Search

Published in IFAC-PapersOnLine (51)11:758-763, 2018; International audience; This work is a positioning research paper for energy efficient building based on ICT solutions. Through the literature about the solutions for energy control of buildings during operational phase, a 3-layers model is proposed to integrate these solutions: first level consists in communication technologies, second level is about data modelling and third level is related to decision-making tools. For each level, key research topics and remaining problems are identified in order to achieve a concrete step forward. 1. CONTEXT AND PROBLEMATICS Through studies on ICT solutions for energy control of buildings, a 3-layers model is proposed to integrate these solutions and position a new way for energy efficiency. The building sector is the largest user of energy and CO 2 emitter in the EU, estimated at approximately 40% of the total consumption (Sharples et al., 1999). According to the International Panel on Climate Change (European Union, 2010), 30% of energy used in buildings could be reduced with net economic benefits by 2030. Such a reduction, however, is meaningless unless "sustainability" is considered. Because of these factors, healthy, sustainable, and energy efficient buildings have become active topics in international research; there is an urgent need for a new kind of high-technology driven and integrative research that should lead to the massive development of smart buildings and, in the medium term, smart cities. From a building lifecycle perspective, most of the energy (~80%) is consumed during the operational stage of the building (European Union, 2010) (Bilsen et al., 2013). Reducing building energy consumption may be addressed by the physical modifications which can be operated on a building like upgrading windows, heating systems or modifying thermic characteristics by insulating. Another possible path to reduce the energy consumption of a building is to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). According to the International Panel on Climate Change, a reduction of energy even greater than the 30% can be targeted by 2030 by considering ICT solutions. In support of this claim, some specialists believe that ICT-based solutions have the potential to enable 50-80% greenhouse gas reduction globally. In this respect, ICT innovation opens prospects for the development of a new range of new services highly available, flexible, safe, easy to integrate, and user friendly (Bilsen et al., 2013). This, in turn, should foster a sophisticated, reliable and fast communication infrastructure for the connection of various distributed elements (sensors, generators, substations...) that enables to exchange real-time data, information and knowledge needed to improve efficiency (e.g., to monitor and control energy consumption), reliability (e.g., to facilitate maintenance operations), flexibility (e.g., to integrate new rules to meet new consumer expectations), and investment returns, but also to induce a shift in consumer behaviour.

International audience; Global competitiveness has challenged manufacturing industry to rationalize different ways of bringing to the market new products in a short lead-time with competitive prices, high quality, and customization. Modern Product Development Process (PDP) has been requiring simultaneously collaboration of multiple groups, exchanging information from multiple perspectives within and across enterprise boundaries. However, semantic interoperability issues (misinterpretation and mistakes) in view of the information heterogeneity from multiple perspectives and their relationships. This research proposes a semantic reconciliation view to support the interoperable information relationships in product design and manufacturing. This view is part of the conceptual framework of an Interoperable Product Design and Manufacturing System (IPDMS). The semantic reconciliation method uses three approaches (Adjustment Context, Ontology Intersection, and Semantic Alignment) to provide support for the semantic information relationships across the product design and manufacturing. The method is applied in a rotational thin-wall plastic injected design and manufacturing and evaluated through the development of semantic rules responsible for the information mapping of sharing, conversion and translation. This semantic rules were modeled in Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) supported by Web Ontology Languages (OWL). Sequentially, the potential benefits and limitation of the method was discussed, contributing to the semantic information interoperability during the development of complex products.

