Benjamin Knoke

Jens Eschenbächer

Virtual Enterprise Environments (VEEs) to Enable Innovation in Collaborative Networks -Initial Modelling Approach

Keywords: Virtual Enterprise Environment, Open Innovation, Innovation Space, Value Production Space, modelling innovation processes

This paper describes the terminology of Virtual Enterprise Environments as a construct to enable the combination of spaces for open innovation and Virtual Enterprises. This shall contribute towards better management of innovation processes in collaborative networks. Consequently this includes the Business Innovation Space and the Value Production Space, which are shared by the collaborating enterprises. Initial attempts are made to characterize the schematics of these spaces and their interactions.

Introduction

While Business Innovation itself is a widely used and unclear term [START_REF] Eschenbecher | Gestaltung von Innovationsprozessen[END_REF], only few accepted models, approaches and tools have been developed [START_REF] Chesbrough | Managing Open Innovation[END_REF]. Innovation in Collaborative Networks has been discussed in publications, such as [START_REF] Eschenbaecher | Managing and Optimizing Innovation Processes in Collaborative and creating Networks[END_REF], [4], [START_REF] Eschenbecher | Gestaltung von Innovationsprozessen[END_REF] or [START_REF] O'sullivan | A Collaborative Knowledge Management Tool for Product Innovation Management[END_REF]. However, yet there is no research work that focuses specifically on Virtual Enterprise Environments. BIVEE Virtual Enterprise Environments (VEEs) are a term that was proposed by the BIVEE 1 project (Business Innovation in a Virtual Enterprise Environment). VEEs can be seen as new approach to tackle innovation processes in collaborative networks. It also contains the concept of open spaces like the Value Production Space and the Business Innovation Space, which allow the integration of external resources into the collaborative network.

Companies with direct end-user connection need to be one step ahead regarding the developments of new products, due to the shortening of product life cycles. Therefore being innovative has become one of the main objectives for most of these enterprises. A prominent example of this dilemma can be found within the mobile phone market, as its market dynamics change and product life cycles shrink rapidly [START_REF] Giachetti | Evolution of firms' product strategy over the life cycle of technology-based industries: A case study of the global mobile phone industry, 1980-2009[END_REF]. Until the middle of the last decade, it was commonly believed that the key competence of a mobile phone manufacturer is to integrate standardized components into a dominant design [START_REF] Funk | The Product Life Cycle Theory and Product Line Management: The Case of Mobile Phones[END_REF], [START_REF] Abernathy | Innovation: Mapping the winds of creative destruction[END_REF], [START_REF] Ulrich | Product Design and Development[END_REF].

Conceptualising the business processes taking place in product development (area of the Business Innovation Space) and production (Value Production Space) is a interesting challenge. The modelling of business process in VO has been discussed in many publications (e.g. Camarinha-Matos [START_REF] Camarinha-Matos | A comprehensive modelling framework for collaborative networked organizations[END_REF]). What is missing so far is a strong focus on innovation processes. This forces the question of how this concept of open innovation can be successfully implemented and modelled within a value chain or a collaborative network. A possible approach can be identified with the concept of the Virtual Enterprise Environment, which will be explained within this paper.

Terminology and Characteristics Towards Innovation in Virtual Enterprise Environments

Leading Practical Example

A practical example illustrates the dilemma of manufacturing companies, when improving business processes in contrast to invest in new products and services. The example will draw attention to strategy options with focus on innovation, while at the same time optimising factories is very difficult. Therefore most OEMs (e.g. Sony-Ericsson, Motorola) have focused on process improvement and low cost production. This belief has become obsolete when Apple released the iPhone in 2007. Its multitouchscreen can be characterized as a radical innovation that revolutionized the smart phone market [START_REF] Cheng | iPhone in depth: The Ars review[END_REF]. This new and fast-growing market has significantly decreased the revenue of high and medium quality mobile phones, as smartphones gained higher market share [START_REF]Apple vs. Nokia: strategic lessons from the Smartphone / Appstore Wars[END_REF]. The development of the global Smartphone vendor market share (Table 1) begs the question: What ia the reason for Nokia's decrease and Apple's success? This can be explained through the iPhone not only representing a product innovation (with its touchscreen and the possibility to display the World Wide Web and not a mobile version in 2007), but a service innovation as well, due to the combination with the Appstore [START_REF] West | Browsing as the killer app: Explaining the rapid success of Apple's iPhone[END_REF]. This combination of the iPhone and the Appstore can be described as an intangible product and shows Apple's innovative advance. Unlike Nokia, Apple did not focus on a maximum efficient manufacturing of a broad array of products, but instead on a single innovative high class product. The development of the iPhone and its apps takes place within an environment, which includes contributing users. With this approach the Appstore developed far more apps, than Apple could have created on its own. The Apple App Store is a prominent example for the successful integration of an external technology base into a company's innovation process. This business model represents a form of open innovation, which has been described by Chesborough [START_REF] Chesbrough | Open Innovation: The new Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology[END_REF]. It can be characterized as a viable option to expand innovative potential and to speed up the innovation processes [START_REF] Chesbrough | Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape[END_REF], [START_REF] Rai | Editorial Notes -The Growth of Interest in Service Management: Opportunites for Information Systems Scholars[END_REF].

