The emerging work environment, as it is fuelled and challenged by information and communication technology
What is e-Work? e-Work has been defined as the computer-supported and communication-enabled work activities, involving networked combinations of humans, robots, agents and autonomous systems. In essence, e-Work is comprised of e-activities, namely, activities based on and executed through information technologies. Those e-activities include v-(virtual) Design, e-Business, e-Commerce, Intelligent Robotics, e-Manufacturing, v-(virtual) Factories, e-Logistics, i-(intelligent) Transportation, v-(virtual) Enterprises, and more. All these e-activities rely on computer support and communication technologies, and all of them require collaboration in their inherent interactions between machines, humans and computers. From the dawn of the 21st century, organizations have increased the level of their networking within and with other organizations. Inter-networking has become a key trend in the economy. As enterprise alliances and supply networks have moved forward, e-Work over distributed working environments has emerged as the modern way of working in manufacturing, service, and other areas. But how can it be done most effectively? How can e-Work soar to new heights of production fulfilment?
Today's enterprises are striving to create more specialized features of production through collaboration and globalization. Hence, companies are actively involved in e-Work as well as business-to-business (B2B) e-Commerce within worldwide markets. The conventional strategy for information technology (IT), what we call e-Business, has been focused on improving intra-organizational processes. But in business, manufacturing and service, and in domains such as medical, education, telework and military applications, when it comes to e-Work, new and even revolutionary strategies and system models must adjust and respond to the communication-intensive, information-loaded and computer-supported work environment challenges.
Rapid growth in information technology and Internet applications in various sectors require the development and refinement of theoretical models of e-Work, and relevant guidelines and criteria for their design and implementation. The adoption, adaptation and invention of the computing concepts and tools for those areas have been one of the major and exciting challenges for the e-Work research community.
The aim and structure of this Special Issue
This special issue contains eleven articles on e-Work, covering topics from the foundation concepts, through theoretical and practical models, to several application cases, experiences and future challenges. Following the definition of e-Work, broadly construed per se, this Special Issue presents research and experiences dealing with the fundamentals of e-Work and emerging applications, distributed organizations and solutions for enterprise information systems. Some extensions to the generic enterprise modelling approach are also investigated within the context of e-Work modelling. Technical issues for e-Work collaboration and integration in supply chain management and e-Commerce are also explored. To examine the validity of e-Work and its relations, practical surveys and analyses are presented too. Industry applications and several specific development areas are included.
Framework and models of e-Work
Fundamentals and framework of e-Work are discussed and illustrated in the article ‘Design of Effective e-Work: Review of Models, Tools and Emerging Challenges’. S. Y. Nof introduces definitions, technology issues, experiences, and a survey of models and tools for various application areas. Challenges to the emerging e-Work solutions, and recent discoveries are clustered in four overlapping areas of electronic work activities: (1) e-Work; (2) Integration, Coordination and Collaboration; (3) Distributed Decision Support; and (4) Active Middleware, with annotated references. Nof proposes several design principles for e-Work based on industry projects. According to his definition, e-Work also includes applications such as tele-robotics, tele-Work, and remote medical, health and security services.
H. Li and T. J. Williams introduce enterprise modelling within the context of e-Work in the article ‘Interface Design for the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (PERA) and Methodology in e-Work’. Based on extensive previous work and experience with PERA, the authors address the problem of establishing the interconnections and interfaces between the components and subsystems of enterprises, necessary for smooth integration. Such integration is considered a fundamental requirement for an effective e-Work environment. The design of the system interfaces must be included in the design of the overall methodology, together with the design of implementation architectures. A phased development program for any enterprise integration project also needs such well-designed communication interfaces between the project phases, to assure that the desired information exchanges occur between the parties involved.
