The theme of the SOHOMA’17 Workshop is “Emerging ICT for intelligent and sustainable manufacturing and logistics systems”.
Markets are currently demanding customized high-quality products with shorter delivery times and shorter lifecycles, forcing companies to adapt their processes by help of flexible and reconfigurable production plants and supply chains. This leads to the challenge of designing systems that exhibit better re-configurability, agility, robustness, resilience and responsiveness while ensuring at the same time maintainability, sustainability and long-term performances of their processes, services, resources, products and logistics systems.
Technological evolutions in ICT have enabled researchers to develop new concepts that were inconceivable in the past. They are based on the interaction of a multitude of various, instrumented, interconnected and even decision-capable smart objects (generated within the industrial systems), embedded or distant, agentified or purely digital. Developing solutions via these “bottom-up” approaches may lead to emerging behaviour that must be integrated with existing “top-down” approaches, the latter being most of the time centralized or hierarchy-based management systems.
Similarly, service orientation of technology and management applied to enterprise have gained attention in the past years, promising a way to create the basis for enterprise agility so that companies can deliver new, more flexible business processes that harness the value of service approach from a customer's perspective.
This 7th edition of the SOHOMA workshop will focus on these challenges and solutions. It will examine the way emerging “bottom-up” behaviours are integrated with “top-down” approaches in an efficient and effective way to constitute hybrid control systems useful to meet industrial needs. It will also foster innovation in sustainable manufacturing and promote concepts, methods, solutions addressing trends in the service orientation of agent-based control technologies with distributed intelligence and the integration with enterprise management.
The scientific event will draw on research developed in the last years in the scientific community SOHOMA as well as from other sources. The main research lines are:
- IT Modelling techniques (UML, Object-Orientation, Agents, Service Oriented Architectures, ...) for automation systems
- Emerging models and technologies for smart and sustainable industrial systems
- Industrial informatics for smart and sustainable industrial systems
- Intelligent products, orders and systems in industrial ICT systems
- The role of service orientation in the development of smart, safe and sustainable industrial systems
- Issues of agility, flexibility, safety, resilience and reconfigurability in industrial systems with new ICT: cloud, Web, SOA
The application space for these types of development is very broad. This edition of SOHOMA will address all aspects of industrial systems management including – for example – applications such as:
- Manufacturing supply chain: management of production, logistics, transportation etc
- Industrial services, maintenance and repair operations
- Management and control of energy production and transmission.
The implementing space for these application classes includes the new digital transformation frameworks and technologies, as the one advocated by “Industrie 4.0” or “Industry of the future” concepts. Digitalization relates to the attention paid on the interaction between the physical and informational worlds through data and knowledge management as well as virtualization of products, processes and resources managed as services.
Examples are not limited to these areas. Papers discussing new application areas and the resulting new developments at the interface of information technology and automation are especially welcome. All contributions must indicate alignment with the Workshop’s theme.
