Companies are nowadays struggling to intercept the new needs arising from the market through the proposal of new offerings to customers and consumers. Simultaneously, they are facing the complexity connected to the transition toward the provision of an offering composed by a mix of products and services, namely the Product-Service System (PSS). As a matter of fact, currently, there is a lack of methods and tools able to support the integration of products and services, which constitutes a pivotal aspect in the PSS design. In response to this, the DIVERSITY Project developed a methodology (the Product-Service System Lean Design Methodology - PSSLDM) and a platform (the DIVERSITY Platform) built upon the concept of integrated design. This paper describes the application of the DIVERSITY instruments in CAREL S.p.A., showing the benefits of the new integrated approach.

Companies are looking for new approaches and tools to help them meet their customer's demands, particularly the desire of customized products at lower costs. The paradigm of product-service systems brings companies the opportunity of enlarging their offer, looking at products and services in an integrated way. This paper presents the early prototype of a software platform that supports companies in designing PSSs using feedback information collected over the value chain. The prototype described has been tested in three industrial companies and is currently being further developed.

Modern companies face immense market pressure to meet customers’ demands while ensuring the sustainability of business. Consumers are now requesting highly customized products and services, i.e. demanding mass customization from manufacturing companies. The complete value chain needs to develop strategies enabling interaction with customers and consumers, supporting customization of features and services, and even co-design. This paper presents the DIVERSITY approach, which consists on a methodology and engineering environment supporting companies in using social media to realize a context sensitive lean design process of product service systems.

Sentiment analysis emerged as an important research topic for its potential in tapping into the large amount of opinions that became a central piece of social networks, providing companies who have any kind of public feedback with new insights on their products and services. Research in this field focuses mainly on the semantic aspects of sentiment recognition and, in more recent years, on the impact of influence in propagation of opinions. Here we present a model that aggregates both these aspects and focuses on providing a framework for calculating global sentiments. The model is based on current literature and provides information regarding not only polarity of opinions, but also on other aspects that affect their diffusion and prevalence, such as influence, reach, ambiguity and relevance. The global sentiment is the result of a weighted evaluation of these aspects and is used both for estimating current sentiment towards an object and for predicting future trends in sentiment.

The subject of this paper is developed in the scope of decision support to reduce energy consumption in industrial processes. It starts from the observation that context under production units are producing might have a strong influence on the specific energy consumption. In this line, this paper proposes an approach to model energy consumption taking the value of context variables in consideration. The approach is based on the estimation of multiple models, using RLS and valid in identified context regions, collecting the necessary knowledge to support future decision making processes. An example using experimental data from a cement factory is used to illustrate the proposed methodology.

This paper reports the work under development in the scope of LifeSaver project aiming at supporting manufacturing companies in optimising the energy performance of their operations. This support will be in the form of a set of ICT building blocks that combine context awareness, ambient intelligence monitoring and standard energy consumption data measurement. LifeSaver will provide: (i) information about the energy consumption to be processed in enterprise management systems, for the purpose of achieving significant energy savings; (ii) a decision support system for optimisation of energy performance of operations; and (iii) predicted cumulative data on the CO2 emissions, as input for the decision support services to enable emission trading across industries and among companies. Three demonstrators of the platform's application in real industrial environment, and their usage for new business models, will be provided.

Building owners, or investors, and facility managers, or building technical consultants, have the difficult task of maintaining an infrastructure by selecting the most adequate investments. Nowadays, this maintenance means in most countries to update a building to current regulations regarding energy efficiency. The decision to retrofit a building involves several actors and a diverse set of criteria, covering technical, economical, social and financial aspects. This paper presents a novel approach to support investors and technical consultants in selecting the most appropriate energy-efficient retrofit scenario for a building. The proposed approach uses the actual energy consumption of the building to predict energy profiles of introducing new control strategies to increase energy efficiency. Additionally, the approach uses the Analytic Hierarchy Process combined with benefits, opportunities, costs and risks and a sensitivity analysis to support actors in selecting the best scenario to invest.

The understanding and applying of knowledge can be difficult if it is isolated from the context under which the knowledge is generated and managed. Despite the importance of contextual information, there has been limited support for utilizing context in existing knowledge management solutions. This paper presents a set of integrated services for context aware enhancing of knowledge and knowledge management: monitoring services monitor human computer interaction to implicitly capture their interactions with the explicit or implicit data; context extraction services extract activity centric knowledge context from the monitoring data, as well as support users to manage their knowledge-based activities; knowledge enhancing services enhance knowledge and knowledge management by taking into consideration the context and topic of the knowledge-based activity. The services are provided in a loosely coupled service oriented framework which can be easily integrated with existing information and knowledge management systems to maximize its usability and extendibility.

