Ebook: Leading the Web in Concurrent Engineering

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 13th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications, CE2006 being held in Antibes, France. The previous events were held in Dallas, Texas, USA (2005), Beijing, China (CE2004), Madeira Island, Portugal (CE2003), Cranfield, UK (CE2002), Anaheim, USA (CE2001), Lyon, France (CE2000), Bath, UK (CE99), Tokyo, Japan (CE98), Rochester, USA (CE97), Toronto, Canada (CE96), McLean, USA (CE95), Pittsburgh, USA (CE94). CE2007 and CE2008 are planned for Brazil and Australia, respectively.

The CEXX conference series were launched by the International Society for Productivity Enhancement (ISPE) which, for more than a decade now, has constituted an important forum for international scientific exchange on concurrent engineering. These conferences attract more than a hundred researchers, industrials and students interested in the recent advances in concurrent engineering research and applications. Concurrent engineering is known as a strategic weapon to achieve industrial competitiveness by developing products better, cheaper and faster using multi-functional teamwork.

The underlying focus of CE2006 Conference is in developing new methodologies, techniques and tools based on Web technologies required to support the key objectives of CE. For several years, with different technologies of information diffusion and sharing provided by the Web, new opportunities have appeared to improve the concurrent engineering approach. Bringing together concurrent engineering with Web technology and applications constitutes the strong and innovative points of the CE2006 Conference. The Web is not merely an immense book where people can search, browse, and view information. It is also a vast database that can allow computers to do more useful work. By developing a Web that holds information for both human and machine processing, people solve problems that would otherwise be too tedious or complex to solve (www.w3.org).

The International Program Committee has decided to select the following major areas for CE2006:

Keynote and invited papers

Web services

Interoperability and interfacing

Collaborative, mobile and multimodal environment

Semantic Enterprise, Semantic Web and ontologies

Knowledge in CE

Global Standardization

Information Systems in CE

Semantic indexing of documents

Innovation and business strategies

Design, manufacturing and services

Cost engineering

Education, social aspects and humanities

Tools and applications

We would like to thank all the authors for the high quality of their papers. We would like also to acknowledge the contribution of the key invited speakers, CE2006 International Program Committee and all session chairs in making a successful conference. We thank sincerely the members of the executive and organizing committees who helped in all aspects of organizing the conference (in particular Moisés Dutra Lima, Lionel Médini and Monique Simonetti). Last, we would like to gratefully acknowledge the institutional support and encouragement that we have received from our sponsors (in particular ISPE, INRIA, UCBL, W3C) and the funding received from Conseil Régional PACA, Ministère francais des affaires étrangères.

Parisa Ghodous, General Chair CE2006, University Lyon I, France

Rose Dieng-Kuntz, Local Chair CE2006, INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France

Geilson Loureiro, Program Chair, LIT, INPE France

Networked devices are increasingly pervasive, ranging from RFID tags to supercomputers. How can Web technologies simplify the development of distributed Web applications that dynamically adapt to the context, including user preferences, device capabilities and environmental conditions? This talk will introduce the Ubiquitous Web, and its dependence on device coordination, layered application models, and the role of Semantic Web technologies to support resource descriptions, resource discovery, and modeling of trust and identity relationships.

Concurrent Engineering received much attention all over the world in the past two decades. The concept comprises integration of technology, but also of various functional areas within and between organisations with a strong focus on enterprise-wide processes. In addition, new forms of business have emerged, due to new technological developments. In the literature, much emphasis has been given to such new technological development, but the importance of applied research is increasingly being recognized. The concept of Concurrent Engineering has strongly developed over the years and has been given many different names. In the ISPE lecture to be presented at the conference, the development of the concept will be addressed, as demonstrated through the work published in the many proceedings of the CE conference. Various areas for current and future research and application will be presented, and reference made to the future relevance of concurrent engineering as a discipline.

The presentation describes the challenges that each enterprise is facing today, in the global market place, and what are the in initiatives that should be taken to address these challenges. PLM is then described as a combination of enterprise organization transformations, new business processes and IT solutions which allow addressing such initiatives. An overview of the main innovative PLM software technology is then shown. The presentation ends with a short update on Dassault Systemes and its commitment to the academic community.

In modern concurrent engineering practices, product development of complex multi-disciplinary products is performed by a team composed of experts from various disciplines such as mechanical design, electronics design, production engineering, industrial design, marketing, finance, sales, services, procurement, etc. Within this formation of team, it is usually the leader who makes decisions and performs systems integration. While in team working, the leader's role is often wrongly mixed with the role of manager. The net result is often the team leader performs the roles of decision maker, manager, and systems integrator. Due to these practices, there is even a belief that the “art” of systems integration can only be learned through experiencing many positions, accumulating experiences and skills. Accordingly, systems integration cannot be discussed and taught in schools. This paper tries to attack this myth and to establish systems integration technology as a discipline that can be studied, discussed, and taught.