The topic of innovation in virtual organisations and the BIVEE project have created a few terms in the area of Virtual Enterprise Environments, which will be described within this chapter.

Virtual Enterprise Environments

The idea of networking is based on the collaboration of independent enterprises aiming at taking different advantages, while maintaining their individual independency [START_REF] Schierenbeck | Grundzüge der Betriebswirtschaftslehre[END_REF]. The rising challenges for concurring enterprises to maintain their ability to compete have led towards a broad field of research concerning collaborations and a significant amount of terms to describe the structure of a collaborative network. The term Virtual Enterprise Environments (VEEs) has been selected for the use within innovation networks, because it combines the inter-organisational structure of virtual enterprises with the concept of spaces, as sketched in Fig. 1. These spaces exist in the environment of a virtual enterprise. Regarding the improvement and innovation processes, two key spaces can be identified: The Value Production Space (VPS) and the Business Innovation Space (BIS), which will be described below.

Value Production Space (VPS)

A Value Production Space (VPS) can be described as an open system, which elements can be internal or external production units that share connections with each other. It is a real existing space in an production factory or similar, which contains the value production of the VEE. Therefore it contains added competencies and resources, which can be described as production units of the collaborating enterprises or external elements. Its openness carries the need of securing and protecting members, production units and innovations created within the VPS.

Business Innovation Space (BIS)

Compared to the VPS, the Business Innovation Space (BIS) contains highly diversified elements and processes. Instead of processing raw materials into products or elementary services into complex services, the BIS targets to create new processes and organizations based on their predecessors. Through this approach, another difference appears regarding the development of innovations. The added competencies and resources of the collaborating enterprises and external elements within the BIS can be described as creative units.

While the structured use of methods, principles and tools may support the innovation process, creativity, intuition and 'lateral thinking' are not to be put into repetitive tasks. Instead, these innovation processes can be supported by environments that allow a high level of creativity, by avoiding pressure of time and providing a comfortable and innovative environment. Especially within the IT-branch, this issue gains a significant value to successful enterprises.

Discussion on the Modelling of the Virtual Enterprise Environment Spaces

This chapter seeks to discuss the modelling of the Virtual Enterprise Environment spaces. Since these spaces are not independent, but tightly interwoven, initial attempts to map their connections are made.

Mapping the Value Production Space (VPS)

The processes within a VPS follow a predetermined path with defined production links and production units. These production units (modelled as circle-shaped nodes, Fig. 2) can be small-or medium-sized enterprises or parts of a single, large enterprise. Production units are connected with production links. Fig. 2 represents a drafted version of a production map. These production maps consist of the previously described production units and links as well as other elements, which represent additional infrastructure e.g. storage warehouses. Their purpose is to picture the flow of goods, services, financials and information, as well as providing an easy comprehension to people, not directly involved in the process.

Mapping the Business Innovation Space (BIS)

As well as the VPS, the BIS can also be visualised with connection and nodes. The nodes represent creative units, which are connected through cooperative interactions.

These cooperative interactions are enabled by communication links and comprise the exchange of ideas and their supportive information. Using these elements, an innovation map can be made, as drafted in Fig. 3. It aims to provide an overview on the flow of knowledge, which may be created within the production process, emerges by passing through different creative units and finally leads into innovative solutions. Radical innovations may lead into the replacement of existing elements, according to destructive innovation, as described by Schumpeter [START_REF] Schumpeter | The theory of economic development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle[END_REF]. Additionally, the possibility of failure has to be taken into account, when dealing with innovation processes. Concerning this issue, it is the task of forecasting methods to determine the chances of the innovation process. This can imply the need of testing as many innovative solutions as possible; in order to achieve an optimal result.

Discussion Towards an Integrated Model of BIS and VIS

Following the idea of a strong connection between BIS and VPS, the mapping of these spaces and their connections into a single innovative production map is one of the key problems in the BIVEE project. The integration of the value production map and the innovation map into a combined overview becomes a challenging task regarding the differing characteristics, roles and objectives of these tightly interwoven areas. The basic approach to complete this task is to use the value production map (including the supporting organization) as substructure and to add the innovation process report to build an innovative production map, forming an integrated metaspace. This process of creating such an integrated view is drafted in Fig. 4. The creation of an Innovative Production Map, framing an integrated meta-space, requires a high level of communication within the collaborating network. To cope with this challenge, the most innovative knowledge representation methods and notations need to be applied.

