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International audience; Abstract.

International audience; no abstract

Within both economics and computer science, many authors have claimed that decentralized or market-based approaches to decision making are superior in general to centralized approaches. The contrary claim has also been made. Unfortunately, these claims are often supported only by informal or anecdotal evidence. In order to assess these competing claims, we present a review of the literature in economics and computer science with a bearing on these issues. Our main findings from this literature survey are as follows: 1 for efficiency assessments, there is wider variance in performance of organizations using market-based control MBC than in organizations using centralized control CC; 2 that MBC and CC have the same efficiency on average, which may explain the observation that 3 human and computer organizations tend to cycle between CC and decentralized control DC structures.

In recent years, researchers have been developing algorithms for the automatic mapping and merging of ontologies to meet the demands of interoperability between heterogeneous and distributed information systems. But, still state-of-the-art ontology mapping and merging systems is semi-automatic that reduces the burden of manual creation and maintenance of mappings, and need human intervention for their validation. The contribution presented in this paper makes human intervention one step more down by automatically identifying semantic inconsistencies in the early stages of ontology merging. We are detecting semantic heterogeneities that occur due to conflicts among the set of Generalized Concept Inclusions, Property Subsumption Criteria, and Constraint Satisfaction Mechanism in local heterogeneous ontologies, which become obstacles for the generation of semantically consistent global merged ontology. We present several algorithms to detect such semantic inconsistencies based on subsumption analysis of concepts and properties in local ontologies from the list of initial mappings. We provide ontological patterns for resolving these inconsistencies automatically. This results global merged ontology free from `circulatory error in class/property hierarchy', `common class between disjoint classes/properties', `redundancy of subclass/subproperty of relations' and other types of `semantic inconsistency' errors. Experiments on the real ontologies show that our algorithms save time and cost of traversing local ontologies, improve system's performance by producing only consistent accurate mappings, and reduce the users' dependability for ensuring the satisfiability of merged ontology.

International audience; no abstract

International audience; no abstract

International audience; Natural language is understandable by human and not machine. None technical persons can only use natural language to specify their business requirements. However, the current version of Business process management and notation (BPMN) tools do not allow business analysts to implement their business processes without having technical skills. BPMN tool is a tool that allows users to design and implement the business processes by connecting different business tasks and rules together. The tools do not provide automatic implementation of business tasks from users' specifications in natural language (NL). Therefore, this research aims to propose a framework to automatically implement the business processes that are expressed in NL requirements. Ontology is used as a mechanism to solve this problem by comparing between users' requirements and web services' descriptions. Web service is a software module that performs a specific task and ontology is a concept that defines the relationships between different terms.

International audience; no abstract

Most inventory models studied in the scientific literature assume implicitly that the inventory position shown in the information system is equal to the actual physical stock used to satisfy the clients' demands. In the recent years, some empirical studies – mainly developed around the deployment of a new identification technology such as RFID - highlighted that errors and inventory perturbations may occur in the inventory system. Such errors result in a gap between what the information system shows and what is actually available for sales and used to satisfy the demand. The impact of such errors is particularly important in a wholesaling / e-retailing context where customer' demands are remotely satisfied based on the inventory record shown in the information system. The aim of the paper is to develop a framework permitting to increase the inventory performance by tackling the errors that may occur. Such errors are represented by a multiplicative structure, an assumption that bears considerable association with reality. The focus will be steered on the impact of ignoring errors when managing the inventory system by using a classical; i.e. error free, policy.

International audience; no abstract

International audience; no abstract

In this paper, we address a two-echelon, multi-location pooling inventory system that consists of an outside supplier, a warehouse and two retailers. To control their inventories, both warehouse and retailers use (R, s, S) policy. The retailers face stochastic customer demands for a single product and the warehouse receives only the replenishment orders of retailers. In case of stock-out at retailers, emergency trans-shipments are used to satisfy the unmet demand at one retailer with the surplus from the other retailer. When the stock is insufficient at the warehouse, we propose two rationing policies to allocate on-hand stock between retailers. The demand that cannot be satisfied neither by stock on-hand nor by trans-shipment from retailers is considered lost. Our work has two objectives. First, we propose an inventory model based on three components: the optimisation inventory model, the trans-shipment policy and the rationing policies for determining the best values of (s, S) at each location that mini...

