Research in collaborative networks has increased due to the opportunities associated with collaboration across the networked partners. This paper focuses on the development of an approach to generally model the network, considering a set of five objects: networks, enterprises, objectives, strategies and key performance indicators (KPI). The model relates the objectives and strategies of the networked partners through KPIs defined to measure the objectives. The strategies influence, on improving the objectives, is modeled through computing the increase of the KPIs when a certain strategy is activated in an enterprise of the network. The model proposed allows researchers to formally identify the aligned strategies, in order to improve the enterprises’ objectives and, consequently, the network performance.

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) often lack of time, means and competences to define methodologically their requirements for a new software development. This creates a gap between the real needs and the sytem requirements identified by analysists and designers. It is thereby important to provide SMEs’ stakeholders means to autonomously build and share knowledge about their organization. In this work, we present an analysis of a set of modeling frameworks, methods and modeling languages to identify these requirements in the case of such organizations. Taking into consideration unexpected limitations given by this analysis, we propose first an enrichment of the ISO19439 and ISO19440 standards to be applicable to SME typed organisations and second a requirements elicitation and validation process that is compliant with this new framework.

It is common for large organizations to maintain repositories of business process models and model comparison happens when organizations merge or measure the gap between their own processes and industry-wide standards. Any comparison between process models relies on a construction of relationship between the elements of one model and the elements in the other model. To resolve this automatic construction issue, a three-step approach is proposed to align business process models based on lexical and structural matching to support discovering complex matches especially. The potential node matches, which are first identified by lexical and context similarity, are further grouped to potential complex matches according to the rules we defined. Then an extended graph structure based algorithm is used to select the optimum mapping in the potential matches. Finally, an experiment based on real-world process models from BPM AI is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

Nowadays, a production and logistics chain consists of many companies. The establishment of a robust information flow consists of the exchange of diverse information between the companies and its corresponding heterogeneous IT-systems. By changing suppliers and logistic partners, the interfaces between their IT-systems have to be adapted. The adaption process is a complex and a time consuming process and it is a significant disturbance variable in the establishment of dynamic production and logistics chains. The time reduction to bind the relevant systems to one’s systems becomes more and more important. This gain of time benefits companies in relation of theirs competitors. But, the binding of heterogeneous systems is not trivial. To bring data sources together, different data integration approaches have to be considered and challenging data integration problems have to be resolved. This includes e.g. the data sources have different meaning of the information, their structure and other context sensitive information. These facts leeds to the important question: Which information about a data source is required and how it can be represented to enable an automated binding process of data sources. This paper explains why an exchange of interface information as a context information is important and how this exchange could look.

Evolution of service concepts and competition standards in business domain has resulted in a new kind of collaboration between enterprises. As a result of this collaboration virtual enterprises and ecosystems were created. Due to this cooperation, several issues had arisen regarding interoperability concerns for data exchange, and service modeling of the new formed service systems. This paper presents the Model Driven Service Engineering Architecture (MDSEA) as a model driven approach targeting service development in collaborative environments, also it introduces the SLMToolBox, a software tool developed for this purpose.

This research aims to provide the possibility to the business analysts to be able to know whether their design business processes are feasible or not. In order to solve this problem, we proposed a model called BPMNSemAuto that makes use of the existing services stored in the service registry UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration). From the data extracted from the UDDI , the WSDL files and the tracking data of service execution on the server, a Web Service Ontology (WSOnto) is generated to store all the existing services. The BPMNSemAuto model takes an input of business process design specifications, and it generates an executable business process as an output. It provides an interface for business analysts to specify the description of each service task of the design business process. For each service task, the business analysts specify the task objective (keywords), inputs, outputs and weights of the QoS (Quality of Service) properties. From the design business process with the service task specifications, a Business Process Ontology (BPOnto) is generated. A service selection algorithm performs the mapping between the instances of the WSOnto and the BPOnto to obtain possible mappings between these two ontologies. The obtained mappings help the model to acquire web services to execute the desired service tasks. Moreover, the consistency checking of the inputs of the proposed model is performed before executing the service selection algorithm. WordNet is used to solve the synonym problems and at the same time a keyword extraction method is presented in this paper.

