Collaboration is a "watch word" and a recognized outcome of the increasing integration in business and industry. The Industrial Revolution brought us "standardization" and as it continues to evolve, "standardization" has widened into the concept of "rationalization." In recent times, "flexibility" has been added to the evolving nature of industry, which includes such developments as flexible manufacturing, CIM, concurrent engineering, supply chain management, etc. But the next step in this evolutionary process is developing out of the newly IT-enabled practices such of E-business, E-engineering, and on-demand business and it is these IT-enabled practices that brings the concept of "collaboration" to the next level of industrial evolution. "Collaboration" here means cooperation among independent enterprises towards some common tasks and even cooperation among distributed systems and processes within the same enterprises. There are some complex organizational and technical forces behind the emerging momentum of Enterprise Collaboration: (1) From the organizational perspective, no single authority can command and control all the participants as the scope of integration grows exponentially across the world economy. (2) From the technical perspective, the scale and complexity of tasks are exceeding the limits of the traditional command-and-control approaches to integration. These are the factors leading to the emergence of a model of collaboration to achieve the goals of integration for enterprises and extended enterprises.

The book will go beyond the discussion of global databases and present a general Enterprise Resources Market model to facilitate the management and integration ofenterprise information resources in a cooperating mode. The bulk of the book will discuss this particular concept in depth and implement a general model to focus on a new publish-and-subscribe model for information resource owners to cooperate at a scale much larger than the traditional global query.

Service Enterprise Integration is developing a business paradigm that is of considerable interest in both the "push" research the academic area and the "pull" research of industry. A prominent example of this development has been the transformation of IBM into a service enterprise and the labeling of its new business model as "On-Demand Business."

In the recent past, manufacturing research and practice have done considerable work on the problem of service productivity. In fact, this work has extended the operations of many manufacturing firms to include the "service enterprise" component. IBM, GE, Siemens are several examples of this development. Using the service work done in manufacturing as a point of departure, Service Enterprise Integration: An Enterprise Engineering Perspective will examine a range of topics on IT-based enterprise integration. It will investigate the proven concepts, models, methods, and techniques in manufacturing operations and examine all their aspects that are relevant to the problem of service productivity. The result will be a systematic examination of the developing business model, service enterprise integration.

The book will present a variety of on-going efforts to provide new results and solutions to the problem of service productivity. These presentations will be in the form of contributing chapters by leading researchers who will provide critical literature reviews, conceptual analysis, and solution-result-oriented applications on topics including ontology, reference models, ERP, supply chain integration, knowledge management, data security, and a variety of cases on particular applications.

There are two types of readers that will find this book useful: those who have an interest in the Metadatabase model as an integration technology, and those who also seek a general discussion on information system analysis and design. To this end, a general conceptual framework on enterprise integration and modeling is provided in the first chapter, and is used to tie together all of the remaining chapters of the book. The next two chapters present some basics and examples of systems analysis and design for enterprise modeling; which serve the purposes of general discussion on the subject as well as illustrating the modeling methods particular to the Metadatabase approach. The particular methods are discussed fully in Chapter 4. An overview of the Metadatabase Model is provided in Chapter 5 and illustrated with a paper demonstration' of a basic Metadatabase prototype in Chapter 6. The main technical elements of the model are presented in Chapters 7-9. The model is then applied to manufacturing in Chapter 10, where a core information model for implementing the Metadatabase approach to integration is also included. Chapter 11 extends the Metadatabase technology into the realm of information visualization. The new user interface model developed can be applied to integrate the traditional management of information in an enterprise with new cyberspace applications such as electronic commerce. The Metadatabase model of enterprise information integration (for multiple systems) has been developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under the sponsorships of Alcoa, Digital, GE, GM, and IBM (from 1986-1995 through the Computer-Integrated Manufacturing and the Adaptive Integrated ManufacturingEnterprises programs), the National Science Foundation (since 1991), Samsung (since 1995), and U.S. Army (since 1995). The technology is being developed into a product for Samsung and the Army. This is the first expository book on the topic.