International audience; Global competitiveness challenges manufacturing industry to rationalise different ways of bringing to the market new products in a short lead-time with competitive prices while ensuring higher quality levels and customisation. Industries need to effectively share heterogeneous information during Product Development Process (PDP) within and across their institutional boundaries to be competitive. However, problems with misinterpretation and mistakes have been identified during information exchange due to the semantic interoperability obstacles. Thus, this research proposes a systematic literature review to identify the main researches and the milestones reference works on semantic interoperability field. A rigorous methodology was conducted in different databases, covering the articles published in scientific journals from 2005 to 2015 as a preliminary study had indicated that the incidence of articles related to the subject was more frequent from the second half of the 2000s. The research structure consisted of four steps: Survey-searching, analysis and selection of recent researches; Categorization-categorization of the selected papers; References citation frequency analysis-the selected papers were analysed and the main researches and milestones references were identified; and Main researches critical analysis – the main researches were analysed for their contributions and limitations, their contributions and limitations, resulting in 14 selected scientific articles and 8 identified milestones references. It is evident that this field has interesting perspectives on future research opportunities on semantic interoperability of information issues across PDP, contributing to the new concepts of future factories.

Published in Procedia Engineering 180:812-82, 2017; International audience; An exhibition system is typically a physical open space made of several buildings devoted to performing demonstrations or social activities. Several examples of exhibition systems can be found word wide. The management of these spaces, even in presence of a limited number of activities, requires significant efforts: safety, welcome, merchandising, public services, etc. Nowadays, the new trend is to offer multiple, contemporary use of exhibition spaces, allowing exhibition events and regular social activities (commercial, cultural, etc.) to be dynamically intertwined, either to endeavor the huge economic investments behind infrastructures or to increase the attractiveness of the exhibition activities.This is the case of “Fiera del Levante”, one of the oldest exhibitions located in a fascinating central area on the seaside of the city of Bari - Italy. Here, multiple social scopes, such as multi-exhibitions and contemporary social activities related to public offices, restaurants and entertainment, live together. This is an almost unique setting, which makes Fiera del Levante (FdL) a complex system and makes the management of the exhibition a challenging co-management task.The paper deals with the development and demonstration of a complex-system modeling framework for the decision support of the co-management of Fiera del Levante exhibition system, taking into account the interaction both physical aspects (building assets, infrastructure, equipment, fittings, …) and intangible aspects (permanent and temporary events, management and business activities, etc) and, of course, considering as a main input the needs of the different stakeholders involved.

International audience; Production planning and control and more generally taking a decision in the context of production systems often consider that input information are known, static and predictable. However, uncertainties on data and perturbations are recorded in the genetic of every production system. For instance, it is impossible to know exactly the level of the demand for a product, the availability of resources, etc. Dealing with this issue asks the question of the ability to take robust decisions against uncertainty (off-line) or the ability to be flexible (on-line). This paper proposes to analyze how Product Driven Systems – as reactive systems against unpredicted perturbations – can be part of operational research solution process against perturbations. Moreover, an overview of models and approaches for dealing with uncertainty in Operational Research is given and a first proposition is made for applying these elements into PDS as decision-making-against-perturbations engines.

Part 3: Interoperability and Systems Integration; International audience; The semantic interoperability of information has become increasingly important in Product Development Process (PDP) to support different phases during the product development. This article presents a proposal of an Interoperable Product Design and Manufacturing System (IPDMS) concept based on a set of engineering domain ontologies and sematic mapping approaches. The concept explores the potentials of semantic well-defined core-foundations in a Semantic Web ontology language. The formal core-foundations can be specialised to perform application view in Product or Manufacturing Model. The application view is used to support the information sharing between product design and manufacturing and verify the accordance with product requirements. A preliminary experimental has been realised, using a test case to share information from the design to manufacturing of an injection moulding plastic. As results, it was identified potential benefits and limitations. The mains contributions are: semantic interoperability during information sharing in PDP and analysis of inconsistencies in PDP.

