Abstract |
The rise of new service-oriented technologies drives new ways to perform interoperability between manufacturing companies, even in areas not directly connected to the manufacturing enterprise core business. The aerospace segment is a highly competitive area, supported by numerous partners and applications which need to collaborate and be interoperable. Particularly, the subcontracted small and medium enterprises (SMEs) need to be flexible towards the changes that are imposed by the major contractors, doing so at the lowest cost. This paper proposes a framework based on Model Driven Interoperability (MDI) and service orientation principles, which advocates negotiations as a pillar mechanism towards the achievement of sustainable interoperability in manufacturing organisations acting in the same industrial market, using a service-oriented platform. The framework encompasses a set of tools that implement the business modelling and negotiation rules, including a reference ontology, and supported by a set of cloud-based services deployed in a cloud infrastructure. The underlying complexity is to model the dynamic environment where multi-attribute and multi-participant negotiations are racing over a set of heterogeneous resources. The evolution of the negotiations is performed through the use of the metaphor Interaction Abstract Machines (IAMs). This framework is then illustrated by the case study of the European Space Agency Concurrent Design Facility (ESA-CDF) department, which performs feasibility studies for space missions. |