In the article ‘Framework for Fractal-based Supply Chain Management of e-Biz Companies’, K. Ryu, Y.-J. Son, and M. Jung model and solve the problem of how to maximize profits despite a high degree of customer demand uncertainty. They focus on a B2C (Business-to-Customer)-type company which connects customers with product manufacturers through a Web interface. A fractal-based management framework is proposed, where each member in the supply chain is modelled with a self-similar structure (a ‘fractal’). The basic fractal unit (BFU) consists of five functional modules: observer, analyser, resolver, organizer and reporter.
Conflicts among e-Workers can stifle production if they are not detected and prevented. As a contribution to the solution of this problem, J. A. Ceroni and A. A. Velásquez present ‘Conflict Detection and Resolution in Distributed Design’. They focus on collaborative distributed design for products and services. With the consideration of increased complexity, functionality and modularity, effective coordination is needed to solve complex interdependencies among the distributed designers and their parallel, concurrent and collaborative design tasks. In this article, the authors present a method, Conflict Detection and Management System (CDMS), which they developed to detect such design conflicts and resolve them. The method itself can be considered part of the e-Work, in the sense that it provides both autonomous agents and active protocols to support the distributed design process.
A new approach of using shared process system and workflow control in e-Work is applied in the article, ‘Collaboration and Integration of the Shared Process System with Workflow Control’ by N. Park. It interprets and controls the collaborative transaction messages based on RosettaNet standard for B2B e-Commerce. This paper addresses the role of workflow control, business process modelling, and technologies used in developing process flow controller to enable effective e-Work in practice. This new design enables easier accommodation of various industry standards for transacting B2B e-Commerce documents, and covers both internal business processes and inter-enterprise public business processes, as required for successful e-Work activities.
The first five articles above cover fundamental models, new theoretical concepts and techniques for the design, analysis and evaluation of e-Work systems and functions. The rest of the articles introduce new models and surveys of e-Work in particular production management cases and application areas.
Cases and applications of e-Work
One of the most prominent information systems applications for planning and control of modern production has been ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning. P. Anussornnitisarn and S. Y. Nof examine in ‘e-Work: The Challenge of the Next Generation ERP Systems’ the difficulties to achieve efficient collaboration across enterprises. They argue that these difficulties have not been solved effectively even though several vendors have added computer communication and Internet capabilities to their services. Their solution approach relies on the automation of the business collaboration workflow. This article addresses the emerging and future problems of ERP systems in both the development and implementation perspectives. The characteristics of the next generation of ERP systems are presented based on conclusions from several Purdue University's PRISM Center research projects in planning distributed information and production systems.
Another view of planning e-Work resources is developed by T.-W. Chang, K.-T. Shin and J.-W. Park, with an application to quotation and purchase order management. Their new e-Work ontology, presented in the article, ‘A Development Methodology for e-Work Ontology Using RDF/RDFS and PSL’, includes Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema (RDFS) and Process Specification Language (PSL) in order to integrate the syntax and the semantics of this information. By integrating the representation of the data and the process in the distributed environment of e-Work, the ontology building methodology can be used to specify and plan e-Work scenarios and application procedures. The new method is applied with examples from the RosettaNet e-Business standard and can be used for general e-Work systems planning.
A case of e-Work in machining is described by D. Ben-Arieh and Q. Li. They apply e-Work techniques to the machining of rotational parts in their article ‘Web-based Cost Estimation of Machining Rotational Parts’. Web-based linking of design stations and manufacturing shops is applied to enable fast, interactive and accurate cost estimation. The Web-enabled integrated environment provides process-planning capabilities, machining time and cost estimation, and corresponding supplier selection. Ben-Arieh and Li implemented the prototype system using Java 2 Enterprise Edition, JSP (Java Server Page) and Enterprise Java Beans. They describe the system architecture and demonstrate its functionality in the article.
An interesting e-Work application area in construction management is the topic of D. Castro-Lacouture and M. J. Skibniewski. They discuss the ‘Applicability of e-Work Models for the Automation of Construction Materials Management Systems’, aiming to redesign traditional processes of quantity takeoff, bidding and quantity revision. Their key to significant improvement of construction materials processes, e.g. minimize estimation errors and improve design quality, is based on a collaborative approach using e-Commerce technology. They incorporate e-Work models for the exchange of design and project information among contractors, designers, fabricators and suppliers.