International audience; no abstract

National audience; L'interopérabilité vise à accroître la capacité de systèmes et d'organisations hétérogènes à coordonner leurs activités de manière efficace. A travers six articles sélectionnés par leur qualité mais aussi leur complémentarité, ce numéro spécial établit des liens multiples entre les problématiques d'interopérabilité et de partage de connaissances. Il constitue ainsi une invitation à l'interaction entre différentes communautés scientifiques dans un but d'enrichissement mutuel.

Specification-based regression testing of web services is an important activity which verifies the quality of web services. A major problem in web services is that only provider has the source code and both user and broker only have the XML based specification. So from the perspective of user and broker, specification based regression testing of web services is needed. The existing techniques are code based. Due to the dynamic behavior of web services, web services undergo maintenance and evolution process rapidly. Retesting of web services is required in order to verify the impact of changes. In this paper, we present an automated safe specification based regression testing approach that uses original and modified WSDL specifications for change identification. All the relevant test cases are selected as reusable hence our regression test selection approach is safe., 9 figures, 2 tables, 11 pages, ASEA 2011

Most inventory models studied in the scientific literature assume implicitly that the inventory position shown in the information system is equal to the actual physical stock used to satisfy the clients' demands. In the recent years, some empirical studies - mainly developed around the deployment of a new identification technology such as RFID - highlighted that errors and inventory perturbations may occur in the inventory system. Such errors result in a gap between what the information system shows and what is actually available for sales and used to satisfy the demand. The impact of such errors is particularly important in a wholesaling / e-retailing context where customer' demands are remotely satisfied based on the inventory record shown in the information system. The aim of the paper is to develop a framework permitting to increase the inventory performance by tackling the errors that may occur. Such errors are represented by a multiplicative structure, an assumption that bears considerable association with reality. The focus will be steered on the impact of ignoring errors when managing the inventory system by using a classical; i.e. error free, policy

