ICE2004, Seville, June 14-16,2004

Business Semantics: The Magic Instrument Enabling Plug & Play Collaboration?

Marc Pallot1, Vesa Salminen2, Balan Pillai3, Kulwant Pawar1 1Centre for Concurrent Enterprise - University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK,

Marc.Pallot@ESoCE.net, Kulwant.Pawar@Nottingham.ac.uk 2Lappeenranta University of Technology- Karjalankatu 3, 80200 Joensuu, Finland, Vesa.Salminen@lut.fi 3Real Time Systems Inc, 3180 Imjin Road,, Marina, California 93 933, USA 3Real Time Systems Inc., 445

Reservation Road, Marina, California 93 933, USA, Balan.Pillai@wirile.com

Abstract Business is changing towards knowledge intensive and value critical over the life cycle. Products are increasingly embedding intelligence; therefore the role of Service and Product Architecture is becoming very important. In the context of knowledge sharing we use the term ontology to mean a specification of a conceptualization. That is, ontology is a description [like a formal specification of a program] of the concepts and their relationships that can exist for an Agent or a community of Agents. When knowledge of a domain is represented in a declarative formalism, the set of objects (let us say for example Service and Product) that can be represented is called the universe of discourse. This set of objects, and their describable relationships, are reflected in the representational vocabulary with which a knowledge-based product and service consists into knowledge. These in turn direct us to new Internet technology where collaborative action will spread and thus interoperability is facilitated. We go for the Semantic Web approach for this purpose. This paper is addressing the collaboration among partners within a sustainable value network. Two aspects, which are nowadays very distant, are tackled Product/Services Life Cycle, Organization and Semantic Architecture, enabling new challenges (i.e. Plug & Play capabilities). We introduce existing theories on which life cycle management is dependent on and give some practices and case studies at the industrial environment. We make an analysis and create also a synthesis. Case studies are viewed in the sense of sustainability of primary industry.

Keywords Collaboration, Concurrent Engineering, product life-cycle, knowledge based, embedded intelligence, sustainability, business semantics, semantic web, interoperability.

1 Introduction

Nowadays, there is still a dramatic gap between capabilities of current collaboration approaches and the needs of networked businesses looking for adaptive, cost-effective and scalable business collaboration solutions [Ce-net, 2003]. Clearly, there is a need to develop a systematic and holistic approach to rapidly form Virtual Enterprises based on ubiquitous (anywhere, anytime) and affordable (easy and cheap) collaborative environments using a secure and interoperable business infrastructure within a multicultural & multilingual context. Ultimate goal is to realise the vision of turning “inside-out” enterprises as a plug-and-play Internet business community. Actual Extended or Virtual Enterprise approaches create a big dilemma because each time a new partner is entering results in increasing exponentially management and integration costs. This is mostly due to disparate visions, understandings and other interpretations which are disabling collaboration capabilities among trading partners.

Simultaneously, business is changing towards knowledge intensive and value critical over the life cycle. Products are increasingly embedding intelligence; therefore the role of Service and Product Architecture is becoming very important [Salminen and Pillai, 2003] especially in the context of outsourcing parts of the development to external competencies. On the other hand, partners have to agree with a shared vision and common understanding whether they are willing to achieve an efficient collaboration among project stakeholders within the context of New Product Development. They need what was named “culture of concordance” [Pawar, Haque and Barson, 1999] to ensure proper capabilities of connection and interoperation at different levels such as organisation, processes and resources, both human and technical (ICT). This paper is addressing the collaboration among partners within a sustainable value network. Two aspects, which are nowadays very distant, are tackled

• Product/Services Life Cycle, • Organization and Semantic Architecture,

Our goal is to evaluate the potential impact of semantics to enable capabilities for plug-and-play collaboration, concurrently on both aspects of business organisation and product/services life-cycle, in reviewing and analysing existing research work as well as industrial practices and case studies.