A schematic view of this Integrated Meta-Space is drafted in Fig. 5. It illustrates the combination of the Production Map and the Innovation Map. Ideas that are generated within the Value Production Space are injected into the Business Innovation Space, where they start the innovation process. Following the innovation process, these ideas circulate between the creative units of the BIS. After their elaboration, these and other external ideas or innovations are injected into the VPS and applied to the value production. In addition to the flow of innovations or ideas, the connection between the production units and the creative units can be modelled. These connections can be highly diverging depending on the modelled level of detail. A creative unit can be either a machine operator generating an idea, while operating a production unit, or a research department which requires a production unit for the creation of a prototype.

Conclusions

Scientifically the discussion of innovation in combination with the optimisation of production processes is in its infancy. This especially applies for concepts such as VEE. We believe that there are no methodologies which are helping companies to decide whether to invest in optimisation of business processes or going for new innovative products (certainly more risky and costly).

The notion of Virtual Enterprise Environments has been created to enable the combination of open spaces with Virtual Enterprises. The Value Production Space (VPS) is comprised of the internal and external production units and processes for value production connected to the Virtual Enterprise. The Business Innovation Space (BIS) is an open system, comprised of creative units and innovation processes, which allows the integration of external competencies and resources into the networks innovation process.

Initial attempts were made to characterize both spaces and to map their internal processes. In addition to their direct connections (e.g. between human resources and manufacturing tools) the flow of ideas and innovations can be mapped. Ideas generated within the VPS can be elaborated within the BIS and re-injected into the VPS to generate innovations.

Further research is needed regarding the elaboration of their structure and the connection of their elements. This shall led in the development or application of a modelling language. This research will continue during the progress of the BIVEE project.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Basic Structure of a Virtual Enterprise Environment

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. First Drafted Production Map to Visualize the Value Production Space

Fig. 3 .

 3 Fig. 3. First drafted Innovation Map to Visualize the Business Innovation Space (BIS)

Fig. 4 .

 4 Fig. 4. Towards the Integrated Meta-Space

Fig. 5 .

 5 Fig. 5. Schematic Draft of the Integrated Meta-Space

Table 1 .

 1 Global Smartphone Vendor Marketshare %[START_REF]Strategy Analytics: Q1 2010 Global Smartphone Market Share Update report[END_REF],[START_REF]Strategy Analytics: Global Smartphone Vendor Market Share: Q2[END_REF]

		2008	2009	2010	2011
	Nokia	40,00%	38,80%	33,40%	15,80%
	Apple	9,10%	14,40%	15,90%	19,00%
	Others	50,90%	46,80%	50,70%	65,10%
	Market Growth	23,1%	15,6%	71,4%	63,1%

http://www.bivee.eu


Eva A Coscia

Rosanna Fornasiero

João Bastos

Américo Azevedo

Domenico Rotondi

Salvatore Piccione

Advanced Services for Supply Chain Design Processes in Collaborative Networks

Keywords: Partner Search, Collaborative Networks, Value Chain, Business Intelligence, Collaborative Framework

Design and production of small series for specific customer target groups in collaborative networks can help companies to increase their competitiveness. This paper aims to describe a new framework of services for collaborative networking for on-demand productions. After describing the business processes that need to be supported by innovative tools for partner search and collaborative production planning, we describe the developed services and how they are integrated to ease the communication between different activities.

Introduction

In recent years, the importance of collaborative strategies addressing the small series production of highly-customized products is emerging at industrial level. European companies of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear industry (TCFI) are asked to supply small series of innovative and fashionable goods having high quality, affordable prices and eco-compatibility. In order to support the design and production of such kind of products, companies need to be fast and flexible in answering to market demand. The CoReNet 1 Project provides a set of tools and services addressing those requirements.

This paper, in particular, presents some of the services developed in the CoReNet project that address the complexity of collaborative networks management able to respond to the high variability of the consumers demand and expectations. The particular case of TCFI companies producing healthy and fashionable products is taken as case study. Small series and customized products require totally different supply network management, where each company should be able to collaborate with specialized partners. In customized production, supply networks should be easily re-configurable for each covered market niche, or, even, for each customer order. In practice these scenarios are characterized by a very large number of small orders, each of them involving different partner companies, selected on the basis of their availability and capabilities. In this context, partner profiling and monitoring, as well as co-planning and control processes need to be re-engineered and supported by integrated services and based on easy to retrieve, easy to manage and reliable information. After a short description of the business processes that are required and supported by the developed tools, the paper will shortly describe the tools and how they are integrated for a combined service to networked companies.

Collaborative Business Processes for Supply Chain Design

Supply networks should be easily reconfigured time after time according to the specific orders as expressed by target groups, for the creation of dedicated small series, or by single people, in case of customized products. Two business processes have been taken into account to support TCFI companies in small series production: Partner Profiling and Search and Collaborative Planning.

