Curious about the bigger picture of digital change?

August 16, 2018

Digitization and Industry 4.0 introduce a new level of manufacturing processes. It provides information exchanges that allow controlled machines to act autonomously and intelligently in order to deliver greater flexibility and customized products. A workshop and panel discussion curated by Markus Tauber (director of Cloud Computing Engineering master’s program at Fachhochschule Burgenland) - will address respective challenges from various multi-disciplinary domains in both; technology and business.

The advanced features of Industry 4.0 bring new challenges in terms of design and security. Key technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), System of Systems (SoS), Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) already exist.  The challenges ahead are beyond technical interoperability.

Digitization affects not only the production area but the entire value chain, i.e., from initial design and engineering to supply chain, manufacturing, sales, delivery, services and support functions, including Human Resources. Due to their distributed nature and the heterogeneity in the involved stakeholders it is important that multi-disciplinary topics including, privacy, techno-legal and techno-social are investigated. This requires a consistent definition of organizational, legal and governance issues regardless of the role of the stakeholder.

Tackling the issues from an academic perspective

The University of Applied Sciences Burgenland (Fachhochschule Burgenland) addresses this in its Master Program Cloud Computing Engineering. Engineers and managers are trained how to orchestrate the diverse areas of applications around cloud technologies and Internet of Things (IoT), including the technical building blocks of digitization. They do this from a technical, organizational and legal point of view. Researchers in the University of Aplied Sciences Burgenland also work on these topics in several national and H2020 research projects with the results published in prestigious conferences and other outlets, for example [1], [2], [3],[4].

Technology has moved from a predominantly manufacturing and support function into the whole delivery process of both products and the service industry. This means that it is increasingly important for our technology students to understand the whole business process as they are now an integral part of strategy development and its delivery. It now forms an integral part of the Cloud Computing Engineering program.

Workshop Contents: the bigger picture of digital change at SEMANTiCS 2018

In this workshop and panel discussion with experts from various multi-disciplinary domains in both technology and business their views on how they need to interact with each other in order to guarantee optimal digital transformation within and across business operations will be discussed.

As output, we anticipate a set of recommendations from the different domains to show how they can be interlinked with each other and the key requirements in the individual phases. These include strategy, logistics, distribution, customer service, infrastructure, facility services and the circular economy. This discussion will lead to potential improvements, as well as new requirements and how the individual domains could further collaborate.

Curious to join the workshop. Register now!

About SEMANTiCS

The annual SEMANTiCS conference is the meeting place for professionals who make semantic computing work, and understand its benefits and know its limitations. Every year, SEMANTiCS attracts information managers, IT-architects, software engineers, and researchers, from organisations ranging from NPOs, universities, public administrations to the largest companies in the world. http://www.semantics.cc

References

  • [1] Bicaku, A., Balaban, S., Tauber, M.G., Hudic, A., Mauthe, A. and Hutchison, D., 2016, April. Harmonized monitoring for high assurance clouds. In Cloud Engineering Workshop (IC2EW), 2016 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 118-123). IEEE.

  • [2] Butterfield, R., Maksuti, S., Tauber, M., Wagner, C. and Bicaku, A., 2016. Towards Modelling a Cloud Application's Life Cycle. In 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services CLOSER 2016.

  • [3] Bicaku A, Schmittner C, Tauber M, Delsing J. Monitoring Industry 4.0 applications for security and safety standard compliance. In2018 IEEE Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) 2018 May 15 (pp. 749-754). IEEE.

[4] Maksuti, S., Bicaku, A., Tauber, M., Palkovits-Rauter, S., Haas, S. and Delsing, J., 2017, July. Towards flexible and secure end-to-end communication in industry 4.0. In Industrial Informatics (INDIN), 2017 IEEE 15th International Conference on (pp. 883-888). IEEE