International audience; The growing complexity of modern organisations poses a series of challenges, among them the cooperation between autonomous and heterogeneous information systems in distributed networks. Actually, Information Systems (IS) are said to be cooperative if they share common goals in their environment and jointly contribute to achieve these common goals. Obviously, this presupposes the ability to exchange information and then to use it in accordance with each information system required. In the literature, these features refer to interoperability. In this context, one of the main issues concerns the evaluation of the lack of interoperability between Cooperative Information Systems (CIS) through the measurement of their semantic gaps. In order to achieve this purpose, this paper proposes a mathematical formalisation of the semantic relationships between CIS conceptual models. The resulting formal model is then analysed for evaluating the lack of interoperability implications to the global information systems shared goals. The proposed approach is illustrated through a case study dealing with a B2M (Business to Manufacturing) interoperability requirement between an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) application.

Best track paper (1/20); International audience; Today, sustainability becomes one of the biggest challenges. It represents a key issue in every production activity. To face this issue, a possible solution is to enhance knowledge usage in manufacturing and sustainability domains. In this paper, we extend the ONTO-PDM ontology for formalizing sustainable manufacturing knowledge. An industrial case is presented for instantiating the extension. Moreover we design a knowledge-based system, which exploits sustainable manufacturing knowledge for supporting design and process planning with sustainability proposals, generating machine code starting from product specifications.

International audience; The grown complexity of the modern enterprise poses a series of challenges, among them keeping competitiveness in the fast changing environment in which the enterprise evolves. Addressing Enterprise Integration is considered as a key to achieve the goal of any enterprise either it is a single or a networked enterprise. Enterprise Modelling is a prerequisite to enable the common understanding of the enterprises and its various interactions in order to "provide the right information, at the right time, at the right place". However, problems often emerge from a lack of understanding of the semantics of the elaborated models resulting from various modelling experience based on different methods and tools. This paper describes the challenges associated to semantics enactment in Information Systems models. To facilitate this enactment, it proposes an approach based on a fact-oriented modelling perspective. Then, it also provides an algorithm to automatically build semantic aggregates that help in highlighting Enterprise Models core embedded semantics. A case study on the field of B2M interoperability is performed in order to illustrate the application of the presented approach.

International audience; Reference models play an important role in the knowledge management of the various complex collaboration domains (such as Supply Chain Networks). However, they often show a lack of semantic precision and, they are sometimes incomplete. In this paper, we present an approach to overcome semantic inconsistencies and incompleteness of the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model and hence, improve its usefulness and expand the application domain. First, we describe a literal OWL specification of SCOR concepts (and related tools), built with the intention to preserve the original approach in the classification of process reference model entities and hence, to enable effectiveness of usage in original contexts. Next, we demonstrate the system for its exploitation, in specific - tools for SCOR framework browsing and rapid supply chain process configuration. Then, we describe the SCOR-FULL ontology, its relations with relevant domain ontology and show how it can be exploited for improvement of SCOR ontological framework competence. Finally, we elaborate the potential impact of the presented approach, to interoperability of systems in Supply Chain Networks.

International audience; This article presents an ongoing research project that aims to define a conceptual method to formally model the system requirements and their relationships in terms of transformation (translation, conversion and sharing) and traceability, based on an ontological approach. In this way, we are considering two hypothesis: (H1) Multiple phases of System Life Cycle can be supported by system requirements in a semantically interoperable manner; and (H2) System requirements formalization can ensure the comprehensibility and verifiability, reducing inconsistencies between different domains across the phases of System Life Cycle.

A draft architecture of a software platform is proposed to support software components interoperability in energy production systems. The scope of the platform is to address the sustainability of energy production and use efficiency. A first prototype of this platform is under development in the framework of the French ANR Plate-Form(E)3 project. Interoperability issues have been faced to design the platform. Best available candidate technologies for implementing the platform are also discussed. One architecture for facing the basic interoperability issues is also presented. A real industrial application case example is proposed to show the potential use of the proposed architecture.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the following 8 International Workshops: OTM Academy; OTM Industry Case Studies Program; Enterprise Integration, Interoperability, and Networking, EI2N; International Workshop on Fact Based Modeling 2015, FBM; Industrial and Business Applications of Semantic Web Technologies, INBAST; Information Systems, om Distributed Environment, ISDE; Methods, Evaluation, Tools and Applications for the Creation and Consumption of Structured Data for the e-Society, META4eS; and Mobile and Social Computing for collaborative interactions, MSC 2015. These workshops were held as associated events at OTM 2015, the federated conferences "On The Move Towards Meaningful Internet Systems and Ubiquitous Computing", in Rhodes, Greece, in October 2015. The 55 full papers presented together with 3 short papers and 2 popsters were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 100 submissions. The workshops share the distributed aspects of modern computing systems, they experience the application pull created by the Internet and by the so-called Semantic Web, in particular developments of Big Data, increased importance of security issues, and the globalization of mobile-based technologies.

