EPES Virtual Collaborative Network (VCN)

Virtual Collaborative Network (VCN) This presents an overview of the Virtual Collaborative Network (VCN) module. This infrastructure can considered a collaborative Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system that provides document and web content management, human to human tacit interaction for sharing content, and complex workflows execution capabilities, which may involve content transformation. The VCN has the following functionalities: • Virtual Factory Infrastructure: The VCN provides a Virtual Factory infrastructure, which groups together stakeholders and offer collaboration features to them. Thus, with the support of the VCN, EPES system users are distributed into collaborative networks. The aim of these networks is to achieve business goals through knowledge management (capturing, sharing and reusing of the generated knowledge) by means of the modelling and measurement of business processes performance through the adherence to the standard BPMN2.0 • Interoperability Support: The Virtual Factory Infrastructure may contain process participants that belong to a single organization or participants that belong to several organizations. In this latter case, the business process may involve the exchange of data between two or more processes, for instance, the collaboration between a provider and a client. In this regard, the BPMN2.0 standard, leveraged by the VCN, enables process interoperability, referred as the “ability of interconnecting heterogeneous services towards the formation of cross organization joint collaborative processes” • Business Optimization Opportunities Tracking (BOOT): Based on the tracking and identification of business optimization opportunities, the VCN enables the creation of new organizational alliances, so-called Collaborative Spaces, focused on answering the identified opportunities. The process of surveillance and identification of these optimization opportunities involves the application of data mining and social network analysis techniques upon the content allocated in the Virtual Factory, upon the tacit knowledge generated interactively by the users and with the support of external sustainability intelligence sources • Eco-constraints and Objectives Tracking: With the support of collaborative web 2.0 capabilities, stakeholders who are linked to the Collaborative Spaces are able to track and investigate eco-constraints and objectives that influence a particular business process. The process of identification of these requirements may involve the application of text mining and social network analysis techniques, which allow Business Process Managers to gather and classify sustainability directives, local regulations or sectorial recommendations in order to process and encode them into eco-constraints and objectives, readable by people and computers. These constraints and objectives are the basis for the identification, implementation and tracking of sustainability KPIs involving profit, environmental and social measurements. In addition, constraints and objectives can be regarded as elements aimed at shaping the business process towards more sustainable practices. Business Process compliance levels with respect to the constraints and objectives, derived from the environment, will be finally evaluated by the continuous monitoring of these KPIs • KPIs definition and specification: An important feature of the VCN that will be leveraged in the service configuration stage is the capability of enabling users the definition of KPIs from a master list. These KPIs belong to the item level, i.e. they are directly applicable so as to augment a simulation / optimization model. The SGM will use these KPI definitions in order to compose and configure EPES Services