and collaborative filtering for personalised manufacturing service recommendation

Owing to the rapid proliferation of Web service technologies in cross-enterprise manufacturing collaborations, information overload is becoming a major barrier that hinders the effective discovery of the shared manufacturing services provided by collaborative partners for supply chain deployment. Thus, we aimed to identify a different approach for discovering manufacturing services by making personalised service recommendations that are suited to the specific needs of active service users based on usage data from previous retrievals made by past service users. The proposed approach combines social network and collaborative filtering techniques in a unified framework to predict the missing Quality of Service (QoS) values of manufacturing services for an active service user, thereby improving the effectiveness of personalised QoS-aware service recommendations. The social network explores the usage of preference and tagging relationships among service users and manufacturing services in making personalised recommendation, which alleviates the data sparsity and the cold start problems that hinder the traditional collaborative filtering techniques. A case study and experimental evaluation demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve the practicality and accuracy to personalised manufacturing service recommendations in a real application.     

Readiness assessment of collaborative networked organisations for integrated product and service delivery

More and more firms are entering into alliances and coalitions to deliver competitive customer solutions, and there is a need to establish a common and recognised methodology in order to evaluate and qualify the impact of such company partnering on collaborative networks. These measures are necessary for informing decisions to admit/omit partners, for the delivery of integrated products and services, i.e. a product-service system, and for enhancing operational efficiency and competitiveness in the rapidly changing and dynamic global environment. In this article, a conceptual model is proposed for assessing the readiness of collaborative networked organisations for product-service system delivery. The model consists of a structural assessment of collaborative network topologies and densities, and a behavioural assessment of partner delivery competences and performance. Based on these concepts, an assessment process model was developed and used in case studies across industrials, consumer goods, health care, and utilities industries. The resulting implications of the assessment for researchers and practitioners are then highlighted and discussed.     

Role mechanisms in collaborative systems

Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) systems are computer-based tools that support collaborative activities. They should meet the requirements of normal collaborative efforts among people. They should not only support virtual face-to-face collaboration among people at a distance, but also improve face-to-face collaboration by providing more mechanisms to overcome the drawbacks of face-to-face collaboration among people. Therefore, introducing roles into CSCW systems is extremely important. By roles, one can avoid users of CSCW systems being overwhelmed by too much irrelevant information. One of the major problems in current CSCW systems is determining how to define and specify roles clearly and rigorously while maintaining the flexibility for collaboration. Many traditional CSCW systems based on roles have lost their flexibility after introducing roles because they can only provide static role mechanisms based on intuitive role concepts. There are no flexible mechanisms for role tuning, changing and transitions because there is not a special mechanism to express a role. This paper reviews the applications of roles in traditional collaborative systems, clarifies the general meanings of roles, discusses the functions of roles in collaboration, and suggests a role mechanism and a group of principles to support collaboration based on roles. This paper concludes that roles need more comprehensive research and will be applied widely in different areas.     

Exploring self-organization and self-adaption for smart manufacturing complex networks

Trends toward the globalization of the manufacturing industry and the increasing demands for small-batch, short-cycle, and highly customized products result in complexities and fluctuations in both external and internal manufacturing environments, which poses great challenges to manufacturing enterprises. Fortunately, recent advances in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the widespread use of embedded processors and sensors in factories enable collecting real-time manufacturing status data and building cyber–physical systems for smart, flexible, and resilient manufacturing systems. In this context, this paper investigates the mechanisms and methodology of self-organization and self-adaption to tackle exceptions and disturbances in discrete manufacturing processes. Specifically, a general model of smart manufacturing complex networks is constructed using scale-free networks to interconnect heterogeneous manufacturing resources represented by network vertices at multiple levels. Moreover, the capabilities of physical manufacturing resources are encapsulated into virtual manufacturing services using cloud technology, which can be added to or removed from the networks in a plug-and-play manner. Materials, information, and financial assets are passed through interactive links across the networks. Subsequently, analytical target cascading is used to formulate the processes of self-organizing optimal configuration and self-adaptive collaborative control for multilevel key manufacturing resources while particle swarm optimization is used to solve local problems on network vertices. Consequently, an industrial case based on a Chinese engine factory demonstrates the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed model and method in handling typical exceptions. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism and method outperform the event-triggered rescheduling method, reducing manufacturing cost, manufacturing time, waiting time, and energy consumption, with reasonable computational time. This work potentially enables managers and practitioners to implement active perception, active response, self-organization, and self-adaption solutions in discrete manufacturing enterprises.     

Determining the optimal collaborative benchmarks in a supply chain

Supply chains are currently considered dynamic systems and will change with time and with the environment. Thus, the performance of a supply chain system will not only be influenced by the determined measuring factors but also by the adding or withdrawal of enterprises. Faced with these unstable systems, this study employs the Data Envelopment Analysis and sensitivity analysis methods in order to measure supply chain collaborative performance as well as relative individual company performance. This approach principally aims at finding: (1) an effective collaborative performance evaluation method that can cover the measuring factors admitted by all chain members; (2) the robust benchmark companies for closely related chain members. The results of this research clearly show the expected study target that will benefit chain members in performance improvement.     