These processes start at the end of the design and development process, when all the items belonging to a specific collection and the related basic elements have been defined (e.g.: 2D/3D models, part programs for cutting, printing and any other automation step) and the products need to be prepared for sales. At this stage TCFI companies need to manage many different product variants as well as the design and production of related components.

Beside the early phases for the design and development of the collection, once the sales start and the actual product request is defined and configured, in terms of measures, quantities and due dates, all the complete set of information required for the actual production can be finally defined (final BOM, accessories, etc.) and the production orders (PO) can be generated for a specific customer order. It is therefore possible to design and create a specific Supply Chain for the processing of the customer order, which implies to have identified all the suppliers and partners in charge of carrying out all the external activities, assigned the whole set of operations associated to a specific product and finally obtained all the information and data needed for the planning activities.

The business processes taken into consideration are depicted by BPMN diagrams and some activities are represented in Figure 1. The process of Partner Search for supplying components and for outsourcing operations may occur both at strategic and operational level.

Many different approaches are proposed in literature on this issue and inspiration is taken from [START_REF] Lambert | Supply Chain Metrics[END_REF] for the application of methodologies to measure performance as a way to improve collaborative networks, from [START_REF] Gunasekaran | Performance measurement and costing system in new enterprise[END_REF] for the KPIs used as criteria to suggest supply network partners, from [START_REF] Jarimo | Partner Selection with Network Interdependencies: An Application[END_REF]) and [START_REF] Crispim | Multiple Criteria Partner Selection in Virtual Enterprises[END_REF]) who introduced other criteria, like trustworthiness and risk values and from [START_REF] Westphal | Measuring Collaboration Performance in Virtual Organizations[END_REF]) for the utilization of KPIs related to collaboration and commitment.

During the definition of the product collection, the manufacturer needs to strategically identify partners who can support both the design and the production of the collection itself or the product customization. Strategic identification of partners is based on a partners profiling process: manufacturer assigns to each partner category some indicators based on previous performance and selects them specifying some selection criteria. From the organizational point of view, the relationship to be established is not only a pure buyer-seller relationship, but it is a more complex relationship that may require sharing data both on product quantity/quality, as well as on the company performances, machines, capacity availability, environmental performance, etc.

Once a customer order is collected, it is necessary to choose among the preselected partners those that will be activated for that specific order. In order to shorten the Partner search process at operational level the search is based on capacity availability for the lead time required by the manufacturer where previous agreements on quality and costs have already been taken. At this level it is mainly a matter of monitoring status of suppliers and outsourcers' availability.

The Partner search tool developed in CoReNet is based on the definition of Partner Profiles including both data provided by the supplier itself (e.g. administrative data, description of competences, provided material or process, etc.), as well as data derived from the analysis of the suppliers' past behavior based on performance indicators like the following ones:

• Collaboration degree: indicating how the supplier behaved in previous collaborations (e.g.: number of collaborations held in the previous period, number of successful negotiations, etc.). • Products quality: reflecting the quality of the provided products (e.g.: number of defective products, etc.). • Flexibility: describing the partner's ability to react rapidly and adapt to changes in the order or at production time. Subsequently collaborative planning process manages the activities to support companies' plans towards each other to reach a joint optimization of the planning across departmental boundaries. Collaborative planning involves activities by means of which individuals coordinate their planning processes [START_REF] Windischer | Characteristics and organizational constraints of collaborative planning[END_REF]).

When working with actual and complex business scenarios (like the textile or footwear sectors, for instance), local autonomy of each entity is an important issue.

For this reason, based on the analysis of the state-of-the-art, an innovative collaborative planning concept and approach is proposed in CoReNet for supporting decision making in supply network planning, respecting the requirements of complex products and small series production networks. The new approach is based on decentralized and cooperative actions and offers user friendly interface to the supply network stakeholders, supporting complex negotiation practices on a web-based platform. Furthermore through the use of a multi-criteria analysis, it is possible to define assessment mechanisms in order to optimize the overall supply network planning process This approach is based on a decentralized negotiation model, which allows partners to propose new delivery dates and costs, represented graphically in Figure 2. The Partner Search service provides an AJAX graphical user interface and a REST API. Through this REST interface, information is made available as two different, but equivalent, output formats: RDFa enriched XHTML, so that the service is accessible using a standard web browser, or RDF enriched XML, that is more suitable for automatic processing by external applications. The REST interface allows integrating the PS tool with other CoReNet tools in order to set up powerful services for the supply chain design and for the automatic detection of suppliers that best fit a set of search criteria.

Data can be both manually entered by human users, (through a GUI implemented as a portlet) and automatically retrieved from legacy systems (e.g. manufacturer's ERP systems). The system consists of three main blocks:

•

Partner Registry Manager: this functional block is in charge of providing the functionalities to add new, or revise existing, partners.