2 Existing theories and work

2.1 Product and Service Collaboration Clusters of networked organisations are often collaborating within the domain of a specific technology. They use a common architecture to deliver independent elements of value growing with the number of participating organisations. A demonstrated approach to increase efficiency in product development cycle is to re-use and share product/parts knowledge. It consists to achieve an optimal product mix by product modularity [Baldwin and Clark, 1997] in introducing alternative components at company driven product platforms and architectures. It influences outsourcing readiness that creates overall flexibility. Unfortunately, Bill of Material and Enterprise Resource Process management systems appear as the core of business operational management. It seems there is no attempt to manage services offering context in business dialogue literature while a model based methodology was recently introduced [Salminen and Pillai, 2003] which helps to capture various aspects of a business and analyse these through dependencies of service and product architectures to identify and compare options for meeting business requirements. A problem statement was also issued as both product and service need to be defined before to be effectively used in configuration according to customer’s needs and functional requirements. An engineer assumes a product is internally maintaining a service domain as soon it is produced. On the other hand, a service provider assumes that the concept is consistently offering product and services. In fact, both of them are misunderstanding what really is product and services. The management of dynamic relationships in value network needs, at least, well-defined business concepts and common terminology. Service level is recognised through evolving customer needs and functional requirements. Knowing of the dependency between these distant entities is crucial when supporting value capture in value network. Product and service can be organized in a systematic way where the dependency described at the product and service architectures [Salminen and Pillai, 2000]. The goal is to reach up to a rationalized and optimized product platform with configured interfaces [Salminen, Pillai and Riitahuhta, 2002]. Product and service platforms are the foundation of derivative products/services. The platform assets consist of several physical and abstract varying items [Salminen, Yassine and Riitahuhta, 2000].

Platforms are also key enablers for continuous introduction of product/service derivatives to multiple market segments [Meyer and Utterbach, 1997].

2.2 Project Management Collaboration A multi-partner collaboration project could bring positive effects like opportunities to improve creativity and innovation as well as reducing costs and lead-time in optimising solutions based on partners’ knowledge and core competencies. On the opposite side, it has been demonstrated that increasing the number of partners results in exponentially increasing management and integration costs. This is the famous well-known collaboration paradox. However, trade-off and decisions should not be delayed because several partners are involved in the same business while their processes are neither incompatible, nor interoperable. Furthermore, the temptation of operating solely in the group could be strong due to security, confidentiality, trust and confidence aspects, also known as the “black-box” effect [Jones, Pawar, Riedel and Pallot, 1999]. The Virtual Project Office was defined, during the FREE (Fast & Reactive Extended Enterprise) ESPRIT project, as an example of mean for supporting project management collaboration among trading partners. This platform was two folds: it provided a common level of processes, organisation and infrastructure. It also provided common services to all partners involved within a project. This common platform should be used as a reference model from which partners can connect their internal legacy systems in order to ensure a good level of interoperability [Pallot and Hof, 1999]. As developed during the EPICE (Electronic commerce for sharing Program management Information in the virtual Concurrent Enterprise) RTD project, a project management baseline provided a common level of organization and operations through shared project management taxonomy, processes and associated dictionary. This baseline has been customized according to the needs of each specific project class and then systematically re-used by the projects belonging to the same class. The associated software platform, based on web technologies, was enabling interoperability between partners’ legacy systems through document and data publishing & subscribing services that were based on XML exchange standard. Partners had to agree with sharing and consolidating information relevant to interdependencies between Work-Breakdown-Structure (WBS) elements and project objectives in terms of duration, cost, performance, risk and resource [Pallot, Maigret, Boswell and de Jong, 2000].

2.3 Plug & Play Approaches The “Plug and Play” (PnP) term has been extensively used in the computer domain meaning the ability to connect either new physical devices or new software tools on a network in a very simple way without any installation burden. The EDA (Electronic Design Automation) community has spent a lot of effort to define PnP electronic design environment, also called Tool Integration Framework, for seamless integration of EDA tools. It has also been re-used in the Business-to-Business area to meaning the automation of “order-to-invoice” process without traditional EDI burden. Past and actual PnP initiatives are, for example:

• Tools-Framework such as the Electronic Design Automation Tools Framework by the EDA community,

• Universal Plug-and-Play such as UPnP by UPnP-Forum • e-Business Plug-and-Play standardisation at a generic level such as ebXML by OASIS • e-Business Plug-and-Play standardisation at a specific industry community such as

RosettaNET.

