Design of effective e-Work: review of models, tools, and emerging challenges

Abstract

The foundations and scope of e-Work are described, and investigations of fundamental design principles for e-Work effectiveness reviewed. The premise is that without effective e-Work, the potential of emerging and promising electronic work activities, such as virtual manufacturing, telerobotic medicine, automated construction, intelligent transportation, and e-business, cannot be fully materialized. A typical and recent example of the inability to fulfill the potential of e-Work is the frustration of workers over supply chains/networks with complex ERP and other information systems, originally designed to simplify and improve their performance. Challenges and emerging e-Work solutions are described, and recent discoveries are clustered in four areas, e-Work; Integration, Coordination and Collaboration; Distributed Decision Support; and Active Middleware, with annotated references. PRISM Center developments of e-Work design principles, models and tools are described, including: Cooperation Requirement Planning; the principle of parallelism; the principle of conflict resolution; new measures of viability and scalability; and the Teamwork Integration Evaluator (TIE), which applies the analogy of distributed computing.

Keywords:

• active protocols
• active middleware
• autonomous agents
• collaborative robotics
• collaborative work
• conflict resolution
• distributed operations
• enterprise integration
• enterprise models
• parallelism
• teamwork evaluation
• viability

Acknowledgement

Research reported in this article has been developed at the PRISM Center with NSF, Indiana 21st Century fund for Science and Technology, and industry support. Special thanks to my colleagues and students at the PRISM Lab, who have worked with me to develop the e-Work knowledge, and to Dr. P. Anussornnitisarn who helped me in preparing the Four Circle review.

Additional details about the PRISM Center activities can be found at URL http://gilbreth.ecn.purdue.edu/≈prism.

SHIMON Y. NOF, Professor of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University, has held visiting positions at MIT and Universities in Chile, EU, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, and Mexico. Director of the NSF-industry supported PRISM Center for Production, Robotics, and Integration Software for Manufacturing & Management; he is a Fellow of IIE, Secretary General of IFPR, and current Chair of IFAC CC–Manufacturing & Logistics Systems. He has published over 250 articles on production engineering and information/robotics engineering and management, and is the author/editor of nine books in these areas. In 1999 he was elected to the Purdue Book of Great Teachers, and in 2002 he was awarded the Engelberger Medal for Robotics Education. Nof has also had over eight years of experience in industrial positions.

Notes

¹Goals beyond productivity, quality, safety, etc.

²Both cognitive and non-cognitive tasks

*Emerging

ABMS: Agent Based Management System; AIMIS: Agent Interaction Management System; CMS: Corporate Memory System; Co-X: Collaborative Tool for Function X; CRP: Collaboration Requirements Planning; DAFNet: Data Activity Flow Network; DPIEM: Distributed Parallel Integration Evaluation Method; FDL/CR: Facility Design Language/Conflict Resolution; FTTP: Fault-Tolerance Time-Out Protocol; IDM: Iterative Design Model; M.E.N.: Multi-Enterprise Network; MERP: ERP e-Learning by MBE Simulations; NEFUSER: Neuro-Fuzzy Systems for Error Recovery; RAP: Resource Allocation Protocol; ServSim: Maintenance Service simulator; TestLAN: Testers Local Area Network; TIE/A: Teamwork Integration Evaluator/Agent; TIE/P: Teamwork Integration Evaluator/Protocol; T-C-M: Two-Center Model; TOP: Time-Out Protocol.