• Local Search Manager: this block provides all search capabilities on profiles of partners with which the manufacturer has a past work history and for which, as a consequence, has KPIs. This module provides its functionalities both via the GUI and via the REST API;

• Internet Search Manager: this block, finally, is in charge of performing searches for potential partners on a set of Internet sites.

Workflow Manager

A Workflow Management (WfM) solution should guarantee companies to create network flows and communicate with partners more efficiently and in an intuitive way. These issues are extremely important especially in the case of small series production, where the exchange of orders and business documents usually happens more frequently than for normal production and the time for producing and exchanging them might be very strict. Therefore it is necessary to have agile tools and services that allow SMEs to quickly react to orders and setup production.

In this context, it is very useful to define a set of basic workflow templates because small series orders come very frequently and are very similar to each other. Such templates might be directly deployed with no need of further adjustments.

The WfM architecture is actually based on an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that takes care of: managing the exchange of information with external applications/services (ERP, CRM, etc.), decoupling the specific way the information is transferred from an external application/service to the ESB and vice versa (the WfM offers transport protocols abstraction by using multiple binding components that provides in/out interoperability with the outside world), as well as routing the received information according to a set of rules or information. The CoReNet WfM platform supports the deployment and the execution of workflows using Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP -see http://www.eaipatterns.com/) and provides a UBL Business Rules Execution Engine: both technologies are used to manage business documents exchange within a specific business process context.

Collaborative Planning Module

The Collaborative Planning (CP) module is a web-based tool deployed under the Liferay portlet container platform. It is a portlet that offers different web-based views accessible for specific user groups/roles supporting user interaction through the planning tool as depicted in the picture 4. The CP module allows each partner to directly propose new delivery dates, lead times and costs, via a web-based planning graphical tool which is available and shared by all supply network partners. Every time a partner proposes a change on a given operation, it is (actually) asking the affected partner to accept this change (and declare its cost) or to make a counter-proposal. Each negotiation round correspond to a pre-defined time period available to discuss/negotiate delivery times and costs, allowing partners to present quotations for each request-for-quotation (RfQ) performed by other partners.

Each proposed change (which "triggers" RfQs to all involved partners), actually asks the partners to present quotations, which might totally or partially meet, the asked RfQ or even suggest new changes. When a proposal has 100% agreement of all partners (i.e. "no pending notifications") it will be considered a plan; although it might be changed by any supply network partner, as long as the negotiation time period is not expired. This plan is serialized according to a set of criteria defined in advance by the Front-office and Core partners. For each of these criteria, it is possible to define a degree of importance, using a percentage score as a final weighting factor, which will used to calculate the best partner proposal. In this way each criterion has not got the same importance but each one has got an importance expressed by a ranking system.

The CP promotes a decentralized approach on the definition of the supply networking planning, since every Core partner has the same "weight" on the decision process as it is capable of proposing and participating actively on the characterization of each required operation and to request from any other partner a change on the plan. Therefore, the proposed planning approach integrated with the partner profiling and search service fits the needs of customer-oriented supply networks in achieving flexibility and responsiveness to the market demands.

Integration of the Services and Common Visualization Layer

The ability of TCFI industries to quickly adapt to new orders and to consumers' requests is the key factor in the design and set-up of supply chain for the production of small series or even single customized items. Therefore a flexible integration of services aimed at rapidly and accurately identifying partners, at communicating with them, and collaboratively agreeing on production plans would provide a great benefit on the supported business process.

Before defining a production plan, a manufacturer should identify the best candidates to become suppliers. Therefore the CP calls the PS through the REST API, providing a list of criteria and KPIs that better define the potential partners for fulfilling the small-series order.

The PS returns an XML document that contains the list of candidates that best match the searching criteria. The same REST API allows also retrieving complete profiles of the selected partners. When the CP has identified the best candidates for setting up the supply chain, some business documents are exchanged between the manufacturer and the (potential) suppliers, such as RfQs, Bills of Material (BOM) etc.

The management of this complex flow of information is performed through the WfM tool, which is activated by the CP in order to dispatch documents to the right parties and to check their contents and consequently apply business rules. These rules can vary from the mere check of the document structure, to more refined checks on the actual content of the document that trigger pre-defined actions (e.g.: if some values of a RfQ do not respect the defined rules, the RfQ is refused and its owner is notified about that). From a technical point of view, the integration between the CP and the WfM is performed by exploiting the SMTP binding component offered by the ESB underlying the WfM tool. Therefore the two tools exchange emails containing business documents on which pre-defined business rules can be applied.

The applications are made available to the end users through a unique access point, based on the Liferay portal (called the CoReNet Collaboration Portal) that enriches these services with social networking functionalities and advanced communication services for commenting, ranking, reporting bugs and asking for assistance.

