1,721,714 research outputs found
Coalition Formation and Operation in Virtual Organisations
Full text linkThe concept of Virtual Organisations (VOs) or Virtual Enterprises (VEs) is rapidly emerging as an important topic in many areas of computing including e-commerce, grid computing and the semantic Web. One reason for this interest is that VOs provide a means of bringing together a number of autonomous stakeholders in a dynamic fashion in order to address a specific problem or niche. These agents then work together for some period of time and then disband when it is deemed appropriate to do so. There are, however, many technical, social and economic issues associated with this VO lifecycle (i.e. creation, operation, maintenance and dissolution) that need to be addressed before VOs can be considered to be practicable. While previous technical work on VOs has concentrated on providing tools to support different aspects of the VO lifecycle, comparatively little work has focused on the mechanisms for automated VO creation, operation and maintenance. To address this shortcoming, this research aims to study and design mechanisms for the VO creation, operation and maintenance phases. In this thesis, our approach is to use combinatorial auctions and coalition formation mechanisms. In particular, novel algorithms for clearing multi-unit single-item and multi-unit combinatorial auctions have been developed as a means of tackling VO creation and one part of VO maintenance. A novel algorithm for coalition structure generation has also been developed to address VO operation and another part of VO maintenance
Towards a Collaborative Ontology-Based Decision Support System to Foster Healthy and Tailored Diets
No full textNutrition-related diseases can considerably contribute to many different health-related problems and can impact on several segments of the population. Promoting balanced diet plans is therefore pivotal; however, this is not a trivial task as it requires different stakeholders (nutrition experts, agro-industrial businesses and consumers) to cooperate. This work introduces a prototypical ontology-based decision support system to enable such a cooperation, allowing nutrition experts to rely on a support tool when developing diet plans, consumers to received tailored suggestions and to be informed regarding new food products that could have an effect on specific their health condition, and agro-industrial companies to divulge characteristics of novel food products and their expected effects. These stakeholders can also exchange comments, suggestions and observations. The decision support system relies on widely-adopted ontologies and its use is introduced by two scenarios
Collaborative Perspective in Bio-economy Development: A Mixed Method Approach
No full textThe hybrid Economic Input Output - Life Cycle Assessment (EIO- LCA) coupled with qualitative methods for consensus creation and participative policy building is a proposed methodology for dealing with complex and data- rich contexts that have to be connected in order to construct a robust regional bioeconomic profile that informs policy makers and other stakeholders about socio-economic and ecological impacts – and suggest at the same time strategies for its validation and implementation. An important result of this work is that the process of data collection and systematisation also provided ample opportunity to be in touch with a wide and diverse range of actors that characterize the different supply chains, ranging from the primary (farming, aquatic resources, forest sector) to manufacturing and services-related companies. These contacts encouraged the establishment of a network exchanging knowledge on crucial aspects for the further development of bioeconomy
A High Level Architecture for Personalized Learning in Collaborative Networks
No full textIn Collaborative Network (CN) environments, creation of collective understanding about both the aimed outcome and the procedure for achieving it by its members is the antecedent to any successful co-working and co-development. While a part of the common CN knowledge is pre-existing to its establishment, once the collaboration activities begin the emergent knowledge also needs to be commonly understood within this environment. Creating such commonality in understanding is however quite challenging. This paper suggests a bottom-up approach to reach collective understanding by all individuals involved in these networks, namely by the staff involved at all organizations which participate in the CN. The proposed approach is founded on the idea of learning-together by the CN members to reach their collective understanding. In this approach, the domain/application experts in the CN act as the instructors and content providers, and assist with the modeling/remolding of the education domain for the CN environment. Considering that the individuals involved in the CN are highly diverse and have different backgrounds, their learning requirements are also highly varied. Aiming to reach common understanding in CNs, this paper first addresses the main challenges in this area of learning; it then presents the related state-of-the-art and proposes a high level architecture for personalized learning of the members in collaborative networks
Behavioral Norms in Virtual Organizations
No full textPart 2: Behaviour and CoordinationInternational audienceVirtual Organizations (VOs) consist of groups of agents that collaborate towards achieving their specified goals. VO Partners are independent, autonomous, and heterogeneous, thus often exhibiting complex behaviors in co-working. Frictional behavior demonstrated by even a few partners, may cause drastic results and total failure of the VO. Therefore, it is necessary to model and analyze VO partners’ behavior. This paper introduces the VO Supervision Assistance Tool (VOSAT), developed based on leveraging partners’ commitments/promises, to monitor partners’ behavior against the synergetic norms in the VO. For this purpose, three kinds of behavioral norms are defined, including: socio-legal norms, functional norms, and activity-related norms. Additionally, a fuzzy norm is introduced to indicate agents’ trustworthy behavior. The functionalities supported in VOSAT enable the VO coordinator with identifying the high risk tasks and the weak or weakest points in the flow of VO planned operations. It further assists the coordinator with finding suitable candidate partners for handling the exceptions that arise during the VO operation phase. These in turn improve the success rate of the VOs