3 Research Approach

In our research work, “Plug and Play Collaboration” is meaning the ability to connect seamlessly several business organisations to interoperate more efficiently along product and services life-cycle according to their respective knowledge and competencies. Our approach is oriented towards connection and interoperation on several layers of artefacts such as business,

organisation, management, process, product, service, architecture, life-cycle and automation (ICT) rather than being fully restricted to software and hardware interoperability. In a more simple way, “Plug and Play Collaboration” could be seen as the representation of capabilities supporting efficient business inter-operability among trading partners. Figure 1 shows juxtaposition of four different organisations having to work together. There are still boundaries

around each organisation which have their own language and don’t necessarily understand each other. Our research approach is to look at what are the capabilities that disable those boundaries and facilitate collaboration. Figure 2 presents the idea of using business semantics as an enabler of collaboration capabilities where semantics provides a way to assemble business concepts together. Like within the CMM (Capability Maturity Model), developed by the Institute for Software Engineering, “Plug and Play Collaboration” capabilities are considered as implemented by practices which are then concretely supported by techniques, methods and ICT.

Organisation 1

Customer needs& requirements

Product & ServicesLife-cycle

Organisation 2

Organisation 4Organisation 3

Project Team

We also consider Business Semantics as a sub-set of semantics which is dedicated to business concepts, their relationships and related properties used by collaboration project stakeholders. It is intended to enabling a shared vision and common understanding among multidisciplinary participants within a multicultural and multilingual environment. Finally, semantics is all about sharing meanings. Our research approach is to evaluate various “Plug and Play Collaboration” capabilities that could be provided by already existing theories and work as well as practices within the different layers of artefacts such as business, organisation, management, process, product, service, architecture, life-cycle and autodifferent areas or layers of collaborationits coverage. The first layer is nameexchange information and data. It meaagreed to share only pieces of the whoMeanwhile, they work separately. Tcollaboration stakeholders synchronise agenda. They still work separately but han overall plan. It means that the overaproject coordinator. The third layer is nconduct collective operation together wi

mation (ICT). However, we found useful to define three capabilities where any organisation can easily identify

d “Communication” where collaboration stakeholders ns they have a collaboration partnership in which they le information, often related to interface specifications. he second layer is named “Coordination” where

tasks and related objects, such as shared workflow or ave agreed to synchronise project tasks and objects into ll project plan is under control of a project manager or amed “Co-operation” where collaboration stakeholders

thin a common workspace.

Organisation 1

Organisation 4

Customer needs& requirements

Product & ServicesLife-cycle

Organisation 2

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Organisation 3

While communication and coordination layers are widely deployed, the co-operation layer is often used as a common workspace, like BSCW, to share information in up-loading files instead of systematically exchange files by mail attachment or FTP (File Transfer Protocol) through the network. It means that project stakeholders are, at least, in position to use the most up-to-date

information and do not need to manage duplicated information and

onon

data files. Nonetheless, exchanging or even sharing information and data does not mean that people are in position to really collaborate. They do need to reach a shared vision and common understanding before being able to efficiently collaborate together. This “Co-operation” layer is far more complex than it was perceived years ago. Figure 3 gives an overview of the three different

collaboration layers and generic activities related to the last layer of conducting collective operations. All following activities are capabilities which support collaboration:

L1 L1 -- CommunicationCommunication

L2 L2 -- CoordinationCoordination

L3 L3 -- CoCo--operationoperation

Exchange information & data

Synchronise tasks and objects

Conduct collective operations into a common workspace

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• Collocation: gathering together multidisciplinary competencies into a common workplace, either physically or virtually, and information & data files.

• Concertation: bring all stakeholders into building-up a shared vision to reinforced trust and confidence.

• Classification: organise business concepts into classes or groups. • Conceptualisation: bring into a common or shared understanding in defining business

concepts, their relationships and related properties. • Correlation: bring information into mutual relationships, map received information with

identified concepts. • Corroboration: giving further evidence, simulating, proof-of-concept. • Confrontation: compare propositions, alternatives and arguments, experimenting. • Conciliation: arbitrate between different positions, trade-off management. • Consolidation: unite or combine into one, unification, aggregation.

Our approach consisted to use an additional list of activities related to the concurrent development of integrated Product-Service-Organisation (PSO) combined with generic co-

operation activities to build-up a matrix dedicated to PnP collaboration. Those PSO development activities are grouped into four domains, namely: Support, Engineering, Process Mgmt and Project Mgmt. Then the idea was to map existing semantics initiatives,

Work BreakdownStructure

Workpackages

Tasks

Is composed of

Decomposed in

Product & Service

Systems

Parts

Is characterised by

Built with

Requirements

Constraints

Is derived in

Induce

Org. BreakdownStructure

MultidisciplinaryTeams

Individual competencies

Is composed of

Populated by

Allocated to

Deliver

ProduceExecute

Assigned to

User & process needs

Influence

Integrating into

such as ebXML, BCM or PSL, within this matrix to sort out what capabilities were already completed, on-going, planned or yet still untouched.