The proposed approach provides several benefits for manufacturers and suppliers of the TCFI sector that are looking for agile solutions for the order management and the production plan processes supporting the production of small series. Indeed, the solution:

• is easily accessible and easy to use, as the tools provide advanced GUI and are available within a unique portal (thus no installation is required); • supports the exchange and the automatic check of business information through well-known channels, like the emails (hiding technical details about the internal format of the exchanged documents); • helps the selection of partners leveraging on information already owned by the manufacturer and provides an open collaborative environment where planning with the selected ones an agreed production plan.

Conclusions and Further Research

In this research, it has been studied a conceptual approach for managing supply chain set up process in collaborative networks, based on a set of services that address the network definition (partner profiling and search) and the network operation. This innovative approach presents a truthful framework for partner selection and subsequent collaborative negotiation among partners in the TCFI supply networks, providing support for the definition and organization of operations and activities relevant to fulfill customer orders of high customizable products and services. The increase of the collaborative level in business processes is not only a matter of changing the organization of the related activities but of creating bridges among them and among involved actors. ICT technologies can play a relevant role for the improvement of business processes performance. Moreover the service orientation of the nowadays technologies allows networks of companies to deal with the complexity of fast changing customer demand and need of flexibility using IT applications which allows to collect and manage easily updated information on suppliers, products, time scheduling, etc. The innovative aspect of this work is linked to the definition of collaborative paths between suppliers and manufacturers and supporting them with services that cover different activities to exchange information and data for the configuration of collaborative networks. Nevertheless service orientation allows integrating and coordinating distribute ICT modules which can be complementary and can easily exchange information and data.

The developed services and related integration protocols are under validation with some companies from the TCFI and further development are planned to make the services fully compliant with their requirements.

Fig. 1 -

 1 Fig. 1 -Collaborative Process planning diagram

Fig. 2 -

 2 Fig. 2 -Collaborative planning approach

Fig. 3 -

 3 Fig. 3 -Partner search module structure

Fig. 4 -

 4 Fig. 4 -Module architecture diagram for the Collaborative Planning module

Fig. 5 -

 5 Fig. 5 -The integration among tools for supply chain design and set-up

CoReNet (Customer-ORiented and Eco-friendly NETworks for healthy fashionable goods: www.corenet-project.eu)

Acknowledgments:

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° [260169].


Nan Jiang

Lai Xu

Paul De Vrieze
email: pdvrieze@bournemouth.ac.ukojarabo@gmail.com

Mian-Guan Lim

Oscar Jarabo

A Cloud Based Data Integration Framework

Keywords: Cloud computing, Situational application, Mashup, Virtual enterprise, Data as a Service

Virtual enterprise (VE) relies on resource sharing and collaboration across geographically dispersed and dynamically allied businesses in order to better respond to market opportunities. It is generally considered that effective data integration and management is crucial to realise the value of VE. This paper describes a cloud-based data integration framework that can be used for supporting VE to discover, explore and respond more emerging business opportunities that require instant and easy resource access and flexible ondemand development in a customer-centric approach. Motivated by a case study discussing power incident management in the Spanish Electricity System, an effective on-demand application is also implemented to demonstrate how to use this framework to solve real world problems.

Introduction

Virtual enterprise (VE) is a temporarily and dynamically formed alliance of businesses where these organisations collaborate and share their skills, corecompetency and resources in order to better respond to market opportunities [START_REF] Martinez | Virtual Enterprise -Organisation, Evolution and Control[END_REF]. It is commonly understood that the success of VE relies on the flexibility and agility of resource sharing across its member organisations in the virtual network (VN) [START_REF] Camarinha-Matos | A Comprehensive Modeling Framework for Collaborative Networked Organizations[END_REF]. Therefore, the key to actualise this lies in the effective data integration and management of each autonomous organisation in the network. VE is intended to meet a market opportunity that cannot normally be answered by individual organisations. However, the current financial and economic situation creates a highly competitive market condition where market opportunities are often unpredictable, short-lived and fast-changing in a wide social context which calls for the development and fast adoption of new information and communication technology (ICT) [START_REF] O'reilly | Organizational ambidexterity: IBM and Emerging Business Opportunities[END_REF]. Thus, new challenges of maintaining sustained competencies have been brought to enterprises and VE [START_REF] De Vrieze | Situational Enterprise Services[END_REF]. In this paper, we propose a cloud based data integration framework which allows VE to better respond these market opportunities and customer needs that require instant and easy access to resources with fast and flexible development in a customer-centric approach. Motivated by a case study focusing on a real world problem, the implementation of this framework is also discussed where an effective on-demand application is actualised to tackle real-time power incident management in the Spanish Electricity System.

