Titulo Estágio
Inter-Organizational Business Processes in the Industry 4.0 Era
Áreas de especialidade
Sistemas de Informação
Engenharia de Software
Local do Estágio
DEI-FCTUC
Enquadramento
The fourth industrial revolution (industry 4.0) is a priority for organizations worldwide, requiring major changes in the work practices and digital infrastructure. The technological portfolio of industry 4.0 is vast, including robotics, augmented/virtual reality, cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), or mobile systems. However, the social and organizational implications of the mass digitalization of industry are also significant. New business models and redesigned business processes are necessary to allow 1) individualization of production, 2) horizontal integration in collaborative networks, and 3) end-to-end digital integration (Brettel & Friederichsen, 2014).
Business process management is nowadays well established in organizations, defined as “a structured approach to analyse and continually improve fundamental activities such as manufacturing, marketing, communications and other major elements of a company’s operation” (Zairi, 1997). More recently, the advent of cyber-physical systems and the increasing complexity of processes shared by multiple organizations (e.g. the cooperative development of COVID-19 vaccine) made inter-organizational business processes (Legner & Wende, 2007) more visible to managers. The “horizontal integration in collaborative networks” generates distributed processes, requiring new forms of performance monitoring, coordination, and shared security and safety requirements.
Inter-organizational business processes are at the core of industry transformations, justifying extensions in popular modeling languages (Zarour et al., 2019), for example, BPM 2.0 (https://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0/PDF/). The work of Bocciarelli, D’Ambrogio, Giglio, & Paglia (2017) proposes BPMN extensions for emerging Cyber-Physical-Production-Systems but do not explicitly address the case of inter-organizational processes. Complementing this perspective, Graja et al. (2017) propose a modeling approach that verifies the consistency of inter-organizational cyber-physical processes but mainly addressing its temporal properties.
Considering the potential of BPMN for requirements engineering (Cardoso et al., 2009), additional research is necessary to evaluate BPMN extensions that could be adapted or improved to the context of industry 4.0.
References
Bocciarelli, P., D’Ambrogio, A., Giglio, A., & Paglia, E. (2017). A BPMN extension for modeling Cyber-Physical-Production-Systems in the context of Industry 4.0. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE 14th International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control, ICNSC 2017, 599–604.
Brettel, M., & Friederichsen, N. (2014). How virtualization, decentralization and network building change the manufacturing landscape: An Industry 4.0 Perspective. International Journal of Mechanical, Aerospace, Industrial, Mechatronic and Manufacturing Engineering, 8(1), 37–44.
Cardoso, E. C. S., Almeida, J. P. A., & Guizzardi, G. (2009, September). Requirements engineering based on business process models: A case study. In 2009 13th Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Workshops (pp. 320-327). IEEE.
Graja, I., Kallel, S., Guermouche, N., & Kacem, A. H. (2017). Verification of the consistency of time-aware cyber-physical processes. In International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (pp. 67-79). Springer, Cham.
Legner, C., & Wende, K. (2007). The Challenges of Inter-Organizational Business Process Design - A Research Agenda. In European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS).
Zairi, M. (1997). Business process management: a boundaryless approach to modern competitiveness. Business Process Management Journal, 3(1), 64–80.
Zarour, K., Benmerzoug, D., Guermouche, N., & Drira, K. (2019). A systematic literature review on BPMN extensions. Business Process Management Journal.
Objetivo
The main objectives of this work are:
1. Literature review of inter-organizational business processes and industry 4.0.
2. Proposal of a BPMN extension to model inter-organizational business processes in industries adopting industry 4.0
3. Test the proposed extension with a real case
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
The main phases for the first semester are presented as follows (may overlap):
1) Research the state-of-the-art: industry 4.0 and BPM, inter-organizational business processes.
Start: September 2020
Duration: 2 months
2) Study BPM 2.0 specification and the development of BPMN Extensions (https://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0/PDF).
Start: October 2020
Duration: 1 month
3) Initial draft of BPMN extensions for inter-organizational business process modeling in industry 4.0.
Start: November 2020
Duration: 1 month
Results of the 1st semester:
• Literature review about the most relevant concepts and the method to develop BPMN extensions
• Intermediate report.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
The main phases for the second semester are presented as follows (may overlap):
4) Development of an approach to model inter-organizational processes using BPMN 2.0 extensions.
Start: January 2021
Duration: 3 months
5) Tests with pilot companies involved with industry 4.0 investments.
Start: March 2021
Duration: 1 months
6) Writing of the thesis and a scientific paper
Start: May 2021
Duration: 2 months
Results of the 2nd semester:
• Scientific publication
• Final report
Condições
The student will be integrated in the Information Systems group (ISG) of CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering. A workplace and the required resources will be provided.
The student will have the opportunity to travel to the selected companies and to present the papers that are accepted at conferences, with expenses paid.
Observações
The development of the modeling approach and the tests may involve cooperation with organizations adopting industry 4.0.
The student will be engaged with the activities of ISG in a topic with major relevance for industries worldwide. Therefore, this work offers an opportunity to strengthen the skills of IT consultancy and IS design for digital transformation.
Orientador
João Barata e Paulo Rupino da Cunha
barata@dei.uc.pt 📩