Rapid advances in industrial information integration methods have spurred tremendous growth in the use of enterprise systems. Consequently, a variety of techniques have been used for probing enterprise systems. These techniques include business process management, workflow management, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), grid computing, and others. Many applications require a combination of these techniques, which is giving rise to the emergence of enterprise systems. Development of the techniques has originated from different disciplines and has the potential to significantly improve the performance of enterprise systems. However, the lack of powerful tools still poses a major hindrance to exploiting the full potential of enterprise systems. In particular, formal methods and systems methods are crucial for modeling complex enterprise systems, which poses unique challenges. In this paper, we briefly survey the state of the art in the area of enterprise systems as they relate to industrial informatics.

Enterprise Systems: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends

Industry 4.0 combines the strengths of traditional industries with cutting edge internet technologies. It embraces a set of technologies enabling smart products integrated into intertwined digital and physical processes. Therefore, many companies face the challenge to assess the diversity of developments and concepts summarized under the term industry 4.0. The paper presents the result of a study on the potential of industry 4.0. The use of current technologies like Big Data or cloud-computing are drivers for the individual potential of use of Industry 4.0. Furthermore mass customization as well as the use of idle data and production time improvement are strong influence factors to the potential of Industry 4.0. On the other hand business process complexity has a negative influence.

https://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783319190266-c2.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1512631-p177384986

Industry 4.0 - Potentials for Creating Smart Products: Empirical Research Results

The fast-paced development of power systems necessitates smart grids to facilitate real-time control and monitoring with bidirectional communication and electricity flows. Future smart grids are expected to have reliable, efficient, secured, and cost-effective power management with the implementation of distributed architecture. To focus on these requirements, we provide a comprehensive survey on different cloud computing applications for the smart grid architecture, in three different areas— energy management , information management , and security . In these areas, the utility of cloud computing applications is discussed, while giving directions on future opportunities for the development of the smart grid. We also highlight different challenges existing in the conventional smart grid (without cloud application) that can be overcome using cloud. In this survey, we present a synthesized overview of the current state of research on smart grid development. We also identify the current research problems in the areas of cloud-based energy management, information management, and security in smart grid.

Cloud Computing Applications for Smart Grid: A Survey

Theories of intramolecular vibrational energy transfer

Examining cloud computing adoption intention, pricing mechanism, and deployment model

The cloud computing model - especially the public cloud - is unsuited to many business applications and is likely to remain so for many years due to fundamental limitations in architecture and design. Enterprises that move their IT to the cloud are likely to encounter challenges such as security, interoperability, and limits on their ability to tailor their ERP to their business processes. The cloud can be a revolutionary technology, especially for small startups, but the benefits wane for larger enterprises with more complex IT needs. Utility computing still cannot match the "plug-and-play" simplicity of electricity. On the other hand, private clouds offer the benefits like scale and virtualization with fewer drawbacks.

Cloud Computing: The Limits of Public Clouds for Business Applications

Assessing the strengths, weaknesses, and general applicability of the computing-as-utility business model.

Cloud computing and electricity: beyond the utility model

Enterprise resource-planning (ERP) systems, relational databases, and other mature information technologies are undergoing commoditization and facing challenges from software-as-a-service (SaaS) players moving into front-end enterprise applications. Yet, such systems are likely to be around for a long time because they are reliable and have lengthy life cycles. That said, investing in disruptive markets and business models and exploring innovative technologies in high-performance computing, pervasive connectivity, Web services, and other trends will be vital if ERP vendors wish to survive well in the unfolding future.

ERP is Dead, Long Live ERP

A central element of emerging Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is the ability to develop new applications by composing enterprise functionality encapsulated in the form of services - whether within a given organization or across multiple ones. Semantic service annotations, including annotations of both functional and non-functional attributes, offer the prospect of facilitating this process and of producing higher quality solutions. A significant body of work in this area has aimed to fully automate this process, while assuming that all services already have rich and accurate annotations, In this article, we argue that this assumption is often unrealistic. Instead, we describe a mixed initiative framework for semantic web service discovery and composition that aims at flexibly interleaving human decision making and automated functionality in environments where annotations may be incomplete and even inconsistent. An initial version of this framework has been implemented in SAP's Guided Procedures, a key element of SAP's Enterperise Service Architecture (ESA).

/pdf/a-mixed-initiative-approach-to-semantic-web-service-vdksnagrxc.pdf

A Mixed Initiative Approach to Semantic Web Service Discovery and Composition: SAP's Guided Procedures Framework

We present an integrated benchmarking approach. To analyse the performance of inter-organizational (supply chain) processes at company level we combine dependency analysis and data envelopment analysis (DEA). DEA has been proven to be a powerful tool for benchmarking processes and for identifying the most efficient ones. Before using DEA analysis the inputs and outputs as well as the relevant dependencies have to be identified. To support the determination of input and output variables we propose to use dependency analysis. We illustrate the application of this integrated approach by analysing the results of an empirical benchmarking study of 65 European and North American companies. The study shows that make-to-stock is still the predominating manufacturing strategy of the analysed industries. Therefore, we utilize different DEA models with weight restrictions only for companies with a make-to-stock strategy. The results support our basic hypotheses that efficient supply chains lead to high financial performance. Furthermore they indicate improvement potential for the benchmarked supply chain processes

Paul Hofmann

Papers

Cloud Computing: The Limits of Public Clouds for Business Applications

Cloud computing and electricity: beyond the utility model

ERP is Dead, Long Live ERP

A Mixed Initiative Approach to Semantic Web Service Discovery and Composition: SAP's Guided Procedures Framework

Efficiency Analysis of Supply Chain Processes