C3Q: A Specification Model for Web Services Within Virtual Organizations
No full textGeneric representation of web services is targeted, in order to generate machine readable specification of business processes that run at each partner organization within the virtual organization (VO). A holistic and formal service specification model is defined that can then be used unambiguously for discovery of business services, i.e. for finding a suitable service available at the VO to perform a given task. Especially, the proposed model, called C3Q, augments the description of service by its behavioral specification. A light extension of the WSDL documents is represented to specify all aspects of C3Q. Finally, a GUI is implemented to assist users with the behavioral description of the VO services.</p
Service Oriented Collaborative Network Architecture
No full textA service-oriented collaborative network (SOCN) supports collaboration among a network of organizations through their shared business services. SOCN in comparison with traditional collaborative networks, promotes and simplifies reusability and interconnection of shared software services, in a distributed manner. Our work contributes to comprehensive support of software service oriented collaboration among networked organizations enabling semi-automated service discovery, selection, and composition in collaborative environments. With the help of an organizational monitoring tool, we improve the accuracy of claimed characteristics based on non-functional criteria of services. The reference framework and implementation architecture are defined in this paper to support implementing SOCN.</p
Supporting Transparent Information/Knowledge Federation in Collaborative Administrative Environments
No full textPart 6: Collaborative Knowledge ManagementInternational audienceLeading edge ICT facilitates obtaining and interoperating information within collaborative networks (CNs), providing the base to tackle more advanced challenges. The paper addresses provision of transparent federated information/knowledge within administrative CNs. We introduce a methodology and mechanisms for incremental ontology development. The paper first identifies four typical sources of information/knowledge at the organizations involved in targeted emerging CNs, including: (i) database schemas, (ii) mission statements and main application scenarios, (iii) textual communications, and (iv) governance policies. It then introduces a systematic methodology to develop their meta-data and unify them into an ontology. This methodology consists of four semi-automated steps to gradually develop and enhance an ontology for the environment. The paper describes and exemplifies these steps and their mechanisms. An example real emerging case in the field of higher education administration in China is presented to serve as the proof of concept and verification of our proposed solution approach
Product-Service Systems Delivered by SMEs During Building Use Stage: Sustainability Criteria Framework
No full textThe building use stage offers the opportunity to provide valuable and sustainable product-service systems (PSS) that enhance the buildings' value for the end-users. Many of them are delivered by networks of stakeholders that actively involve small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We have combined an existing literature review with the multiple stakeholders' feedback to identify several problems and define the main hypothesis: diverse and presented in a structural way information about PSS can contribute to a better understanding of the added value by multiple stakeholders. We have co-created a list of criteria, which were formed into the sustainability multi-criteria framework. The proposed framework also supplements PSS-specific criteria, such as PSS type, PSS collaborative partnership networks type, and PSS integration type. A list of findings related to the topic was declared to help further develop the study, such as the correlations between PSS-related and PSS sustainability-oriented criteria
A Coopetition Space for Complex Product Specification
No full textPart 3: Product-Service SystemsInternational audienceDue to peculiarities and complexities embedded in complex service-enhanced products, e.g. automated buildings, these products are one-of-a-kind, largely customized, and may involve a large number of competitive / cooperative multi-stakeholders. Life cycle of complex products typically includes a substantially long creation phase, followed by its operation and evolution phases that last over decades. Although, the majority of complex product components (e.g. equipment and services) are specified gradually and by varied stakeholders during its creation stage, further specifications are also provided later on to support its evolution. This paper addresses challenges in both specification of varied and numerous components, and managing these specifications thought-out the complex product life cycle. We address reusability, modularity, and federated sharing requirements in the coopetition space of complex product specification, and within the context of Virtual organizations Breeding Environments (VBEs). Our developed product specification system, which is already alpha tested, addresses these identified requirements, and is described and exemplified
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