This research is based on a hybrid exploration in an abductive approach with a problem of translation between concepts and empirical data from a study of optimization of the management of the relationship with citizens in six cities. We will show that incremental system consisting of a continuum of three stages is necessary to answer the questions posed by the management of cities: "What is it? and how? ". The incremental system that we propose is a method to reveal plans to optimize the management of the relationship with citizens in a society where digital seems prégnant. The three phases of incremental system are "around a semantic search and issues," "the discovery of six projects" and "work in iterations." In the last step, after identifying the positions of all the players, the management of SITIV organize a session of collective intelligence (Levi, 2003) because according to Demailly (2008) "members of an organization does not have a view full of what takes place there, or in time or in space, and will therefore settle benchmarks available, the most immediate are thinking and what their colleagues are doing "... It is for this reason that direction SITIV promotes (and encouraged) exchanges between cities. For the direction of SITIV all projects identified around the Citizen Relationship Management (CRM), are part of a global architecture information system dedicated to this activity. The SITIV and six cities seem heckled by this development. Thus, the chain of historical value SITIV should be reviewed because it does not take sufficient account of the impact of digital technology on the territories of communities and their stakeholders. This evolution of the value chain is in the will of the President and the leadership of SITIV that it becomes an innovator to help cities in transforming their organization and probably adapt more easily to their territoriality . Thus, the arrival of digital seems to upset relations with the local community stakeholders., Cette recherche repose sur une exploration hybride dans une démarche abductive, avec une problématique de traduction entre des concepts et des données empiriques issues d'une étude d'optimisation de la gestion de la relation avec les citoyens dans six villes. Nous allons faire apparaître qu'un système incrémental constitué par un continuum de trois étapes est nécessaire pour répondre aux questions posées par les directions des villes : " qu'est-ce que c'est ? et comment faire ? ". Le système incrémental que nous proposons est une méthode pour faire apparaître des projets pour optimiser la gestion de la relation avec les citoyens dans une société où le numérique semble prégnant. Les trois phases du système incrémental sont : " autour d'une recherche sémantique et des enjeux " ; " la découverte de six projets " et " un travail par itérations ". Dans la dernière étape, après avoir identifié les postures de tous les acteurs, la direction du SITIV organisera une séance d'intelligence collective (Levi, 2003) car selon Demailly (2008) " les membres d'une organisation n'ont pas une vue complète de ce qui s'y déroule, ni dans le temps ni dans l'espace, et vont donc se contenter de repères disponibles, dont les plus immédiats sont ce que pensent et font leurs collègues " ... C'est pour cette raison que la direction du SITIV favorise (et incite) les échanges entre les villes. Pour la direction du SITIV, tous les projets identifiés autour de la Gestion de la Relation Citoyen (GRC), s'inscrivent dans une architecture de système d'information globale consacrée à cette activité. Le SITIV et ses six villes semblent chahutés par cette évolution. Ainsi, la chaîne de valeur historique du SITIV doit-être revue car elle ne tient pas suffisamment compte de l'impact du numérique sur les territoires des collectivités et leurs acteurs. Cette évolution de la chaîne de valeur s'inscrit dans la volonté du président et de la direction du SITIV que celui-ci devienne un acteur innovant pour aider les villes dans la transformation de leur organisation et probablement de s'adapter plus facilement à leur territorialité. Ainsi, l'arrivée du numérique semble bouleverser les relations de la collectivité locale avec ses parties prenantes.

International audience

International audience

International audience; L'approche compétence apporte une nouvelle vision aux problématiques auxquelles les organisations sont confrontées. Dans cet article, nous présentons une démarche d'identification des compétences requises ainsi que son application dans le domaine de la logistique. Notre démarche est basée sur une approche fonctionnelle.

International audience

International audience; Because of sustainable development has recognized for last 10 years. Most interpretations of sustainable development recognize that there are constraints on long-term human activities consisting of three dimensions: economic, environmental and social. From the literature review, we found that indicators of environmental and economic performance are relatively well established. They can be combined to indicate the sustainability of products, services and supply chains. Meanwhile indicators of social performance are more problematic, particularly indicators to describe the social value of products and services. This paper reviews a context of social indicators and proposes a metric to measure social performance for sustainable supply chain.

International audience; In this paper, we show that the integration of a new MES within an existing manufacturing system requires to appeal to a method enabling the modeling of interactions between hardware and software components, the modeling of their behavior and their use by production staff. We show how SysML is a language fitting this need and we illustrate this discussion on a real sample.

International audience; Today, within the global Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) approach, success of design, industrialization and production activities depends on the ability to improve interaction between information systems that handle such activities. Enterprises deploy mainly PLM system, Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP) and Manufacturing Execution System (MES) in order to manage sufficient product-related information and provide better customer-products. This paper proposes a methodological approach to integrate product data generated during product design, industrialization and production. This involves the PLM and MES integration. Thus, the proposed approach aims to overcome the problem of data heterogeneity by proposing a mediation system resolving syntactic and semantic conflicts.