International audience; The knowledge reuse and mapping are among the most important concerns related to the design knowledge representation. In this paper, authors focus on the importance of one specific property of a design knowledge representation: the unambiguity. Authors show 1) how the ambiguity of the representation can increase the risk of a failure in the reuse and mapping processes, 2) how most of works in the literature use formal logic constructs and finally 3) how the use of these can increase the risk of ambiguity. On the basis of these remarks, an overview on the works on the anti-logicist architecture is provided: the systems based on this architecture show an intelligent behaviour without using logic constructs. An analysis and a transposition of the anti-logicist principles are then performed to build a framework allowing to represent design knowledge without logic constructs. To do so 1) main concepts are formalised in a conceptual model; 2) an algorithm has been designed to map pieces of knowledge based only on the representation syntax; 3) two instantiations of the framework are showed using a CAD instantiation. Finally, the limits of the current deployment of the framework and the research perspectives are discussed.

International audience; Requirements Engineering (RE) is an important activity in system engineering and produces, from the users' needs, specifications related to what the final system must be. This process in complex systems engineering is extremely intense, because there is a large number of stakeholders involved, with expertise deriving from heterogeneous domains. Moreover, requirements' improvements and variations are common during system life cycle phases. Thus, there is a risk of inconsistency of requirements during the engineering of a system. This paper provides a contribution in requirements engineering as it explores requirements interoperability in complex systems when multiples dimensions are involved. It discusses requirement management according to the cross-domains dimension, the cross-systems life cycle dimension, the cross-requirements dimension and the risk of inconsistency when three dimensions are involved simultaneously during the life cycle phases. The main result is an overview of the existing gaps in one and/or more dimensions allowing a discussion on the possibilities to cope with the problem of requirements inconsistency in multiples dimensions.

International audience; Many researches show that the ability of independent, heterogeneous enterprises' information systems to interoperate is related to the challenges of making their semantics explicit and formal, so that the messages are not merely exchanged, but interpreted, without ambiguity. In this paper, we present an approach to overcome those challenges by developing a method for explication of the systems' implicit semantics. We define and implement the method for the generation of local ontologies, based on the databases of their systems. In addition, we describe an associated method for the translation between semantic and SQL queries, a process in which implicit semantics of the EIS's databases and explicit semantics of the local ontologies become interrelated. Both methods are demonstrated in the case of creating the local ontology and the semantic querying of OpenERP Enterprise Resource Planning system, for the benefit of the collaborative supply chain planning.

International audience; The product variety management is a key process to deal with the flexibility requested by the mass customisation. In this paper we show that current variety-modelling methods miss a customer representation: without a proper assessment of the customers is not possible to define the product variety that has to be developed to meet the requirements of a customer segment. Here we present an innovative approach to rationalise the product variety, i.e. to link each product variant to the customer profile who needs it. The aim is to optimise the product variety avoiding excesses (variants not related to a customer), lacks (customers not related to a variant) or redundancies (two or more variants proposed to a customer). An overview of customer modelling approaches in the classic product design (non-customisable) is presented. The innovative approach is here developed using system-thinking concepts. A knowledge-based system that uses this approach is designed. Finally the approach is explained using a real industrial case of a quasi-real coil design process.