First, a motivational case is described in the Section 2. Next, the requirements of implementation are analysed in Section 3. A proposed cloud-base framework is then described in Section 4 followed by the presentation of application in Section 5. Last, the conclusion and the future work are drawn.

A Motivational Case Study

A national electricity system is formed with a high-voltage electric power transmission network and grid connecting power stations and substations to transport electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed in the country. In an industrial perspective, there are three key stakeholder areas in the system: generators, distributors and suppliers [START_REF]National Grid[END_REF]. When an incident occurs in the system, effective communications from these stakeholders to clients become crucial. However, this is not normally well managed for various reasons which results in negative impacts on all stakeholders in the system and the community.

The Spanish Electricity System and Key Stakeholders

As shown in Fig. 1, Act 9(1) in Law 17/2007 defines six key stakeholder areas in the nation's electricity system: generators, distributors, system operator, market operator, suppliers and end users [START_REF] Eléctrica De España | [END_REF]. In practice, a utility company commonly plays multiple roles in the system. For example, Endesa (E), Iberdrola (I) and Gas Natural Fenosa (GNF) are the three major energy companies in Spain. They are not only the main suppliers but also the principle generators as well as distributors. Red Electrica De España (REE) is the system operator and carrier for operating the nation's power transmission system and electricity grid and Compañía Operadora del Mercado Español de Electricidad (OMEL) is the market operator dealing with electricity wholesales. End users include industrial users and domestic users where the former is often connected to the high voltage network directly. The electricity transmission starts from power stations where energy is generated from various sources. The production is later transformed to a high-voltage and transported to REE, the system operator, through the transmission network. After that, it is transmitted from power substations, through an output line substation, to a transforming centre and is finally transformed to the needed voltage level for different consumption needs. Since electricity cannot be stored in large quantities, the whole process must work continuously without any interruptions. Moreover, it also needs to consider balancing the system to make sure that demand is met by supply. Consider Spain is the fourth biggest wind power producer. With intermittent generation, it is becoming even more difficult.

Incidents and the Situational Environment

The whole system is complex. Thus, several incidents can occur during the process to transport electricity from energy production plants to customers. These incidents will affect energy supply, lead to power cut and eventually generate negative impact to some stakeholders and the community. A 2007 blackout on 23rd July 2007 in Spain affecting 323,337 customers living in Barcelona area for more than 56 hours is seen as a prime example which resulted in huge fines, severe punishments and supplier switch [5].

Incidents have to be coordinated at a system level, typically involves the system operator REE and all energy distributors in the system where REE works as a coordinator to provide knowledge of problem to all distributing companies. This is because distributing companies may use each other's substations to provide services to their own clients in others' serviced areas and regions. Industrial users who are usually connected to the high voltage are also informed for the incidents by their suppliers bound to an "interruptibility" contract (ITC 2370/2007) but domestic customers are often ignored. As a result, call centres could be overwhelmed with an unprecedented number of calls in the event of an incident, leading to customer dissatisfaction. Therefore, following a customer-centric approach, all customers, rather than only the important ones, must be actively informed with the incidents and progress. However, energy suppliers show little interest in doing this due to technical difficulties and cost issues.

A misunderstanding is that informing clients should not be a difficult task for suppliers who also work as distributors in the system. The problem is that energy distribution and supply are operated as separate businesses due to strongly different market focus so the inter-connection between them does not exist. In addition, for a business where scattered information systems are normally used for different operations and functions, information interchange is also difficult. These issues subsequently make inter-organisational information exchange become more complicated.

Business Opportunities and Requirements

Business opportunities lie in the enterprise situational awareness (SA) which relies on a fast response to the emerging and/or changing situations. This requires instant access to resources of different systems and owners and rapid and flexible customeroriented development. Consider the fact that key stakeholders in the Spanish Electricity System use different information systems for supporting their operations and activities. The following requirements for implementing an effective incident management application have been formed:

1. A list of affected streets should be obtained from a distributor. 2. A list of the affected customers should be obtained from suppliers.

3. Customers must be effectively informed with the problem, the forecast and the progress through available communication channels provided by both suppliers and distributor. In addition, the key requirement of situational driven enterprise applications is that their initial development until in a working stage is reasonably simple and cheap, which means that little time must be spent in the development [START_REF] De Vrieze | Situational Enterprise Services[END_REF].