The government appears to be a high potential scenario for the deployment of service-oriented applications. The business processes in the service-oriented computational model are modelled and implemented as services. Interoperable service is a major goal of service orientation. Government organizations are adopting service use in order to achieve interoperability of government systems, but there is still a lack of technical support to reuse already conceived service concepts, as well as the efforts and experience of the experts who conceive services. Accordingly, this paper proposes a Service Specification Method for Electronic Government (SSMe-Gov) to support the development of systems of government. The method supports the specification of e- government services from service patterns. A lifecycle of services is also proposed for the specification of new services from service patterns. The lifecycle of services includes the activity of finding patterns of candidate services. The conception of services combined with the concept of patterns can help software architects to identify recurrent functional elements and reduce redundant efforts in the conception of services with the same purposes. Previous case studies show that it is feasible to set service patterns from the analysis of existing services in government.

Model transformation, regarded as a pillar of model-driven engineering, plays a key role in improving enterprises’ interoperability. However, to define the process of a model transformation (within a specific context) needs large mount of human’s effort. To reduce human’s effort and make model transformation more efficient, automatic model transformation would be a suitable solution. We present an automatic model transformation approach in this paper, which is based on model transformation methodology, using syntactic and semantic check among model elements. In this approach, a generic meta-meta-model and semantic checking rules are proposed. With a simple use case, we illustrate how this approach works.

In the highly competitive world of today, firms try to maximize value for their customers and other stakeholders through the effective management of their networks. That is why companies must adopt changes, generally at a network scale, that often involve high costs and potentially allow high benefits. This paper deals with an original method able to quantify the financial impacts of a planned improvement project. This proposition is instantiated in a three-step methodology: (i) modeling the AS-IS collaborative flows through a Value Stream Mapping (VSM) method and making decisions regarding the potential improvements; (ii) assessing the expected business consequences of the improvement plan through a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) approach; (iii) converting the business evaluation in a financial dimension through a Value Stream Costing (VSC) step. The originality of this research work consists in coupling VSM, DES and VSC techniques in a unique and integrated method able to support decision-making by forecasting financial consequences of any improvement plan, at a network scale. A real application case from the construction industry sector is developed at the end of the paper to illustrate the benefits of our proposition.

Driving a BPM (Business Process Management) approach could be dedicated to support the design of IS (Information System). In a collaborative situation, involving several partners, such a BPM approach may be useful to support the design of a Mediation Information System (MIS), in charge of ensuring interoperability between partners’ IS (presumed to be service-oriented). For such an objective, there are two main barriers, which are: (i) building the collaborative business process cartography by characterizing the collaborative situation and creating collaborative ontology, and (ii) reducing semantic gap between business activities (from the business process models) and technical web-services (from the physical SOA architecture of ISs). This articles aims at presenting the engineering steps of the whole BPM approach to break the two scientific problems by using a simple example.

The present research work aims at developing an approach to reach inter-enterprise interoperability and to test its achievement using practices from the software engineering process. Four fundamental activities are identified in the software process: software specification, software development, software validation and software evolution. In this work, interoperability requirements are specified by representing interoperability problems directly on business process models. For the validation activity, an interoperability testing sub-process is defined based on this new form of interoperability requirements specification. It is also demonstrated that the improvement proposed in software specification activity will have positive impact on the software development activity.

In the homecare domain, workflows are in the mainstream for supporting the coordination and monitoring of care processes which involve managing a sequence of care workflow (careflow) activities, transmitting the information required for providing care and supporting the invocation of appropriate human and/or IT resources. However, the design of these careflows for later enactment by a Workflow Management System remains a complex task, heavily dependent on patients’ profiles and accordingly requiring to be distinctly personalised. This paper proposes an ontology-driven design approach for careflows, to facilitate the construction of personalized careflows. Following an approach grounded in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), our methodology is based on the matching of ontologies between conceptual models of homecare and a semantic representation of Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) which is associated with both Actor and Case Profile ontological models.