ATHENA research program proposes innovative approach to address needs for interoperability of enterprise applications. It addresses in particular the area of Collaborative Product Design, for Aerospace but also other manufacturing sectors. Innovation comes from a holistic approach of the problem at enterprise, knowledge, ICT and semantic levels. It implies simultaneous advanced usage of technologies coming from various domains like enterprise modeling, Model Driven software engineering, Service Oriented Architecture, Collaborative Executable Business Process engineering and Semantic reconciliation. In the Aerospace sector, but also for numerous other industrial sectors (as automotive, furniture, ships, building…), current trend is to develop Product Life Cycle Management approaches across the virtual enterprise, with earlier consideration of downstream phases when designing product system, and important role of “Product Data Management”, “Product Data Exchange and Sharing” and “Change and Configuration Management processes”. This paper describes the used way to define accurate Aerospace Collaborative Product Development pilots, in order to reach ATHENA objectives in term of scientific achievement and business impact, and with as a result definition of a first set of pilots and a proposal for Networked Enterprise Collaborative Product Definition infrastructure.

Concurrent engineering (CE) is intertwined with the field of computer-aided engineering (CAE). The author presents a vision of future for CE and CAE where computational intelligence (CI) will play an increasingly significant role. Various disciplines within CE such as design, manufacturing, knowledge management, collaborative computing, Web processes and services, and distributed infrastructures must rely heavily on CI to achieve the increasing sophistication demand. The author has been advocating and advancing a multi-paradigm approach for solution of complicated and noisy computational intelligence problems. In 1995 he co-authored Machine Learning – Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms, and Fuzzy Systems [1] the first authored book that presented and integrated the three principal soft computing and computational intelligence approaches. It was shown that such integration would provide a more powerful approach than any of the three approaches used individually. Since the publication of that ground-breaking book the author and his associates have demonstrated that chaos theory and wavelets can be used to further enhance computational intelligence especially for complicated and noisy pattern recognition problems. In this lecture it is shown how wavelets can be used as a powerful tool to complement and enhance other soft computing techniques such as neural networks and fuzzy logic as well as the chaos theory for solution of complicated and seemingly intractable CI problems. Examples of research performed by the author and his research associates in the areas of intelligent transportation systems [2–4], vibrations control [5–8], and nonlinear system identification [9–10] are presented.

Since the product recall problem is recently observed, realizing design and production activities which can prevent occurrences of a product failure has been becoming a serious issue. This paper proposes “the Synthetic design approach of a product and a production process which enables to reduce occurrences of a product failure from the initial stage of a product development”. In order to realize this proposed concept as a specific system, the integrated model of the failure information in the design and production is introduced. This paper shows some examples of design and production for a circuit breaker and an automobile with considering a design error and a production failure using developed prototype system.

This invited talk deals with studying a service-driven web manufacturing methodology and exploring its potential applications in industry. In the aspect of methodology, basic equipment e-service model, manufacturing executive system configuration, and system running in the context of real-time information scheduling, sharing and tracking mechanism are three key issues that should be solved in advance. On the basis of our bottom-up research strategy, first of all, an e-service fundamental model attached to any a CNC machine tool is put forward. It is actually a server front-end of the machine tool and is able to provide online service functions including machining data sampling and handling, process quality control, machining operations visualization, collaboration, etc, through three modes, that is, access mode, subscription mode and broadcast mode. In terms of connecting all server front-ends with each other, secondly, we establish a web- based manufacturing executive system referring to decomposing the manufacturing tasks and allocating necessary manufacturing resources by means of using both BOM and Gantt charts. Furthermore, this web-based manufacturing executive system in a “Browser/Server/Web Database” three-tire architecture can run under the control of real-time information scheduling, sharing and tracking mechanism based on a time-dependent instantiated template net (TIT-net). As methodology verification, we use an industrial case to demonstrate the methodology mentioned above. The further potential applications in industry are also discussed in detail in this invited talk.

Automated composition of Web services or the process of forming new value added Web services is one of the most promising challenges in the semantic Web service research area. Semantics is one of the key elements for such a task. Even if semantics enables Web service to describe their capabilities and processes, there is still some work to be done. Indeed Web services described at functional level need a formal model to perform the automated composition of Web services. The suggested model (i.e. Causal link matrix) is a necessary starting point to apply problem-solving techniques such as regression-based search for Web service composition. The innovative model supports a semantic context in order to find a solution for an AI planning-oriented Web service composition.

Interactions between Web services are based on interfaces which describe Web services on both structural and behavioral perspectives. It can happen that the interface provided by a service does no longer match (for instance, because of an evolution) the interface required by its partners. In this situation, and until the required interfaces are fixed, interactions cannot succeed. To address this issue, and focusing on the behavioral part of interfaces, we propose an approach based on a mediator which aims to seamlessly resolve incompatibilities during service interactions. We adopted a formal tool as finite-state automata, particularly Labeled Transition Systems to model the behavioral aspects of operations exposed by Web services.

The SEAMLESS project targets the design and deployment of a self-organising, open, dynamic collaborative e-environment providing companies (especially SMEs) with the required means to support their e-business needs without cultural/technological constraints. SEAMLESS represents the instantiation of the Single European Electronic Market (SEEM) concept considering the environmental conditions (technical and business-related) required to support simple but useful e-business practices targeting the enlarged Europe. The SEAMLESS conceptual approach is ontology-enabled since the business interoperation heavily depends on how effectively SMEs are able to understand precisely the meaning of the business requests among them. This paper discusses the SEAMLESS vision and framework, and points out the challenges to be faced.