International audience; The inventory level shown in the Information System contrary to popular belief and assumptions in most academic papers and inspite of the considerable amounts invested in information technology, is often inaccurate.The inventory inaccuracy occurs when the inventory shown int he Information System is not in agreement with the actually available inventory. In this paper,we first describe the major factors generating inventory inaccuracy. Then,we provide situations permitting to manage an inventory system subject to errors. We provide a general framework permitting to model the inventory inaccuracy issue. In particular,we link the inaccuracy issue with the well known random yield problem.The shown link permits us to derive the optimal ordering policy of an inventory framework where demand satisfaction is done based on the inventory records(which are subject to inaccuracies). We also propose an analysis permitting to show the added value of an advanced identification system such as the RFID technology.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems are integrated software packages offering a standard solution, which must be adapted and customized to the needs of a company. A consistent alignment between the company and the ERP system influences the success of an ERP project. Decision-makers have thus to be guided in order to conduct and manage this alignment. In this paper, we define and analyse what we call the ‘misalignment risk’ in order to have a better vision of this alignment problem. Our analysis allows (1) highlighting the links that exist between this risk and the other ones; (2) setting the related risk factors in the ERP project lifecycle, and (3) underlining the links between risk categories particularly the “project” misalignment risk and risk factors.

International audience

International audience

International audience; The international competitive market causes the increasing of shorten product life cycle and product development process with the improvement in term of time, cost and quality while increasing the waste generation. To reduce the waste generation, companies follow the environmental legislation and focus more and more on the product lifecycle sustainability. Sustainability on product lifecycle encourages in reducing wastes, saving resources and energy, reusing product and its component and avoiding of usage hazardous substances as well. Therefore, this research work is aimed to establish a Knowledge Management System (KMS) based on a multi-agent system in order to manage sustainability knowledge related to environmental security and performance through the link between Agents' knowledge base and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system. It will help the decision makers in each stage of the lifecycle and make them take into account the environmental impacts of their decisions. The proposed architecture will be illustrated on an industrial case study.

National audience; no abstract

The last decade has seen researchers developing efficient algorithms for the mapping and merging of ontologies to meet the demands of interoperability between heterogeneous and distributed information systems. But, still state-of-the-art ontology mapping and merging systems is semi-automatic that reduces the burden of manual creation and maintenance of mappings, and need human intervention for their validation. The contribution presented in this paper makes human intervention one step more down by automatically identifying semantic inconsistencies in the early stages of ontology merging. Our methodology detects inconsistencies based on structural mismatches that occur due to conflicts among the set of Generalized Concept Inclusions, and Disjoint Relations due to the differences between disjoint partitions in the local heterogeneous ontologies. We present novel methodologies to detect and repair semantic inconsistencies from the list of initial mappings. This results in global merged ontology free from ‘circulatory error in class/property hierarchy’, „common class/instance between disjoint classes error’, ‘redundancy of subclass/subproperty relations’, ‘redundancy of disjoint relations’ and other types of „semantic inconsistency’ errors. In this way, our methodology saves time and cost of traversing local ontologies for the validation of mappings, improves performance by producing only consistent accurate mappings, and reduces the user dependability for ensuring the satisfiability and consistency of merged ontology. The experiments show that the newer approach with automatic inconsistency detection yields a significantly higher precision.

International audience

International audience

International audience; Information systems (IS) are now more and more based on 'off-the-shelf products' such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. These offer a generic solution apart from the company in which they will be set up. Thus, an essential success factor of this set up is a consistent alignment with the company. The methods suggested to support this alignment, which are described and analysed in this paper, especially insist on the modelling techniques to use without sticking to the characterisation of the various alignment and misalignment situations. Therefore, an algorithm to identify them is proposed. It formalised those situations and associate decisions to be taken in order to mitigate the misalignment risks.

National audience; La mise en place d’une armoire automatique de gestion des médicaments change les pratiques en cours et requiert des investissements financiers. L’évaluation de ce nouveau système ne peut toutefois pas être envisagée d’un seul point de vue, qualité ou coûts et doit être pilotée par une politique adaptée de gestion des stocks. Pour mener cette étude, une version étendue de la méthodologie ASCI est utilisée pour analyser la situation existante, proposer et évaluer une solution en prenant en compte les points de vue des différentes parties prenantes de l’hôpital. En outre, un politique de gestion des stocks multi-produit, multi-niveau et contrainte par la capacité est appliquée pour piloter le nouveau système.