Effort estimation is one of the most challenging tasks in the process of software project management. Enhancing the accuracy of effort estimation remains a serious problem for software professionals. Accurate estimation is difficult to achieve. The main difficulty is to collect distributed knowledge as data and information are often dispersed over different services, departments or organisations. Other main difficulty is to propose a model representative enough of this multi-partner behaviour. The objective of this study is to propose a general framework of the estimation starting from the analysis of the available projects database, the choice and establishment of estimation model, up to the use of this model to make estimation for new projects. In this paper, a comparative study between regression models and neural network models is performed. The proposed study is applied on a dataset of an automotive company.

Interoperable companies making business together form large networks. Communication and exchange of goods and documents is permitted by critical infrastructures like the energy network, the railway, and the telecommunication network. These are threatened by several hazards spanning from natural disasters, as earthquakes and tsunami, to anthropic events, as terrorist attacks. An example of such catastrophic events is the Fukushima nuclear disaster causing deaths, destroying buildings and infrastructures and impacting on the supply chains of several companies. Simulation is one of the most promising means to prepare to such events. Hovewer, manual definition of emergency management scenarios is a complex task, due to their inherent unpredictability. In this paper an automatic approach to support generation of emergency management scenarios is proposed. This is based on the CEML scenarios modelling language, on the design patterns-based modelling methodology, on the notion of mini-story, and on emergency management ontologies.

This paper deals with a result of a French project SIM-PeTra aiming at defining an agile and collaborative information decision support system for road crisis management. This paper exposes the global architecture of the information system designed through a model driven engineering approach. The SIMPeTra systems also offers a tool to detect road crisis evolution and the adaptation face to these changes. Method and technologies proposed to tackle this issue are presented in this paper.

Several approaches have been proposed for the generation of application ontologies from relational databases. Most of these approaches, propose a fully automatic process based on unrealistic assumption, where the input database is well designed, up-to the third normal form (3NF). Real-World databases may contain irrelevant, missing or erroneous information to the ontology learning process. Preparing databases before ontology learning is quite rare. We propose in this paper a methodology for Database Preparation (DBP), composed of three sub-processes: the extraction of a Business Database (BDB), the cleaning of the BDB, and the enrichment of the cleaned BDB. A proof-theoretical case study shows that the proposed methodology is feasible and useful.

The main objective of this communication is to discuss and present a framework for interoperability requirements. More precisely, the here presented research focuses on the dimensions to consider in order to capture and structure interoperability requirements in a precise way for partners that want, further, to verify the truthfulness of these requirements. First, the concept of interoperability is presented according its main characteristics and the need to express it as a requirement. Then, the dimensions of the framework are highlighted and related in order to be suitable and usable. Finally, some interoperability requirements and their positioning in the framework for interoperability requirements are introduced to show the interest of such approach.

The paper introduces concepts concerning Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE), its involved actors and their roles. It presents a framework to establish guidelines in a composition of a DBE. In additional, an ontology about its domain knowledge is proposed, which is accomplished with concepts, properties and rules related to the DBE actors. Finally, a branch of fruit and vegetables, with typical situations that have been identified in Romania was chosen as a case study to exemplify the usefulness of various IT solutions, performing an instantiation of the proposed framework main functions to which the members of the DBEs can benefit.

The French project OpenPaaS aims to support collaborative process by first deducing the process from the collaboration objectives and then orchestrating it. In order to design the process, a functional matching is established in order to find which sets of organizations are able to fulfill the objectives. Then a non-functional selection has to be executed in order to find the “best” process, with the most adapted partners. This paper presents a framework that has been settled for evaluating the organizations through non-functional criteria. Based on various cases of partner selection, this framework is intended to be the most exhaustive possible: it should allow the system to evaluate organization as a human would do in the case of a request for proposal. A structure of framework is first proposed, that fits with the OpenPaaS utilization. Then, non-functional criteria are classified according to it.