After the successful seventh edition in 2012, the eight edition of the Enterprise Integration, Interoperability and Networking workshop (EI2N’2013) has been organized as part of the OTM’2013 Federated Conferences in Graz, Austria. The workshop is co-sponsored by the IFAC Technical Committee 5.3 ”Enterprise Integration and Networking” (main sponsor) and IFAC TC 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 5.2, 5.4 and 9.5, the IFIP TC 8WG 8.1 ”Design and Evaluation of Information Systems”, the SIG INTEROP Grande-Region on ”Enterprise Systems Interoperability”, and the French CNRS National Research Group GDR MACS.

Part 22: Sustainable Collaborative Networks III; International audience; To cope with the customer-oriented business model in a global competitive market, enterprises tend to be networked for achieving mass customisation: i.e. offering customisable products with the same efficiency as mass production. This scenario highlights two faces of variability: variability of needs (on customer side) and variability of organisations (on production side). Both types of variability induce a huge number of specified products, namely configurations. This configuration variability must be efficiently managed. This position paper discusses trends and issues for rationalising the number of configurations: i.e. engineering the right number of configurations that match both the customer needs and the production strategy. After this positioning, we propose a systemic perspective for addressing the discussed issues from a sustainability point of view. Finally we give a perspective for a product line definition method that leads to models that meet the discussed variability rationalisation.

International audience; Sustainability is one of the biggest challenges of this century either for the environment or economical growth. The required cultural shift needs challenging action that will involve deeply software and hardware aspect of manufacturing processes. In this paper, the software part of the matter is addressed by proposing a product centric ontology, in which concepts of product, processes and resources are associated to functions and sustainable manufacturing knowledge. The aim is to design a knowledge-based system that, simulating a sustainable manufacturing expert, is able to automatically identify change opportunities and to propose alternatives on the basis of the existing production scenario.

International audience; Enterprise performance is, now more than ever, one of the key points for reaching the market success. In order to increase it, economics paradigms focus on how to better manage knowledge acquiring, sharing and update. Knowledge management can be approached with the possibility offered by the sustainability goals trying to optimize different enterprise strategic domains. The modern architecture of information systems (ISs) is based on distributed networks with a grand challenge of representing and sharing knowledge managed by ISs and consequently, to remove semantics interoperability barriers. First, this paper analyses interoperability issues between Cooperative Enterprise Information Systems (CEIS). Based on this analysis, the authors propose a conceptualisation approach for semantics discovery and management in Enterprise Information Systems models, based on applying fact-oriented transformation rules. The input of the transformation process is a conceptualised UML class model, reverse-engineered from an implemented model, and transformed into a Fact-Oriented Model (FOM), which makes explicit the finest-grained semantics. Semantics aggregates are then computed for structuring the whole semantics embedded in enterprise applications. They define independent set of concepts with their own minimal mandatory semantics. Finally a case study is proposed to validate the practicability of our approach in a real scaled scenario involving an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and a Manufacturing Execution System (MES).

International audience; This paper addresses the problem of designing the configuration of an interconnected electricity distribution network, so as to maximize the minimum power margin over the feeders. In addition to the limitation of feeder power capacity, the distance (as hop count) between any customer and its allocated feeder is also limited for preventing power losses and voltage drops. Feasibility conditions are studied and a complexity analysis is performed before introducing a heuristic algorithm and two integer linear programming formulations for addressing the problem. A cutting-plane algorithm relying on the generation of two classes of cuts for enforcing connectivity and distance requirements respectively is proposed for solving the second integer linear programming formulation. All the approaches are then compared on a set of 190 instances before discussing their performances.