C. S. Leem, H. S. Suh, B. Y. Kim and N. Park present ‘A Study on e-Transformation Effectiveness Analysis with Cases in Manufacturing and Retail Industries’. They define the term ‘e-Transformation’ as ‘enterprise-wide changes and e-Work-related innovation processes through information technology and the internet’. With this definition, they describe the changes in business processes and the impacts from e-Work and e-Transformation. A framework is proposed for e-Transformation effectiveness analysis to investigate the industrial e-Work transformation phenomena, including general indices, effectiveness indices and measurement indices. For both manufacturing and retail production, the practical value of the framework is examined through industrial survey and analysis.
Business-to-business (B2B) activities increasingly depend on e-Work techniques. A serious concern is how to apply the new e-Work tools while still keeping valuable legacy resources. This common issue is addressed by T. Lim, H. Kim, M. Kim, and S.-H. Kang, who develop ‘Object-oriented XML document meta-model for B2B collaborations’. Their solution applies an object-oriented eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Document Meta-model to support Collaborations. They argue, that in a distributed enterprise environment, automatic interpretation of communicated data and integration of the data with legacy databases (without losing any useful information) must be enabled when implementing B2B collaboration. They develop a document data model that efficiently integrates XML documents as a medium to exchange data on the internet among inter-enterprise databases. Two types of models are discussed: a generic model, complying with typical requests that occur in B2B transactions, and a ‘lightweight’ model to increase applicability to particular B2B collaborations.
Summary
This Special Issue has been developed by the initiative of members of the International Federation for Automatic Control (IFAC) Committees on Manufacturing and Logistics Systems (CC5). The co-editors thank the many referees who participated in the critical review process for their essential help in improving the quality of the selected articles. By now, e-Work is common in production planning and control, as it has been in the production and control of this Special Issue. You, the readers, are invited to consider how e-Work has already transformed the way you work, plan and evaluate your own productive activities. We hope that this Special Issue will contribute to organize our thinking about how to plan and design better e-Work systems and methods.
NAMKYU PARK has earned his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Industrial Engineering at Seoul National University, Korea. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. He has also been a faculty member of Dong-Shin University in Korea and a CEO of a startup company in the enterprise computing arena. Currently, Dr Park is a Visiting Assistant Professor of the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University, and a Senior Research Scientist at the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH), which is one of the national research institutes of Korea. His research interests include agile enterprise computing, design informatics, bio-inspired systems, applied optimization in e-commerce and information systems, intelligent manufacturing systems and technology strategy and management. He is a member of INFORMS, IEEE and DSI, and a senior member of IIE.
GEORGE L. KOVÁCS got his Dr Techn. degree (PhD) at the Technical University of Budapest, 1976, and he has been a Professor at the same university since 1995. In 1997 he got the Dr of the Academy degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS). He has been with the Computer and Automation Research Institute of HAS since 1996, recently head of the CIM Research Laboratory. Visiting researcher in the USA, the Soviet Union and West Germany, and visiting professor in Mexico and at the University of Trento, Italy. He is the author of more than 250 scientific publications, and member of several Hungarian and international scientific organizations, including IEEE, IFAC and IFIP. Project manager of several Hungarian and international R&D projects. Specific interest: intelligent manufacturing.
SHIMON Y. NOF, Professor of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University, is also the founder and Director of the NSF and industry-supported PRISM Center for Production, Robotics and Integration Software for Manufacturing and Management. Since its establishment in 1991, the PRISM Center has graduated over 46 PhD and MS students, and 16 Honour BS students, focusing on e-Work research, education and consulting in assembly, inspection, robotics and sensors integration; engineering and design collaboration; information and decision systems for networked enterprises; and several international projects.