4 Findings

This study conducts to a synthetic “Plug and Play Collaboration” capability table, defined by layers, allowing the analysis of entirely fulfilled, partially fulfilled and lacking functionality. It further leads to the analysis of Business Semantics ability to enable Plug and Play Collaboration in short, medium or long term.

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Categories Key Process Areas

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Semantic based Initiatives

Promoting Organisation

Organisational Process Focus X X X UBL OASIS

Organisational Process Definition X BPEL OASIS

Organisational training

Project Planning X BCM OASIS

Project Monitoring & Control X XSupplier Agreement Mgmt X ebXML CAM OASIS

Integrated Supplier Mgmt X X ebXML SCM OASIS

Integrated Project Mgmt

Integrated Teaming

Requirements Development X X X X X PSL NIST

Requirements Mgmt

Technical Solution

Product Integration

Verification

Validation

Configuration Mgmt X X X PLCS OASIS

Organisational Environment for IntegrationDecision analysis and ResolutionCausal Analysis and Resolution

Semantic Meta-data Identifier

Engineering

Support

URI by W3C, XDI by OASIS, UDEF by AFEI

Co-operation

Process Mgmt

Project Mgmt

In future when benefiting fully the business semantics we have four various fields to manage: • B2B Collaboration on value network (customer, partners, suppliers, e.g.); • A2A Business Logics with enterprise integration through application architectures; • B2E Communication for users to communicate; • M2M Connection, when devices communicate with each others.

In this article we introduce just some examples of connectivity through semantics and analyze major test bed implementations and new standards, Semantic Infrastructure for Plug and Play Collaboration was created first time a couple of years ago at National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST on test bed or so called information platform. Process Semantic Language, PSL, was also implemented on the test bed (figure 1). While the time this methodology was introduced for applying at the test bed facility, was too early. It is tempting to say that sheer speed will no longer suffice, and that more knowledge of chess, or something else, is needed. What this sketch shows is that a state transition must be represented as a pair forward >< backward, where forward is information about how to get to the state from the immediately preceding state, and backward is information about how to undo forward, that is how to go back to the immediately preceding state. A procedure was initiated through this sketch. Process specification language and the semantic impacts were tried to coin by adding a modelling tool. This tool models the context into machine understandable language; thus pinning a representation that adds value to this new standard. In practice, it has proven that it doesn’t rule the goof. The purpose of this study was methodological evaluation when building

Semantic infrastructure adding functionality with PSL. The representation needs to be evaluated before one could bring more functionality. In this case we were proposing a requirement analyzing and managing tool called Optiwise®. We have also experimented in adding RDF with Ontology standpoints to bring Representation at the Application layer. This approach needs serious technical discussions, before it can be applied more widely.

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• iLOG,KIF,STEP

RDF Why is not good?

• Functionality adds value

Object Management Group

• Robust features• PSL Consistency approaches

• PSL mapping to produce modeling

• Content Standards

• Semantic standards

• Communication layer

• XML, Xpress• NIST simulation tools

METHODOLOGY TO i & e-MANUFACTURING

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INTEROPERABILITYDEPENDENCY

MODELING

Figure 1 - Semantic Infrastructure for implementing PSL (Process semantic Language)

5 Conclusion and future work

Based on our conceptualisation of “Plug and Play Collaboration” capabilities, several conclusions could be foreseen in term of connection and interoperation layers to be considered within a single or integrated approach. We also address actual gaps to be fulfilled by future work and eventual new research initiatives. Another aspect of concluding remarks is to anticipate whether Business Semantics is a promising research domain to further explore. We tried to explore the product and service concept into collaborative business semantics. In another case study we have tested enterprise integration environment though in this study we have not included the results. However, we are convinced that this approach is working.

Acknowledgement This work has been partly funded by the European Commission through IST Projects CE-NET and EPICE. The authors wish to acknowledge the Commission for their support. We also wish to acknowledge our gratitude and appreciation to all the CE-NET and EPICE project partners for their contribution during the development of various ideas and concepts briefly introduced in this paper.

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