Information in enterprise is, now more than ever, a fundamental resource. In order to increase enterprise performance, economics paradigms focus on how to better manage it. Information Systems (IS) are systems whose activities are devoted to capture and to store data, to process them and produce knowledge, used by any stakeholders within an enterprise or among different networked enterprises. The modern architecture of information systems is based on distributed networks. An important challenge, to reach higher performance, is to represent and share knowledge managed by those ISs. One of the main issues in making such heterogeneous Cooperative Information Systems (CIS) working together is to remove semantics interoperability barriers. This paper firstly analyses interoperability issues between CISs and then proposes a systematic approach for data models conceptualisation for knowledge explicitation, based on initial conceptual model cleaning rules, expert knowledge injection rules and finally fact-oriented transformation rules. A case study is proposed, related to a work order process in an Enterprise Resource Planning application, Sage X3.

International audience; To remain competitive, enterprises increasingly need to collaborate with each other and evolve into extended enterprises or networked enterprises. These organisation configurations incite the different enterprise systems to be interconnected in spite of their functional, structured, and conceptual heterogeneity. Typically, these features refer to the interoperability that can be defined as the capacity of systems or organisations to provide or to accept services and to use those services to effectively operate together (IEEE 1990). To promote added value creation through this collaborative activity, there is an increasing demand for information exchange and knowledge sharing among the various information systems (known as technical interoperability). Information and communications technologies and implementing standards can contribute to solving (at least partially) the barriers to technical interoperability. However, these efforts remain insufficient to guarantee interoperability at the conceptual level, where enterprises in a networked system can share information with each other, interpret this information correctly according to a common business semantics and then use this information to achieve a global mission.

International audience; The grown complexity of the modern enterprise poses a series of challenges, among them keeping competitiveness in the fast changing environment in which the enterprise evolves. Addressing Enterprise Integration is considered as a key to achieve the goal of any enterprise either it is a single or a networked enterprise. Enterprise Modelling is a prerequisite to enable the common understanding of the enterprises and its various interactions in order to "provide the right information, at the right time, at the right place". However, problems often emerge from a lack of understanding of the semantics of the elaborated models resulting from various modelling experience based on different methods and tools. In this paper, we describe the challenges associated to semantics enactment in Information Systems models. To facilitate this enactment, we propose an approach based on a fact-oriented modelling perspective. Then, we also provide an algorithm to automatically build semantic aggregates that help in highlighting Enterprise Models core embedded semantics. A case study on the field of B2M interoperability is performed in order to illustrate the application of the presented approach.

International audience; With the growing advances in computing and communications technologies, the concept of system-of-systems (SoS) becomes widely recognized as it offers potential benefits and new challenges. Relevant perspectives related to SoS constitutes nowadays an active domain of research, among them those issues concerning the need of full interoperation. When it is related to enterprise information systems, the SoS paradigm may then be derived to a form of System-of-Information Systems (SoIS). This paper presents an overview of the features of the interoperation in SoIS and proposes guidelines to evaluate and formalize it in order to identify semantic gaps between information systems concepts and models. It provides, through an example, an approach to use Description Logic for evaluating semantic interoperability concerns.

International audience; In this paper, the multi-purpose machines problem denoted MPM|split|Cmax is considered. In such a problem, each machine is qualified to process a subset of product types but not necessarily all the product types. The set of the qualifications machine/product represents the configuration of the multi-purpose machines workshop. Uncertainties on the demand are considered and a question related to sensitivity analysis is answered to find the neighbourhood of a forecasted demand in which the demands are completed by the configuration before a given deadline. The stability radius of a configuration is moreover computed.

Acceptance rate: 14%; International audience; In order to increase enterprise performance, economics paradigms focus, now more than ever, on how to better manage information. The modern architecture of information systems is based on distributed networks with a grand challenge representing and sharing knowledge managed by those ISs. One of the main issues in making such heterogeneous Cooperative Information Systems (CIS) working together is to remove semantics interoperability barriers. This paper firstly analyses interoperability issues between CISs and then proposes patterns for data models conceptualisation for knowledge explicitation, based on expert knowledge injection rules and a fact-oriented approach. A case study is proposed related to a work order process in Sage X3, an Enterprise Resource Planning application.