International audience

International audience; no abstract

‘The Best of Time’ of any organization is achieved through several factors such as connectivity, causality and understanding. These factors are found by successful implementation of strategy through business process. Extending operational excellence to management excellence is the strategic imperative for organizations of all sizes, in every market around the world. The goal is clear; however, in most organizations, the path for getting there is less so. This paper illustrates how business processes are integral to delivering business strategy. It also examines the way organizations can analyse the performance of their existing processes and suggests some ways in which they can look to improve that performance because business competitive edge and success comes from the organisation's ability to continuously improve its operations and processes. It discusses on the Process Renewal Group Business Process Management Framework. In addition, it provides a deeper look into two main phases, such as Understanding the Enterprise and Architect and Alignment of Business processes, which are the fundamental building blocks for the success of modern enterprise. We conclude that alignment of organisation's business processes with strategy and stakeholder expectations is also highly important.

The massive growth in ontology development has opened new research challenges such as ontology management, search and retrieval for the entire semantic web community. These results in many recent developments, like OntoKhoj, Swoogle, OntoSearch2, that facilitate tasks user have to perform. These semantic web portals mainly treat ontologies as plain texts and use the traditional text classification algorithms for classifying ontologies in directories and assigning predefined labels rather than using the semantic knowledge hidden within the ontologies. These approaches suffer from many types of classification problems and lack of accuracy, especially in the case of overlapping ontologies that share common vocabularies. In this paper, we define an ontology classification problem and categorize it into many sub-problems. We present a new ontological methodology for the classification of web ontologies, which has been guided by the requirements of the emerging Semantic Web applications and by the lessons learnt from previous systems. The proposed framework, OntClassifire, is tested on 34 ontologies with a certain degree of overlapping domain, and effectiveness of the ontological mechanism is verified. It benefits the construction, maintenance or expansion of ontology directories on the semantic web that help to focus on the crawling and improving the quality of search for the software agents and people. We conclude that the use of a context specific knowledge hidden in the structure of ontologies gives more accurate results for the ontology classification.

International audience; This article deals with problems encountered be routing nurses through home health care services. It is difficult to assign patients to different care workers by taking into account their availability and their skills. If patients need several cares during a week, they may be treated by the same employee. We show that this problem is equivalent to a routing problem with some specific constraints. We propose an integer linear program for deciding (1) which human resource should be used and (2) when to execute the service during the planning horizon in order to satisfy the care plan for each patient served by the home health care providers

In a scale-free network, only a minority of nodes are connected very often, while the majority of nodes are connected rarely. However, what is the ratio of minority nodes to majority nodes resulting from the Matthew effect? In this paper, based on a simple preferential random model, the poor-rich demarcation points are found to vary in a limited range, and form a poor-rich demarcation interval that approximates to k/m [3,4]. As a result, the (cumulative) degree distribution of a scale-free network can be divided into three intervals: the poor interval, the demarcation interval and the rich interval. The inequality of the degree distribution in each interval is measured. Finally, the Matthew effect is applied to the ABC analysis of project management.

This paper considers a number of problems in a pharmaceutical downstream supply chain under specific constraints related to pharmaceutical products (e.g., their expiry date and regulations) and to inventory control (e.g., low prices of products, gift products or prices near zero, shortages prohibited but excess inventory allowed). As traditional models of inventory control and replenishment cannot optimize the total cost of the system, it is very important to consider the transportation cost as well. In this paper, we take into account some of these constraints and propose two models for multi-product replenishment policies, namely centralized and decentralized models. We seek to identify the best quantity and period of replenishment of products for a joint optimization of inventory and transportation costs. The proposed models can be applied to a specific family of products with a stable demand and high turnover rate, low prices (or gift products for some of them), and without any shortage. These two models are compared and the global approach is illustrated by a numerical example taken from a real-case study.

