Computers in Industry

Call for Papers - Special Issue on Sustainable interoperability in future internet based industrial enterprises

Guest editors (Contact email: rg@uninova.pt):

Prof. Ricardo Jardim-Goncalves (UNINOVA, Universidade Nova de Lisboa – Portugal),
Prof. Keith Popplewell (University of Coventry, UK)

Rationale

Competitive markets are becoming increasingly complex and dynamic, and the traditional way of doing business does not provide the expected efficiency. Companies do not survive and prosper solely through their own individual efforts. Each one’s success also depends on the activities and performance of others with whom they do business, and hence on the nature and quality of the direct and indirect relations. These involve a mix of cooperative and competitive elements, and to cope with them, organizations need to focus on their core competencies by improving their relationships with customers, streamlining their supply chains, and by collaborating with partners to create value networks between buyers, vendors and suppliers. In such interoperable environments, companies and the networks of which they are part, tend to follow a dynamic and evolutionary behaviour as in Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), exhibiting elemental and behaviour properties which are influenced by the environment, i.e., complex collection of interacting adaptive agents. Awareness of the known landscape and industrial market dynamism tends to condition an organization’s behaviour (e.g. self-organization, nonlinearity, melting zone, co-evolution), affecting its internal elements, the wide variety of heterogeneous agents, the ability to interact, autonomy, or even the ability to learn.

Nowadays, the interoperability of companies’ ICT systems and applications has been prescribed by numerous frameworks and methods, guidelines at enterprise level, data reference models and techniques looking for seamless systems or organisations.  In parallel, most international software, hardware and service vendors have created their own strategies for achieving the goal of open, collaborative, loosely coupled systems and components. Indeed, organizations wish to adapt themselves according to the market demands and the availability of new systems and applications, or just by reusing existing ones introducing new requirements and updates, for example to adapt to a new client or to be part of a new collaborative working place. Adaptation brings complexity, processes, models and semantics change, heterogeneity of applications and data is present, mostly resulting in the loss of stability of the enterprise interoperable environment through failure of harmonization.

These facts introduce the new concept of sustainable interoperability. Sustainable interoperability is a new research dimension into the interoperability of enterprise systems and applications domain, that is looking for novel strategies, methods and tools to maintain and sustain the interoperability of enterprise systems in networked environments in the advent of their dynamics. Among other things, it should address: (1) Discovery capabilities: detecting when new enterprise system is added, or updated in the network, driving into  harmonisation failure; (2) Learning capacity: after detecting harmonization failure a learning process should be triggered to learn more about the changes which occurred and the node adaptation required; (3) Adaptability: enabling the adaptation of systems and the optimization of the maintenance process, using knowledge representation technologies, applied to the model management domain, such as dynamic Model Morphisms (MoMo). (4) Transient analysis:  to understand how a network, as an integrated complex system will suffer during transient period, and how this affects the overall behaviour; (5) Notification/Communication: informing in what way should the network nodes react, so that they obtain information for the needed adaptations, in order to enable the system, as well as the entire network, to evolve for the new interoperable state.

This special issue seeks to bring together novel contributions from researchers and practitioners who are exploring the definition and applicability of systems interoperability in the advent of the future internet based industrial enterprises, putting focus on strategies, methods and tools to support the sustainability of interoperable ICT systems in a scientific-based perspective. Conceptual, theoretical, empirical and technological contributions are foreseen.

Special Issue Focal Topics

• Reference ICT architectures, methodologies and tools to support sustainable interoperability in future internet based industrial enterprises
• Novel contributions in the area of sustainable interoperability, e.g., enterprise interoperability dynamics and its transient analysis; networked enterprise systems management; behaviour monitoring and adaptability strategies; collaboration and coordination facilities; impact of changing requirements and information models in interoperable environments; interoperability of digital ecosystems as “complex systems of systems”.
• Case studies of relevant applications to support sustainable interoperability in future internet based industrial enterprises

Target Audience

Researchers and practitioners who are investigating and developing beyond the state of the art on the definition and applicability of sustainable interoperability in future internet based industrial enterprises, and placing new trends in, and novel proposals for the use of Information and Communication Technology in industry, in a scientific-based or applied research perspective.

Important Dates

• Email the guest editors promptly (Ricardo Goncalves: rg@uninova.pt) indicating your expression of interest, specifying the tentative title, the authors and their affiliation, and the date foreseen for the submission of the full paper
• Foreseen publication date: March 1st, 2012

Note: The submissions will be reviewed according to the Computers in Industry journal standards.

Computers in Industry aims to publish original, high-quality, application-oriented research papers that: Show new trends in and options for the use of Information and Communication Technology in industry; Link or integrate different technology fields in the broad area of computer-applications for industry;  Link or integrate different application areas of ICT in industry.

Computers in Industry: ISSN: 0166-3615, Imprint: ELSEVIER