Collaborative smart process monitoring within virtual factory environment: an implementation issue

The focus of this paper is to elaborate collaborative business process monitoring within virtual factory (VF) environment in a smarter way. This process monitoring is tracked through visualisation over a user interface such as ‘dashboard’. This research briefly provides all aspects of implementing process monitoring through the dashboard user interface and explains technical aspects of monitoring. The dashboard features state-of-the art business intelligence and provides data visualisation, user interfaces and means to support VF partners to execute collaborative processes. With advanced visualisations that produce quality graphics it offers a variety of information visualisations that brings the process data to life with clarity. This data visualisation provides critical operational matrices (e.g. KPIs) required to manage virtual factories. Key reporting outputs such as KPIs and day-to-day operational data can be used to monitor and empower partners’ processes that help to drive collaborative decisions e VF broker or partners’ also retain full flexibility to create, deploy and maintain their own dashboards using an easy to understand wizard-driven widget and an extensive array of data visualisation components such as gauges, charts, maps, etc. Various technical aspects of this dashboard user interface portal are elaborated within the scope of this research such as installation instructions, technical requirements for the users and developers, execution and usage aspects, limitations and future works. In addition to the dashboard user interface portal this research also investigates the VF life cycle and provides architectural framework for VF. The research work highlighted in this paper is conceptualised, developed, and validated within the scope of the European Commission NMP priority of the Seventh RTD Framework Programme for the ADVENTURE (ADaptive Virtual ENterprise ManufacTURing Environment) project.