Small and Medium Enterprises of the manufacturing domain have to cope with a highly competitive market today. To establish flexible and efficient collaborations with partners in such an environment, new collaboration concepts and corresponding IT architectures are required, such as Virtual Manufacturing Enterprises. Therefore, we provide in this paper an overview of a generic IT architecture for realizing collaborations within Virtual Manufacturing Enterprises. However, besides an adequate IT architecture, a sound and up-to-date data basis is an essential necessity for inter-company collaborations to be successful. Smart Objects constitute a promising technology to gather and transmit a huge diversity of different process-relevant data in real time and can thus act as valuable data source in order to achieve such a comprehensive and up-to-date data basis. In consequence, we describe in this paper how Smart Object technology can be employed and integrated in our architecture for Virtual Manufacturing Enterprises in order to enable efficient data provisioning in such collaboration scenarios.

Nowadays, cloud platforms are widely used both in-premise in so called private Cloud or through public Clouds. Multiple models are available: IaaS platform to take benefit of resources virtualisation, PaaS to provide development and deployment of Cloud dedicated IDE, SaaS to provide end-user ready applications. Main added value comes from the elasticity and multi-tenancy necessary for accessing largely distributed services to build complex application. Meanwhile, this capability raises the need for a monitoring infrastructure that would ensure services are behaving as expected. The control should be operated in a non intrusive and efficient way. At the same time, Event Driven Architectures (EDAs) are considerably growing thanks to the loosely coupling paradigm they provide. The SocEDA project investigates innovative solutions to provide a Cloud-based platform for large scale social aware Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). In this context, we take benefit from both Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and EDA technologies in order to provide a flexible monitoring infrastructure for a cloud- friendly ESB. In this paper, we present the main aspects of the implemented middleware.

As a plethora of technological ICT solutions invade the manufacturing domain under the umbrella of Future Internet, the need to ensure that such solutions are built in the right way and address the real needs of an enterprise becomes more and more crucial. In this context, this paper introduces an innovative way of performing Verification and Validation activities, which brings together both the technical and the business viewpoints and can be applied throughout the whole lifecycle of the software product. It describes the necessary steps, the techniques to be applied for each step, the roles to be involved, and suggestions for crowd assessment. It is developed taking into account its application in manufacturing settings, yet it is reusable to any project that has software development tasks and follows either the traditional waterfall method or invests on agile software building patterns.

Romania’s Healthcare Complex Adaptive System of Systems is in progress to support a very ambitious process of structural, but behavioral also, transformation. Healthcare domain, eHealth systems and eHealthcare subsystems are facing, worldwide, with objective phenomena: ageing population, increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, degenerative diseases, healthcare costs rising, and so on. One topics to be under debate due to present paper contributions is concerning with care diseases information capturing, but knowledge management by both sharing best practice and explicit recommendations within a holistic approach for cross-domain investigations. Information Technology & Communication Tools (ICT) within the new Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES) paradigms is a major key to reach high Quality of Services, efficient implementation of Web interoperability oriented new methodology to develop complex composite Web services and last but not least, new System Architecture of eHealthcare systems. A research programme so called E4H CAS [Environment, Economics, Education and Entrepreneurship to sustain eHealthcare Complex Adaptive Systems] is aiming at populating the eHealth framework with focused prototypes and applications like knowledge capture, repository archiving and best practices of rare diseases multidisciplinary diagnoses and therapy.

Today enterprises have to distribute their final products to far away consumers. It is difficult and not cost effective for these enterprises to manage their own transport vehicles. Thus, they outsource their transportation tasks to third party logistics (3PL) companies. These 3PL companies take transport orders from several clients and try to group them in the vehicles to utilize their resources at maximum. An issue of interoperability arises, when 3PL companies have to process different transport orders arriving from several clients in different formats and terminologies. Secondly, how 3PLS will collaborate with other 3PL companies following different working standards and also for collaboratively delivering transport orders which single 3PL cannot deliver alone due to its limited operational geographic area. Interoperability to achieve collaborative transportation planning is our concern in the context of this paper. Interoperability is a key issue for collaboration, especially in case of heterogeneous environment, when entities trying to collaborate have different ways of functioning and follow certain standards specific to their organizations. So the objective of this paper is to present a distributed and interoperable architecture for planning transportation activities of multiple logistics enterprises aiming at a better use of transport resources and by grouping transport orders of several manufacturers for each effective displacement.

Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises benefits much from Service-oriented manufacturing, which utilizes the internet and service platform to arrange manufacturing resource and provides service according to the customers’ demands. On this platform, service selection is one of the key steps for customers to get the best services. This paper introduces a service selection approach in cloud manufacturing for Small- and Medium-size Enterprises. First, we build a service selection model, including service evaluation and service constraints. And then a service selection algorithm is presented based on the service selection model to identify the best service for a service buyer. Finally, a case study is given to illustrate how this approach works in Cloud Manufacturing Platform for Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (CMfg- SME).

With the deep development of economic globalization, companies tend now to collaborate closely with each others to improve their competitiveness. The problems of interoperability have recently been the subject of considerable amount of studies. In this paper, we propose a mediation based approach, which allows to a set of heterogeneous companies to cooperate. So, they can form a company network called SoS “system of systems”. The purpose of this solution is to keep the company architecture and to ask the mediator that is a software-based agent to play an intermediary role between companies, and to make the transformation between companies as well. We define a dynamic and cooperative inter companies model. The dynamic aspect gives the possibility to change the collection of services involved in the collaboration. Our model combines the agent technology and the decision trees paradigm. This last facilitates making decision by selecting the services that best meet customer needs, in order to create a composite service. The realization of the offline composition process by mediator saves the response time. Once the service is executable it will be published to permit its reuse.

Recent years, the research on Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) has developed extensively, especially concerning its concept and architecture. Now we propose to consider the core of CMfg within its operating model. CMfg is a service platform for the whole manufacturing lifecycle with its countless resource diversity, where organization and categorization appear to be the main drivers to build a sustainable foundation for resource service transaction. Indeed, manufacturing resources cover a huge panel of capabilities and capacities, which necessarily needs to be regrouped and categorized to enable an efficient processing among the various applications. For a given manufacturing operation e.g. welding, drilling within its functional parameters, the number of potential resources can reach unrealistic number if to consider them singular. In this paper, we propose a modified version of DBSCAN (Density-based algorithm handling noise) to support Cloud service decomposition model. Beforehand, we discuss the context of CMfg and existing Clustering methods. Then, we present our contribution for manufacturing resources clustering in a CMfg.

In this paper, we discuss the use of the General Systems Theory, for Enterprise Interoperability (EI). We review the main systemic concepts and models, highlighting the systemic concepts related to the enterprise domain, that are important for interoperability. In particular we survey the Ontology of Enterprise Interoperability (OoEI) based on the Framework for Enterprise Interoperability (CEN/ISO 11354) and grounded in systemics. We then extend the OoEI by a systemic model of enterprise. This will help locate problems and solutions for interoperability with better granularity.

The economy is dominated by the service sector. Citizens see services as a way to have access to basic or complex commodities, to address environmental problems while manufacturers consider them as a way to differentiate themselves from the competition, to be closer to their customers and to improve the shopper experience. Services are of a huge importance in the national and international economy and are discussed in many domains: human and social science, manufacturing science, business domain, IT domain, etc. Several concepts related to service have merged as well as new scientific disciplines. General issues linked to service design, service implementation, service operation management, service quality, service modeling and simulation, product-service system design are still under consideration and the multiplicity of the domains concerned failed to come up with unanimous answer. This paper proposes a contribution to service modeling and simulation that can potentially be used in any area. The proposed model is based on the most relevant concepts coming from a specialized literature review on services. A distributed simulation model of service is then proposed.

