The fourth industrial revolution stimulates the advances of science and technology, in which the Internet of Things (IoT) and its supporting technologies serve as backbones for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and smart machines are used as the promoters to optimize production chains. Such advancement goes beyond the organizational and territorial boundaries, comprising agility, intelligence, and networking. This scenario triggers governmental efforts that aim at defining guidelines and standards. The speed and complexity of the transition to the new digitalization era in a globalized environment, however, does not yet allow a common and coordinated understanding of the impacts of the actions undertaken in different countries and regions. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to bridge this gap through a systematic literature review that identifies the most influential public policies and evaluates their existing differences. This cross-country/region comparison provides a worldwide panorama of public policies' durations, main objectives, available funding, areas for action, focused manufacturing sectors, and prioritized technologies. Findings of this review can be used as the basis to analyse the position of a country against the existing challenges imposed towards its own industrial infrastructure and also to coordinate its public policies.

No abstract

Nowadays, the need for systems interoperability in or across enterprises has become more and more ubiquitous. Many research works have been carried out in the fields of information exchange, transformation, discovery and reuse. One of the main challenges in these researches is to overcome the semantic heterogeneity between enterprise applications along the life cycle of a product. As a possible solution to assist the semantic interoperability, the semantic annotation has gained many attentions and widely used in different domains. We collect a number of literature that applied semantic annotations on different objects, and classify them according to the subject being described in an enterprise architecture framework. In this paper, a detailed survey, especially from the formalization perspective, is presented to identify the existing drawbacks and to point out the possible research directions.

No abstract

Global competitiveness challenges manufacturing industry to rationalise different ways of bringing to the market new products in a short lead-time with competitive prices while ensuring higher quality levels and customisation. Industries need to effectively share heterogeneous information during Product Development Process (PDP) within and across their institutional boundaries to be competitive. However, problems with misinterpretation and mistakes have been identified during information exchange due to the semantic interoperability obstacles. Thus, this research proposes a systematic literature review to identify the main researches and the milestones reference works on semantic interoperability field. A rigorous methodology was conducted in different databases, covering the articles published in scientific journals from 2005 to 2015 as a preliminary study had indicated that the incidence of articles related to the subject was more frequent from the second half of the 2000s. The research structure consisted of four steps: Survey-searching, analysis and selection of recent researches; Categorization-categorization of the selected papers; References citation frequency analysis-the selected papers were analysed and the main researches and milestones references were identified; and Main researches critical analysisthe main researches were analysed for their contributions and limitations, their contributions and limitations, resulting in 14 selected scientific articles and 8 identified milestones references. It is evident that this field has interesting perspectives on future research opportunities on semantic interoperability of information issues across PDP, contributing to the new concepts of future factories.

Process flexibility plays a key role in high variability environments, such as healthcare. In this type of environment, the process model needs to change some elements to adjust to specific sets of requirements. Thus, this paper proposes a process model customizing method based on ontology and process mining. The method proposed is applied in customizing process models for acute ischemic stroke treatment. During process model customization, the method provides decision-making support for users, thereby ensuring a structurally correct process customization and enabling improves patient treatment by means of recommendations.

No abstract

In the last years the aec (architecture, engineering and construction) industry has been influenced by the development of building information modelling (bim). With the creation of complex systems, the need for efficient in­teroperability arises. Based on a study of bim interoperability dimensions and its levels, this research presents an inter­operability assessment of bim system in the structural domain, especially considering cast-in-place concrete structures, since they present some special challenges for system interoperability. This assessment was conducted by experiments that imported and exported structural models and structural elements through a non-proprietarz standard for bim mod­els (ifc- industry foundation classes). The experiments were conducted twice, with a five year gap from each other, so the evolution of the interoperability could be assessed as well. The results showed that some special characteristics must be considered in order to achieve efficient interoperability for cast-in-place concrete structures – these structures are monolithic and they have reinforcement steel bars that need detailing. Also, the research showed that in the five-year gap there were evolutions in interoperability, like in object identifiers, which had a considerable improvement. However, some of the major problems remain, such as overlapping of structural parts.