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the 3-Tier application server model.
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Networking technology, object-oriented distributed systems, workflow mechanisms and the WEB are now the obvious foundations for complex information management and concurrent engineering in the distributed virtual enterprises to come. Moreover, the combination of these rapidly evolving technologies are to be done in compliance with Product Data Tech...
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... The built environment must integrate emerging non-intrusive devices and systems (e.g., sensors, actuators, intelligent components, etc.) which should be able to generate and communicate data and information and potentially interact among them and with the users. Therefore, there is the need to develop standardized communication channels that will manage all the collected and distributed data flows, along with new methods and tools to analyse ambient data in the building, but also behaviours leading to the emergence of a new form of engineering based on embedded services for the built environment, deploying new forms of extended enterprise information systems, as for virtual enterprises [61,62] and achieving coherence between strategies in these extended enterprise systems [63]. As an example of these types of new open platforms to plug-in software and hardware, the CSTBox, i.e., CSTB sensing and tele monitoring box [64], is a global solution designed by CSTB, which targets embedded applications based on ambient instrumentations and allows using at the same time various devices, including sensors, actuators and user interaction devices, which are provided by different makers and make use of different communication protocols. ...
More than two decades ago, object-oriented representation of AEC (architecture engineering and construction) projects started to offer the promise of seamless communication of semantic data models between computer-based systems used from the design stage to the operation of the facilities. BIM (building information modelling) emerged and appeared as a means to store all relevant data generated during the life-cycle of the facilities. But this upstream view of the built environment, arising from the design and construction stages, extended to the downstream operations where building and industrial facilities appeared more and more as huge dynamic data producers and concentrators while being operated. This created new challenges leading to what is referred to as ISCs (intelligent and smart constructions). The current state of the art is that final constructions still contain various and increasingly versatile control and service systems, which are hardly standardised, and not interconnected among themselves. Monitoring, maintenance and services are done by specialised companies, each responsible of different systems, which are relying on customised software and techniques to meet specific user needs and are based on monolithic applications that require manual configuration for specific uses, maintenance and support. We demonstrate in this paper that the early promises of integration across the actors and along the lifetime of facilities have gone a long way but will only be delivered through enhanced standardisation of computerized models, representations, services and operations still not yet fully accomplished 25 years after work started. Key words: Architecture engineering and construction, building information models, semantic interoperability, intelligent and smart built environment, information systems and sensors for new services.
... Furthermore, the execution of distributed business processes representingg the activities of the VE itself (see Section 2.2.2), can also be supported by workfloww management techniques. In fact, workflow management systems represent ann approach that has been extensively applied by several VE projects such as PROD-NETT [40], VEGA [176] and NIIIP [114]. In all these cases, the reference model defined byy the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) [167] has been followed. ...
... VEGAA The VEGA project aims at the support of the technical operations and businesss activities of VEs in the area of Large Scale Engineering (LSE) projects [176,175]. Thee VEGA infrastructure incorporates four main kinds of information management technologiess or standards: product data modeling (ISO STEP), middleware technologyogy (CORBA), workflow management (as defined by WfMC), and Web-related standardss (HTML, VRML, Java, etc.). Namely, the representation and management of thee VE-related data in VEGA is based on the STEP standard; the global VE process iss managed through workflow specifications; and the data and service interoperability issuess in a distributed network are addressed using CORBA and Web technology. ...
... •• Distributed transaction management functionalities. As mentioned in Chapterr 2, for some VE infrastructures, there is a prominent need to support advancedd distributed transaction management mechanisms [176,114]. This need wass not relevant to the kind of VE scenarios addressed in this thesis. ...
... Regarding the multi-agent systems approach, it was applied so far to VE modeling in the building construction domain (see e.g. [9], [24], and [34]). Both approaches can be used in the development of an ABVE in the civil engineering domain. ...