Cloud-based Data Integration Framework

As shown in Fig. 2, a cloud based data integration framework using a DaaS (Data as a service) model [START_REF] Mateljan | Cloud Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) -ROI[END_REF][10] [START_REF] Youseff | Towards a Unified Ontology of Cloud Computing[END_REF] is proposed. From the bottom up, it includes three different parts. First, enterprise data, which is supplied by different VE partners, is wrapped from the owners' different information systems and served as services embedded into an open/private cloud. Second, a cloud infrastructure is adopted to include all different functional services which can be later used to process data or can be composed for different data processes. Third, mashups are used to specify situational demands in the real business environment. Implemented mashups are also served as services within the cloud infrastructure. First Part: Data Wrapped as Services: An organisation's master data are normally stored in different information systems and business applications used by the organisation. Such data are often shared and exchanged intra-organisationally to support the organisation's business functions and activities. With a number of appropriate processes such as data integration and MDM, some data can be extracted as individual services directly and made available in the virtual network (e.g., Service A, B and C). Since data access is controlled through the data services, it tends to improve data quality in an end-user perspective. Sometimes the data services can be provided in a more convenient way with the integration of third-party applications. For example, Web mapping applications (e.g., Google Maps [START_REF]Google Maps API[END_REF]) have been widely used by organisations to provide location-based services. Therefore, organisations may also consider creating their service in an open architecture through the support of third-party APIs (e.g., Service D and Service E) with business mashups.

Second Part: Cloud as Service Infrastructure: Cloud is considered as the service hosting infrastructure for VN to address two common limitations of VE: maintainability and flexibility [START_REF] Martinez | Virtual Enterprise -Organisation, Evolution and Control[END_REF]. First, a virtual network (VN) is a temporary collaborative network where participating organisations are dynamically allied in a customer-centric approach. This brings challenges to the long-term maintenance of the network as participants can stay, join or leave the network at any time. The loosecoupling feature of cloud makes changing the presentation layer of the virtual network is very cost-effective and much more feasible. Second, although VE is highly flexible as it optimises supply chain in a wider context, it aims to provide value-added services over existing services/activities rather than creating new services. This means that a traditional VE is not highly flexible to respond emerging business opportunities that require instant access of different resources. A cloud empowered VN can provide good agility due to the simplicity of the data access without the need for extensive knowledge of the underlying data. Additionally, cloud also makes it possible to merge For example, a CMS API can be integrated to provide incident information on all suppliers' websites and a mapping API can be integrated to provide interactive location-based views of incidents and progress. Additionally, the situational application can extend its communication channels through the integration of other social Web service APIs (e.g., twitter/facebook updates).

Conclusion

The core concept of the framework is that it uses DaaSs and mashups to help VE member organisations respond to immediate customer needs that require instant and easy resource access and rapid and flexible on-demand development. The case study has demonstrated how the framework facilitates in solving a real world problem effectively. Whilst it is based on the Spanish Electricity System but it can also be applied to other electrical systems especially for the European Union countries in compliance with Act 17/2007. Moreover, the situational application shown in the case study focuses on power incident management which can also be extended to other emerging application areas and industrial sectors where immediate communications to clients are needed.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. The Spanish Electricity System in a market perspective.

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. The cloud-based data integration framework for VE.

Acknowledgments. This work is made possible by the support of the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No.61150110484, ESSENTIAL: Enterprise Service deSign based on ExistiNg software Architectural knowLedge.

VEs to enter a new market as long as data access can be maintained at the presentation layer of the new cloud.

Third Part: Mashups as Interface: Mashups are used to manage interorganisational data communications/activities. With common data access protocols provided by mashups, organisations and customers can access all available services on the cloud and create applications on-demand through the mix-n-match of different services that represent different business opportunities [START_REF] De Vrieze | Building Enterprise Mashups[END_REF]. Moreover, mashups remove the internal boundaries in a dynamic supply chain formed in the VE so that any member organisation in the virtual network can access any available services from anywhere and form its own customised applications.

Implementation

In this section, we demonstrate how the proposed framework can facilitate on-demand applications, which actualises effective incident management for the Spanish Electricity System in the case described in the Section 3. In Section 5.1 we explain different data sources which related to the applications. Final implementation of the applications can be found from Section 5.2.

Data Sources

A distributor typically operates two distinct information systems, named SGC (Sistema de Gestión y Control) and BDI (Base de datos integrada). SGC is a management and control system containing a list of transformer centres (CT) where each associates with customers and a supplier. This allows the distributor to charge a supplier directly for the energy consumed by its customers and in turn allows a supplier to charge their customers with this information. BDI is an integrated database containing substation detail where each substation includes a list of positions inside a substation in which a CT list is attached to each position. As shown in Fig. 3, a substation-customer service can be created and published through data extraction and integration from SGC and BDI. Incidents are normally discovered through a distributor's SCADA system which can also be extracted as a situation service trigger as shown in Fig. 4. Supplier stores information about their customers and marketing offers etc in its CRM, which can be extracted to form a customer notification service in conjunction with supplier's existing communication channels as shown in Fig. 5.

On-Demand Application

Situational application 1 can be created by using mashups to mix-n-match the above services to notify customers and report progress when an incident occurs (Fig. 6). A better application can be further actualised in conjunction with third-party services. 1 A working demo of the SA using this framework has been developed through the use of a public service cloud hosting and IBM Mashup Center 2.0.