System of Systems (SoS) Engineering (SoSE) requires to be able to model and to argue the quality of the modeled solution, thanks to various objectives prior to any other efforts. This paper presents and discusses the development of an approach to support SoSE activities and particularly to achieve SoS modeling and verification. First, requested models are identified and illustrated here on Virtual Enterprise domain (VE). Second, it is proposed to merge two complementary verification approaches, formal proof and simulation. This allows us to ensure particularly the stability, integrity and control expectations of the proposed SoS solution, and must encompass particularly three main SoS characteristics chosen here that can impact SoS stability, integraty and controllability. These characteristics are connectivity, particularly subsystems’ interoperability abilities, evolution and emergence of behaviors and properties which are due to the subsystems’ interactions when fulfilling the SoS operational mission. For this, a formal properties specification and proof approach allow the verification of the adequacy and coherence of SoS models with regard to these characteristic and to stakeholders’ requirements. Then, simulation based on Multi Agents Systems (MAS) allows the execution of the architectural model of SoS. This allows to detect potential emergent operational scenarios and then to obtain an approached behavioral model of the SoS. This MAS is enriched by concepts and mechanisms allowing to evaluate some criteria to facilitate and guide the identification of such operational scenarios.

Freight transport is an essential element of our economy. It allows the goods to travel from their production place to customers. In France this activity implies many companies. Most of them are very little ones and are threatened by the economic crisis. This article studies how collaborative approach allow those companies finding solution to improve their performances. We simulate different scenarios which highlight benefits in particular in dynamic context when a last minute unforeseen change occurs. As interoperability is essential for collaboration implementation, companies must integrate its dimension in their development policy.

A science base for enterprise interoperability was first proposed in 2006, as a mechanism to formalize knowledge being generated by researchers and applied by industry to facilitate collaboration between enterprises through mutual interoperability of their enterprise systems. Subsequently the community of researchers and exploiters of Enterprise Interoperability research addressed this issue as a collaborative group, culminating in a project funded by the European Commission FP7 programme. In this paper we explore the structure for an Enterprise Interoperability Science Base defined in this project, based on analysis of its purposes, the knowledge already available from pragmatic research, and the lessons learned, both on interoperability and the theoretical structure of a science base. The resulting science base is now evolving from the body of knowledge used for its initial population to embrace new research results and issues.

With an increasing number of distributed heterogeneous manufacturing systems, interoperability is becoming more and more critical for the reliability, performance, and security of working applications. In order to control the development and evolution of applications interoperability, crucial decisions should be made at the earliest stages of development. These decisions need to be incorporated in the detailed design of the components that make up the application in order to accomplish a reliable and efficient solution at the implementation level. For a complete solution the application architecture must be designed using a methodology that can be verified. The components used in the implementation must be verified against the evolving application requirements. These components need to be checked for coherency of the design as the application evolves to meet new application requirements. The two checking types, in conjunction with an integrated approach, constitute the main goal of interoperability verification. This paper presents elements of an integrated modeling of interoperability verification. The implemented model is designed to develop automatic interactive tools which facilitate the tasks of interoperability verification.

Interoperability in enterprise systems is currently discussed from a system theoretic point of view. In the conceptual work described here, two special instances of systems theory are used as a basis allowing to detail requirements for interoperability in dynamic environments. Chaos Theory and Complex Adaptive Systems Theory focus on the description of properties of dynamic systems where the global system's behavior cannot be determined by summing up behaviors of system parts. First a connection between enterprise systems and the theories are established. The theories are then used as a lens for analyzing and discussing initial requirements for a platform that supports interoperability in a dynamic context.

Several research work and initiatives have been proposed in the literature to identify the dimensions of interoperability and to define a framework that provides organizing mechanism and knowledge of this field in a structured way. However, the lack of a common understanding and a consensus on these dimensions is one of the biggest barriers to true interoperability . In this paper, we aim to identify the required dimensions that have to be taken into account to facilitate interoperability between health systems by (i) a survey of the main research works and initiatives dealing with interoperability in the health domain and (ii) the investigation of a comparative analysis of the interoperability reference frameworks based on specified criteria.

