The major contribution of the PhD project, beyond the current state of the art, can be summarized as follows:
-Definition of a new framework for enterprise transformation interoperability, which will support stakeholders, architects and engineers of business services in their understanding, design, assessment, decision making and engineering task.
-Development of a prototype for the monitoring and decision support for enterprise interoperability transformation in networked enterprises.
Description
The obligation to become more competitive and effective in providing better products and services requires enterprises to transform from traditional businesses into networked businesses. The availability of the Internet and information technologies has encouraged new business strategies that take advantage of enterprises’ ability to create networks or to network with other enterprises. One of the challenges faced by a network of enterprises is the development of interoperability between its members (Chen et al., 2008) (Vernadat, 1996).
Developing interoperability might carry on some readjustments and transformations to satisfy the need of development under this new situation.
Such transformations present enormous challenges and need to be prepared to avoid costly corrective actions.The PLATINE project (PLAnning Transformation Interoperability in Networked Enterprises) deals with transformations related to enterprise interoperability. The objective is to help organizations planning their interoperability transformations in order to facilitate the transition from an AS-IS situation to a TO-BE one; and prevent interoperability and transformations problems before they occur.
The objective of this PhD research aims to focus on providing a foundation for understanding, designing and planning transformations with regards to interoperability within a network of enterprises. Transformations in this context are driven by interoperability problems that an enterprise may face. In light of these, various issues remain open and will be the subject of research in this project:
- How to help an enterprise to plan interoperability transformations in the context of networked enterprises? In other words, how to help an enterprise to increase its interoperability readiness and its capacity to adapt within a changing environment?
- One of the implications of the previous research question touches upon the capacity of the enterprise to solve interoperability issues and raises one new question: How to diagnose or predict interoperability potential problems and plan transformations in networked enterprises (NE)?
In order to diagnose interoperability problems, one of the first steps to deal with, is to study the AS-IS situation in order to detect strengths and weakness in terms of interoperability. This is in particular the purpose of the interoperability assessment, which raises the following question: How to evaluate the potential of interoperability in networked enterprises? In order to reply to such a question, an analysis of the enterprise AS-IS situation is required. This leads us to deal with the following research question: How to architect the interoperability in networked enterprises?
As a result of the interoperability diagnosis, a set of problems is identified. The enterprise can choose to deal with the totality of the problems or select some of them. This depends on the set of the transformations that will result to solve these problems.
Nr of positions available : 1
Research Fields
Engineering
Career Stage
Early stage researcher or 0-4 yrs (Post graduate)
Research Profiles
First Stage Researcher (R1)
Requirements
| ENGLISH |
| Excellent |
| Computer science |
| The candidate must demonstrate motivation, self-structure and responsibility as well as ability to work independently. Excellent education in decision support and reasoning engines is considered as an asset. | |
| Programming skills are mandatory. |
| Master Degree or equivalent |