Hsu and Pant in Innovative Planning for Electronic Commerce and Enterprises: A Reference Model have proposed a management planning model for developing strategic goals for e-commerce enterprises. The authors feel they may be provocative sometimes; however, the field is so new that there is no working model for an e-commerce enterprise with a proven success record. In this book, Hsu and Pant develop a framework for a working model. This framework has three parts: (1) The first part is the planning model and a methodology. The planning model is based on principles derived from the literature and the author's research. The methodology also uses Value Chain Analysis to connect e-commerce goals with business processes. (2) The second part evaluates the model and calibrates it to industrial cases and established scholarly results in the field. (3) The last part consists of three exploratory plans for some industrial applications, including supply chain integration, Internet banking, and customer service (ordering) for heavy industry. About fifty cases are discussed in the book at various degrees of depth. The three industrial cases illustrate how to apply the planning model using the methodology. Hence, the book's e-commerce reference model is obtained from the planning model, its methodology, and the industrial benchmarks.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of cutting-edge approaches for decision-making in hierarchical organizations. It presents soft-computing-based techniques, including fuzzy sets, neural networks, genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization, and shows how these approaches can be effectively used to deal with problems typical of this kind of organization. After introducing the main classical approaches applied to multiple-level programming, the book describes a set of soft-computing techniques, demonstrating their advantages in providing more efficient solutions to hierarchical decision-making problems compared to the classical methods. Based on the book Fuzzy and Multi-Level Decision Making (Springer, 2001) by Lee E.S and Shih, H., this second edition has been expanded to include the most recent findings and methods and a broader spectrum of soft computing approaches. All the algorithms are presented in detail, together with a wealth of practical examples and solutions to real-world problems, providing students, researchers and professionals with a timely, practice-oriented reference guide to the area of interactive fuzzy decision making, multi-level programming and hierarchical optimization.

Hsu and Pant in Innovative Planning for Electronic Commerce and Enterprises: A Reference Model have proposed a management planning model for developing strategic goals for e-commerce enterprises. The authors feel they may be provocative sometimes; however, the field is so new that there is no working model for an e-commerce enterprise with a proven success record. In this book, Hsu and Pant develop a framework for a working model. This framework has three parts: (1) The first part is the planning model and a methodology. The planning model is based on principles derived from the literature and the author's research. The methodology also uses Value Chain Analysis to connect e-commerce goals with business processes. (2) The second part evaluates the model and calibrates it to industrial cases and established scholarly results in the field. (3) The last part consists of three exploratory plans for some industrial applications, including supply chain integration, Internet banking, and customer service (ordering) for heavy industry. About fifty cases are discussed in the book at various degrees of depth. The three industrial cases illustrate how to apply the planning model using the methodology. Hence, the book's e-commerce reference model is obtained from the planning model, its methodology, and the industrial benchmarks.

There are two types of readers that will find this book useful: those who have an interest in the Metadatabase model as an integration technology, and those who also seek a general discussion on information system analysis and design. To this end, a general conceptual framework on enterprise integration and modeling is provided in the first chapter, and is used to tie together all of the remaining chapters of the book. The next two chapters present some basics and examples of systems analysis and design for enterprise modeling; which serve the purposes of general discussion on the subject as well as illustrating the modeling methods particular to the Metadatabase approach. The particular methods are discussed fully in Chapter 4. An overview of the Metadatabase Model is provided in Chapter 5 and illustrated with a 'paper demonstration' of a basic Metadatabase prototype in Chapter 6. The main technical elements of the model are presented in Chapters 7-9. The model is then applied to manufacturing in Chapter 10, where a core information model for implementing the Metadatabase approach to integration is also included.Chapter 11 extends the Metadatabase technology into the realm of information visualization. The new user interface model developed can be applied to integrate the traditional management of information in an enterprise with new cyberspace applications such as electronic commerce. The Metadatabase model of enterprise information integration (for multiple systems) has been developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under the sponsorships of Alcoa, Digital, GE, GM, and IBM (from 1986-1995 through the Computer-Integrated Manufacturing and the Adaptive Integrated Manufacturing Enterprises programs), the National Science Foundation (since 1991), Samsung (since 1995), and U.S. Army (since 1995). The technology is being developed into a product for Samsung and the Army. This is the first expository book on the topic.

This book goes beyond the discussion of global databases and presents a general Enterprise Resources Market model to facilitate the management and integration of enterprise information resources in a cooperating mode. It is the first book to analyze the problem from the perspective of information management and to present a solution for a key aspect of the cooperation problem on-demand information exchange.

This book provides a systematic examination of the developing business model, service enterprise integration. It investigates the proven concepts, models, methods, and techniques in manufacturing operations and examines all aspects relevant to service productivity. Chapters written by leading researchers provide critical literature reviews, conceptual analysis, and solution-result-oriented applications.