International audience; In a turbulent and increasingly complex environment, the agility of the Supply Chain Management (SCM) is clearly identified as a key factor for success and a strategic essential lever. The objective of this work is to identify which human competencies are the most important factors of agility in Supply Chain Management (SCM). To do this, firstly, our proposal is based on a process approach and on the analysis of the real work situation. This analysis assumes that competence is a dynamic construction that can be grasped only by reference to an actor in a professional situation. Given the complexity of supply chain Management, we're limited to the identification of the competences required by the inbound logistics (planning and procurement) that occupy a prominent place in the chain. Finally, we present our approach of identifying the competences applied particularly to inbound logistics

International audience; Abstract.

International audience; Firms cannot be competitive if their business and information technology strategies are not aligned. Yet achieving strategic alignment continues to be a major concern for business executives. A number of alignment models have been proposed in the literature. Enterprise Modelling (EM) can deliver models that are understandable by all participants and formalised enough to map the Enterprise Engineering and Reengineering activities directly onto the business process execution. However, models need terms (names, verbs...) to identify and describe the constructs modelled in the EM language used. To share business knowledge, a common modelling language is not sufficient. A common business language is required to share the understanding of any constructs used in the modelling language at a semantic level. The aim of this paper is to present the importance of knowledge formalization for strategic alignment. Our work is based on knowledge contained in a well-known reference model for supply chain: SCOR model. To analyze this knowledge, we transform this model into ontology. Finally, we will explore the respective advantages of the different representations of SCOR model (original text, using a business modelling language, ontology), and more generally, the contribution of ontologies as they are becoming a major issue in business modelling.

This paper addresses a distribution center selection problem in a three-echelon supply chain including suppliers, distribution centers (DCs) and retailers. There is a set of DCs, in which some of them should be selected in each period. Due to the imperative role of the time value of money (TVM), we consider this decisive factor in the problem. Besides it is assumed that the setup cost of each DC can be decreased in period t based on its number of the previous periods that it has been selected. This phenomenon, which shows the loyalty of a customer, is named as loyal customer (LC) effect. The aim of the problem is to minimize the total costs, including transportation and setup costs. A non-linear mathematical model is developed for the mentioned problem and it has been solved by the GAMS optimization software to obtain the optimum set of DCs.

International audience; Cet article présente un état de l'art des publications scientifiques étudiant l'impact de la technologie RFID sur le management des chaînes logistiques. Pour ce faire, nous proposons une classification des articles selon deux critères différents. Le premier critère de classification concerne la nature de chaque contribution. Nous distinguons les articles descriptifs, les articles proposant des démarches de mise en œuvre de la technologie, les articles proposant des méthodes d'optimisation ou d'analyse des performances, les études de cas, et enfin les revues de littérature. Le deuxième critère est basé sur les types de processus impactés par la technologie RFID ; nous utilisons le modèle SCOR (Supply Chain Operations Reference model) comme référence dans cette dernière classification. L'objectif de notre contribution est double : permettre une meilleure visibilité des contributions scientifiques traitant l'impact de la technologie RFID, et déduire le potentiel de recherche future dans le domaine.

International audience

A multi-objective two stage stochastic programming model is proposed to deal with a multi-period multi-product multi-site production-distribution planning problem for a midterm planning horizon. The presented model involves majority of supply chain cost parameters such as transportation cost, inventory holding cost, shortage cost, production cost. Moreover some respects as lead time, outsourcing, employment, dismissal, workers productivity and training are considered. Due to the uncertain nature of the supply chain, it is assumed that cost parameters and demand fluctuations are random variables and follow from a pre-defined probability distribution. To develop a robust stochastic model, an additional objective functions is added to the traditional production-distribution-planning problem. So, our multi-objective model includes (i) the minimization of the expected total cost of supply chain, (ii) the minimization of the variance of the total cost of supply chain and (iii) the maximization of the workers productivity through training courses that could be held during the planning horizon. Then, the proposed model is solved applying a hybrid algorithm that is a combination of Monte Carlo sampling method, modified -constraint method and L-shaped method. Finally, a numerical example is solved to demonstrate the validity of the model as well as the efficiency of the hybrid algorithm.

International audience