Modelling efficient virtual enterprises (VEs) represents a real challenge in the context of dynamic, complex and extending business markets. Among the modelling approaches proposed for VEs, multi-agent systems are more suitable due to their basic characteristics of flexibility, modularity, distributivity as well as some characteristics such as adaptability and learning, that could be added in order to improve the overall VE performance and scalability. The application of VEs and agent-based VEs were proposed for several industrial domains: automotive industry, food industry, electronics and telecommunications, transportation, robotics, for manufacturing and supply chain problems solving. This paper presents a generic framework for virtual enterprises development, VE-Frame, and an agent-based virtual enterprise model, ABVE-Construct, for the civil engineering domain, derived from the VE-Frame. Also, a case study of using the model for a building construction scenario, and the model adaptation options for other domains of applications are discussed.
... The virtual enterprise is defined as: « An association of the infrastructure networks, technology and the expertise that generates a form of company difficult to distinguish » [8]. ...
Face to the technological development and to the race to the competitiveness that drives the search for total quality and the reduction of the cost in order to meet the needs of customers who have become more and more demanding. The world of organizations has evolved into a virtual world which removes the notions of dimension and of the time. One of the new forms of organization that information technology can withstand is the virtual enterprise. This new conception of the organization is in need of communication technologies to share information within the company or with partner companies. Thus, these new organizational forms such as the company are based on an intensive use of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and the integration of the Help Systems in the Cooperative Work (HSCW). The technological tools such as the Ethernet TCP/IP, Intranet or the Internet allow you to perform the sharing of information and resources in real time to meet the needs of customers. A well calculated approach to integration of these tools allows a successful management of change in order to install these new practices within the culture of the company. In this article, we will describe the strategy of the virtual enterprise, its characteristics, its forms, the technologies and methods to help the cooperative work contributing to this virtual environment while ensuring a successful approach for change for the case of a company that wants to change its old practices by the practices developed by this strategy.
... and, albeit identified as a problem for the furniture industry, there is a global concern in the SME-based industrial sectors [19]. The huge number of proprietary systems operating in the furniture industrial sector makes this problem bigger and more difficult to solve [20]. Thus, this industrial community is eager to have an International Standard for product life-cycle information in which software providers can have confidence on its worldwide adoption. ...
Furniture sector in Europe involves mainly to small and medium enterprises that try to succeed day by day in a market that is becoming more and more competitive everyday. The needs of the global economy have encouraged the furniture industry sector to use secure electronic commerce services. However, typically each of these companies uses different software to design, produce and sell their final product. A more competitive method of exchanging product data with higher quality and with low cost is foreseen, has been proposed inside IMS SMART-fm project (www.ims.org, www.smart-fm.funstep.org), leading to the need for adoption of data standards. Involving partners from USA, Europe, Canada and Australia, this project develops and demonstrates in industrial environments, an interoperable open standards-based framework that supports smart environments through the complete product life cycle in the furniture manufacturing industry. This framework supports a two level approach to business-to-business electronic commerce: 1) interoperability among user applications, and 2) interoperability among electronic commerce platforms. The paper presents the strategic objectives and results as a case study to stimulate and accelerate enterprises to adopt technologies and practices in the emerging networked digital economy. It concludes anticipating the strategic results that it will deliver for the next decade.
... Some projects in related areas are evident. Among them there are the NIIIP project in the USA (NIIIP 1996, Barry et al. 1998), the PRODNET project and the VEGA project in Europe (Afsarmanesh et al. 1999, Zarli andPoyet 1999). Camarinha-Matos et al. (2003) embark on infrastructure developments for agile VEs, suggesting solutions that follow the major phases of the VE life cycle, i.e. creation, operation, evolution, and dissolution. ...
The concept of Virtual Enterprise (VE), a special organization of manufacturing units and enterprises, has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Unlike traditional enterprise, VE is most suitable in production environments that experience frequent changes in product mix. To complete a complex task composed of some sub-tasks, traditional control architecture is not versatile enough to coordinate and schedule multi-site and multi-type resources, especially in resolving resource conflicts during operations. Using hybrid control architecture, VE can execute the effective control on multi-site enterprises to support the rapid response to customer demands. Coordination mechanism running through the total life cycle of VE is applied to coordinating and scheduling the requests from different tasks and resources, which make VE flexible, adaptive and robust. In this paper, the hybrid control architecture based on multi-agent technology that supports the cooperation of enterprises is presented. Coordination mechanism and the corresponding optimal models are discussed. Finally a case study is used as an illustration to present the detailed coordination mechanism.