With the advent of globalization, enterprises, especially Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), need to be efficient, effective and to embrace innovation. These characteristics are vital in order to face the global market environment, which raises the need for collaboration and interoperability in a more demanding and competitive industrial scenario. Interoperability and standardization are proven approaches to leverage collaboration and help establishing business networks, increasing competitiveness of organizations. However, some of these organizations have been experiencing some problems when trying to adopt one of the most important standards for the exchange of product data, the STEP (ISO10303). These problems are due to the poor software support and usage of complex technologies. This paper proposes as a solution, a framework for the harmonization of STEP conceptual models and knowledge with other standard technologies commonly adopted by today's organizations. The results presented in this paper has been supported and validated in the scope of the some European/International industrial research projects like the IMS SMART-fm (www.smart-fm.funstep.org), Athena-IP (www.athena-ip.org), and InterOp (www.interop-noe.org).

Peer to peer decentralized hybrid networks are well established but are most frequently used to connect desktop machines for fun services. We present a concept that enables creation of p2p like networks where nodes are information portals enabling eBusiness activities. The paper gives an overview of such network and interoperability issues.

This paper presents an approach towards autonomic workflow management within a distributed, agent-based structural health monitoring system. This monitoring system is currently being developed at the Institute of Computational Engineering. Its global aim is to support the involved human experts in monitoring safety-relevant civil infrastructures by an artificial organization of several cooperating software agents. For the purpose of managing the workflow, Graph Theory – suitable to mathematically represent discrete distributed systems – is utilized by self-controlling software agents. To this end, software agents are regarded as distributed, self-contained entities and capable of making independent decisions. However, by applying the Graph Theory, and in particular Petri Nets, for controlling software agents, the agents just carry out instructions of a “centralized planning capability” that provides workflow specifications but cannot act independently. Thus, a layered approach is outlined allowing benefits from both the independent agent nature and the advantages of centralized planning.

The new millennium has seen widespread recognition that the construction industry must embrace new ways of working if it is to remain competitive and meet the needs of its ever demanding clients. Project collaborations and collaborative working have increasingly become more important in construction projects. However, it has been argued that perhaps they are not being used to their full potential and in the correct context. The industry has shown a need for simple and efficient (shared) processes to help in the planning and implementation of effective collaboration. Much of the recent work on collaborative working has focused on the delivery of technological solutions, through Web-based systems (e.g. extranets), Computer Aided Design/Drafting (modeling and visualization), and knowledge management technologies and systems. However, recent outputs have displayed a better understanding by many researchers and leading industrialists that effective collaboration does not result from implementing technological solutions alone, with equal (or more) consideration needed for the organisational and people issues. Work currently being undertaken at Loughborough University aims to demonstrate this importance through the development of a decision-making framework and supportive tools to effectively plan and implement collaborative working in construction projects/organisations. This paper reports on the development of the prototype framework.

This paper describes an application of the TrustCoM environment to support secure contract based collaboration between companies using managed web services. The application scenario describes a consortium of engineering companies that seek to upgrade a customer's fleet of aircraft to provide in-flight internet capabilities. The environment supports the consortium to collaborate so as to take advantage of the market opportunity. In order to reduce the risks of collaboration, the environment provides assurances of the past performance of consortium members, of the current performance of each member to meet their contract and service level agreements, and the secure control of access to resources. As a result of a member's performance, the consortium dynamically reconfigures itself and initiates a collaborative business process that enlists new members to join and contribute to the negotiations with the customer.

The paper addresses the problems of collaboration of teams in manufacturing industry in the scope of concurrent engineering (CE) processes. The problem of involving shop-floor teams in product/process improvements is specifically addressed. The objective is to develop a new information technology platform based on software collaborative services supporting different CE processes where different teams – product design, maintenance, shop-floor teams etc. – around the complex assembly and manufacturing lines have to be involved. The platform is one of the first attempts to apply Collaborative Reference Architecture to support CE in manufacturing industry. The work presented addresses a development of new tools and the core collaborative services for design of such a platform. Several current applications of such platform are indicated.

Due to current trends in the design field towards virtual teams that collaborate over computer networks to achieve global optima in design, there is an increasing need for design teams to share knowledge and to establish and maintain a cooperative work through effective communication, coordination and collaboration at the knowledge level. As problems become more complex, teamwork is becoming increasingly important. This paper proposes a web-based multi-agent architecture to support multidisciplinary design teams that collaborate in a distributed design environment. Using ontologies and multi-agent system, the proposed framework addresses communication problem at knowledge level and aims to optimize constraints and conflicts management in concurrent engineering environment. A prototype, based on the Function-Behavior-Structure design framework, was built up to validate this approach.

Telemedicine is a promising field in medicine and many studies show the importance on patient's health and cost saving. The company RDSM has found a cheap, wireless and completely automated solution for following up patients in the comfort of their homes.