面向协同虚拟制造的分布式支撑环境研究

提出了协同虚拟制造(collaborative virtual manufacturing, CVM)的概念及其主要内涵,比较了CVM与VM之间的联系与区别。作为VM的拓展和延伸,CVM可以被定义为基于网络技术、数据库技术和分布式计算技术,由制造商、供应商、合作伙伴和客户协同参与的支持供应链管理和个性化服务的虚拟制造。基于分层次、高度集成与松耦合的辩证统一和可扩展性的原则,给出了CVM体系结构,该体系结构同时考虑了供应链上企业之间的横向一体化和基于多层分布式对象技术的纵向一体化。分析了CVM与现有的分布式对象结构的主要矛盾,针对这一矛盾,提出了面向CVM的分布式支撑环境的主要技术内涵。给出了一个面向CVM分布式支撑环境的典型框架结构,该架构通过Web Service服务层整合异构分布式对象,并用传统的Socket通信方式以解决实时通信的问题。     

虚拟车间动态重构模型的研究

阐述了敏捷制造模式下，车间的功能除了具有常规的生产管理和控制功能外，还具有实现单元动态重构的功能和通过网络对外合作的功能。在分析了虚拟车间动态重构的系统的关键技术的基础上，提出了基于多代理机的虚拟车间动态重构模型，讨论了Ａｇｅｎｔ之间的协商机制。     

Knowledge discOvery And daTa minINg inteGrated (KOATING) Moderators for collaborative projects

A major issue in any multidiscipline collaborative project is how to best share and simultaneously exploit different types of expertise, without duplicating efforts or inadvertently causing conflicts or loss of efficiency through misunderstanding of individual or shared goals. Moderators are knowledge based systems designed to support collaborative teams by raising awareness of potential problems or conflicts. However, the functioning of a Moderator is limited by the knowledge it has about the team members. Knowledge acquisition, learning and updating of knowledge are the major challenges for a Moderator's implementation. To address these challenges a Knowledge discOvery And daTa minINg inteGrated (KOATING) framework is presented for Moderators to enable them to continuously learn from the operational databases of the company and semi-automatically update their knowledge about team members. This enables the reuse of discovered knowledge from operational databases within collaborative projects. The integration of knowledge discovery in database (KDD) techniques into the existing Knowledge Acquisition Module of a moderator enables hidden data dependencies and relationships to be utilised to facilitate the moderation process. The architecture for the Universal Knowledge Moderator (UKM) shows how Moderators can be extended to incorporate a learning element which enables them to provide better support for virtual enterprises. Unified Modelling Language diagrams were used to specify the ways to design and develop the proposed system. The functioning of a UKM is presented using an illustrative example.     

A Secure NDN Framework for Internet of Things Enabled Healthcare

Healthcare is a binding domain for the Internet of Things (IoT) to automate healthcare services for sharing and accumulation patient records at anytime from anywhere through the Internet. The current IP-based Internet architecture suffers from latency, mobility, location dependency, and security. The Named Data Networking (NDN) has been projected as a future internet architecture to cope with the limitations of IP-based Internet. However, the NDN infrastructure does not have a secure framework for IoT healthcare information. In this paper, we proposed a secure NDN framework for IoT-enabled Healthcare (IoTEH). In the proposed work, we adopt the services of Identity-Based Signcryption (IBS) cryptography under the security hardness Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptosystem (HCC) to secure the IoTEH information in NDN. The HCC provides the corresponding level of security using minimal computational and communicational resources as compared to bilinear pairing and Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC). For the efficiency of the proposed scheme, we simulated the security of the proposed solution using Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA). Besides, we deployed the proposed scheme on the IoTEH in NDN infrastructure and compared it with the recent IBS schemes in terms of computation and communication overheads. The simulation results showed the superiority and improvement of the proposed framework against contemporary related works.     

Development of a parallel processing multi-agent architecture for a virtual CIM system

Global manufacturing enterprises tend to rely on fully integrated manufacturing systems to satisfy constantly changing market requirements. In addition, small to medium enterprises are in a dilemma when competing with large organizations. Virtual computer-integrated manufacturing (VCIM) is a realistic concept that can provide the integration requirements for the globally distributed manufacturing resources and it has the potential to satisfy the market requirements of small to medium enterprises. The vision of the VCIM is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of manufacturing enterprises by seamlessly integrating globally distributed manufacturing resources as much as possible. Meanwhile, intelligent agent technology provides a better means to implement distributed components as integrated application systems. The paper provides a parallel processing multi-agent architecture to support a global integrated manufacturing system in the form of the VCIM. In this architecture, a three-layered structure is proposed to accommodate all the agents no matter where they are located. Multiple Facilitator agents are proposed with similar functionalities to smooth the information flow across the integrated system in a parallel connection manner. In addition, a multi-agent VCIM model that describes the agent identification approaches for VCIM, Java environment implementation approaches and a simulation system to demonstrate the parallel processing multi-agent architecture are also discussed.     

Design of a decentralized framework for collaborative product design using memetic algorithms

This paper proposes a generalized bi-level decentralized framework to model collaborative design problems over autonomous stakeholders with each having different objectives. At the system level, a system solution derived from the Pareto concept is created. A facilitator agent is introduced to search for Pareto optimal solutions based on a Memetic Algorithm (MA). At the design disciplinary level, design agents representing design teams are introduced to optimize their own objectives. The proposed framework will guide the collaborative designers to converge to Pareto optimal solutions given any forms of design utility functions. The only information exchanged between the two levels is numerical values instead of utility functions. Therefore sensitive (private) design information can be protected. Three comparison experiments are conducted to evaluate the solution quality and explore the applicability of the proposed framework to collaborative design problems.