Standards provide the foundation for ensuring interoperability, but if they are not implemented correctly or consistently their value is diminished leading to problematic installations and higher costs. Conformance and Interoperability testing is essential for ensuring standards are implementable and implemented correctly; however, limited budgets often preclude adequate attention to this testing during the product development life cycle. Automated testing can help on both fronts. We propose an Internet-based interoperability test bed that extends a testing infrastructure and conformance testing framework. The operational aspects of the architecture are presented against the backdrop of distributed health information technology applications and a representative case study. Although the concepts and methods are applied to the healthcare domain, they have broad applicability.

Current trends in manufacturing enterprises dealing with complex systems are usage of System Engineering, Product Life Cycle management and systematic utilization of computer aided solutions for all engineering or management activities. In such a context, sustainable and agile infrastructure for emerging digital ecosystems is required, based on open eBusiness PLM standards supporting exchange, sharing and long term archiving of digital models describing behavioural products and implied organizations. This paper will present some new ways to deal with interoperability in such a context, based on Dynamic Manufacturing Networks, constituted by a network of partner enterprises, of enterprise applications involved in the cross-organizational collaboration processes and of the underlying ICT systems. The approach will consist in qualifying such a network to support a portfolio of cross organizational processes supported by a PLM Hub, in particular in terms of interoperability and in terms of security, and to map it with available capabilities used by the actual collaboration participants. Then it will be possible to define the efforts required by the partners in order to be able to participate to a given kind of collaboration, making then it possible to participate in any other future collaboration where the partner will play the same role. Doing so, interoperability can be established in a continuous and smooth way, allowing all the digital business ecosystem community to build together their interoperability maturity. This approach is completed by the elaboration of an associated testbed for eBusiness PLM standards allowing the community to accelerate development of required standards as well as their implementation, being by software product solutions or by industrial processes and methods. The principles will be exposed, as well as illustrations coming from research projects such as IMAGINE or IRT-SystemX SIP projects.

Interoperability is the ability of making systems and organizations to work together (inter-operate). Integrated interoperability represents the enterprise collective interoperability capability which composed of System interoperability and business interoperability. Business interoperability is further composed of other sub-capabilities: Strategy capability, operational capability, managerial capability, which have indirect impact on the effectiveness of system interoperability. Interoperability is broadly seen as an essential component of SMEs competitiveness and sustainability. Our research primary focus is the ‘how’ of achieving a state of interoperability that engages technology, people organizational mission, value and culture in collaborations to exchange information, knowledge or services - so that all can advance mission or achieve business success and sustainability. The objective of this research is to develop an effective and integrated interoperability Model for sustainable and adoptable SMEs. The model is empirically validated in Danish SMEs to identify the correlation between the integrated interoperability capability and the adaptive capabilities through an integrated interoperability capability model analysis. The empirical data analysis reveals that there is strong positive correlation between the firms integrated interoperability capability and their adaptive capability including: agility, resilience, and innovation.

Collaboration of organizations in professional context has become ubiquitous. However, the security issues still exist. In this paper, we propose a decentralised hybrid framework for managing identity and access control for collaborative platforms as a service PaaS. We propose an approach based on federations that ensure the interoperability within the platform while preserving organizations authentication and authorization mechanisms.

Nowadays, manufacturing environment is populated with computational information files and records with implicit knowledge, which integration has becoming a major problem to seamless computational integration. Moreover, most of these systems are heterogeneous, thus problems of interoperability are frequent and any collaborative environment becomes easily compromised. Ontologies constitute the set of concepts, axioms, and relationships that describes a domain of interest, contributing to harmonize the information flow within computational systems. The distributed and heterogeneous nature of the organizations, in particular networked enterprises, led to the development of different ontologies for the same or overlapping areas, resulting in non- interoperability. This has become the basis for research methodologies to support a reference ontology, contributing to the standardization and development of ontologies within enterprises and virtual network, providing interoperability properties to intelligent systems. This paper exposes how the MENTOR methodology assisted the development and use of a reference ontology in the field of metrology, contributing to manufacturing teams collaboration and systems’ integration. The aim is to maintain the different ontologies of each partner, providing networked enterprises with coherent interaction and unambiguous communication. The case study in the field of metrology demonstrates the proposed methodology benefits introduced at collaborative manufacturing level.