... To achieve this goal, several projects have been done to investigate this problem. Among them are the NIIIP project in the US [5, 6], the PRODNET project [7] and the VEGA project [8] in Europe. Finding the right partners and establishing necessary conditions for starting the collaboration process might, however, be a costly and time consuming activity and, therefore, an inhibitor of the desired agility. ...
Rising product variety and complexity, shorter time frames to respond, and the continual need to gain new capabilities through
innovativeness force the trend of outsourcing to be replaced by strategic alliances, where enterprises or individuals work
together towards a common goal and share their responsibilities as well as their profits. Recent developments in information
technology have enabled relatively inexpensive, reliable and fast networking to support such alliances in real time. In this
context, the virtual enterprise (VE) represents an appropriate cooperation alternative and competitive advantage for the enterprises.
VE is a temporary network of independent companies -- suppliers, customers, even rivals -- linked by information technology
(IT) to share skills, costs and access to one another’s markets. In this emerging business model of virtual enterprise, the
decision support functionality, which addresses issues such as partner company selection, is an important domain to be studied.
In this paper, we propose an analytic hierarchy process model to contribute in the selection of the partner companies in the
virtual enterprises. A case example is also covered to validate the feasibility of the adoption of the model in virtual enterprise
situations.
... For all software applications to integrate and achieve compatibility in interfaces and data, each application must develop one dedicated translator for each normally incompatible application it would like to operate. This is a problematic situation considering the effort required to develop each translator and the unpredictable number of incompatible platforms that could exist (Matos and Afsarmanesh, 1999; Davulcu et al., 1999; Jardim-Goncalves and Steiger-Garção, 2001b; Poyet, 1999; Umar and Bellcore, 1999; VEGA, 1999). The ideal situation would be one where all applications could easily be integrated, independently of the platforms in use as if all platforms were equal, interoperating in flexible and configurable enterprise environments. ...
Numerous proposals exist worldwide for the representation of data models and services for the main manufacturing activities. The ISO10303 STEP has developed more than 40 standard Application Protocols for product data representation, and they reflect the consolidated expertise of major industrial worldwide specialists working together for more than 20 years, covering the principal product data management areas for the main industries. However, these standards are focused on product data representation. A framework to enable them to interoperate at meta-model and knowledge levels permits the reuse of this existing expertise, extending its capabilities in complementary application domains, like advanced modelling tools, knowledge management and the emergent semantic web technologies. This paper proposes a framework for the development, usage and extension of integrated data and knowledge models, using as a reference existent standard-based protocols. The work results from the research and development completed by the authors under the umbrella of international projects.
... Inter-enterprise cooperation is then performed via the interaction (transactionoriented) through these layers. Examples of this approach are early efforts in VE infrastructures, as represented by the NIIIP, PRODNET II (Camarinha-Matos and , or VEGA (Zarli and Poyet, 1999) projects, that aimed at designing open platforms to support the basic information exchange and coordination needs in industrial virtual enterprises. Most of these developments cover basically the integration levels 1 and 2. ...
The availability of a flexible and configurable base infrastructure is one of the main requirements for the practical implantation of agile virtual enterprises (VE). An overview of current approaches and trends towards the establishment of such infrastructures is presented in this paper. Various example architectures from several international research projects are discussed. Also, the aspects of trust building and the formation of breeding environments, as an important basis for practical agile virtual organizations (VO), are introduced. Finally, a list of open challenges in terms of advanced infrastructures is included.
... Interenterprise cooperation is then performed via the interaction through these layers. Examples of this approach are early efforts in VE infrastructures, as represented by the NIIIP [4], PRODNET [2], [3], or VEGA [5] projects, that aimed at designing open platforms to support the basic information exchange and coordination needs in industrial virtual enterprises. ...