In Spain, the use of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) has led to a decrease in the incidence of vaccine serotypes causing invasive and non-invasive disease in vaccinated and unvaccinated children and adults. Further, the coverage of most of the resistant serotypes by vaccines resulted in an overall decline in antibiotic resistance.As an undesirable effect, there was an increase in the non-vaccine serotypes causing infection, especially serotypes 1, 7F and 19A after PCV7 and serotype 8 after PCV13 approval, this making the beneficial effect of vaccination less apparent.The inclusion of PCVs in childhood vaccination schedules, its approval for use in healthy adults and the increasing number of serotypes covered by the vaccines in development are strong strategies in the fight against pneumococcal disease. Nonetheless, the epidemiology of Streptococcus pneumoniae infections must be still under surveillance to detect new changes, given the high capacity for recombination and adaptability of this always-surprising microorganism.En España, el uso de las vacunas conjugadas neumocócicas (VCN) ha significado una disminución en la incidencia de los serotipos vacunales causantes de enfermedades invasivas y no invasivas, tanto en niños vacunados como en no vacunados y en adultos. Además, al estar la mayoría de los serotipos con resistencia antibiótica cubiertos por las vacunas, su uso se ha visto acompañado de una disminución global de la resistencia.Como efecto no deseable se ha constatado un aumento de los serotipos no vacunales causantes de infección, especialmente de los serotipos 1, 7F y 19A después de la comercialización de la VCN7 y del serotipo 8 después de la autorización de VCN13, lo que ha hecho que el efecto beneficioso de la vacunación fuera menos aparente.La inclusión de las VCN en los programas de vacunación infantil, su autorización para su uso en adultos sanos y el creciente número de serotipos cubiertos por las vacunas en desarrollo son estrategias importantes en la lucha contra la enfermedad neumocócica. Sin embargo, aún se debe vigilar la epidemiología de las infecciones por Streptococcus pneumoniae para detectar nuevos cambios como consecuencia de la alta capacidad de recombinación y adaptabilidad de este siempre sorprendente microorganismo.

This paper proposes an approach based on a combination of case-based reasoning and the analytic hierarchy process to support innovation in industry. The combination of these two methods has the objective of overcoming some of their individual weaknesses. Case-based reasoning is a method used to compute similarity between a new situation and previous stored cases, which results in a list of similar situations. The Analytic Hierarchy Process is a method used to order a set of alternatives considered as options in a decision-making process. With the proposed combination, the case-based reasoning identifies the set of alternatives to be used and ordered by the analytic hierarchy process. The approach considers group decision-making, involving actors with complementary expertise engaged in innovation processes in companies, such as product design.

When intending to renovate an existing building, with energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions in mind, a building owner is always questioning himself if the available investment resources are being directed to an effective return and if there are ways to improve this return. In addition, it is quite difficult to identify all the criteria to be considered in such decision and how to structure it in a formal and systematic process that involves all necessary stakeholders. This paper presents an innovative approach to support decision-making when choosing energy-efficiency investments on building renovations. The proposed approach uses prediction based on model consumption to propose alternative energetic scenarios and the Analytic Hierarchy Process to select the best one.

We present a novel children’s educational game, which was created through a human-work interaction design – an emerging research field which advocates a better understanding of the relationship between work-domain based empirical studies and iterative design of prototypes and new technologies. We describe how “SimCompany”, a game for teaching children about business management concepts, was created. SimCompany proved effective as a teaching tool about business management concepts, and initial evaluation showed a positive increase in students’ rate of learning, compared to traditional teaching methods.

Due to global market and the emerging economies, industry is living its most difficult days ever. To survive in this new economic picture, they must find an organisational solution enabling them to cope with global business opportunities without suffering from limited resources or exposing themselves to the risk of direct investment. The inclusion of additional life-time services is, nowadays, one of the most important added-values from the consumer point of view. The ability resides in the appropriate and efficient use of the company's assets to make the best decision at several levels. These tasks can become highly critical due to the complexity in distributing, incorporating and using the knowledge. This paper proposes that an intelligent decision-support approach to the knowledge-based activities in industry is the basis to improve competitiveness of companies in a global market. Intelligent decision support tools can hugely facilitate the decision-making process, especially, if they are equipped with prediction and adaptation capabilities. The combination of these characteristics allows predicting the consequence of selecting an alternative based on the experience gained from past similar situations. The decision-making aspects being explored in the scope of three European projects are briefly discussed.

The Andean Information System for Disaster Prevention and Relief – SIAPAD (as it is called in Spanish) is an Andean Committee for Disaster Risk Prevention and Relief (CAPRADE ) initiative oriented to provide tools for data and information discovery, visualization and to facilitate access to the data available in the different technical organizations of Andean countries participating in the initiative (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru). SIAPAD includes a geoportal aiming at making available relevant information to support decision making during the different phases of the disaster risk management process (prevention, mitigation, preparation, relief). The architecture of SIAPAD promotes and takes advantage of the current initiatives oriented to develop a Spatial Data Infrastructure in the Andean Community. This paper describes the functions and architecture of SIAPAD.

Companies are turning to new forms of collaboration, at several levels, as a way to respond to the demanding market. Constantly changing requirements make collaboration among companies, having each company involved with several others, forming networked enterprises. The current paper presents an approach to efficiently support intra-enterprise collaboration in such networked enterprises. The approach presented explores the fundamental problem: how different services for management of social interactions and `smart' devices in a networked enterprise can be used to enhance knowledge and knowledge management services to support collaboration and interoperability within such an enterprise. The work presented includes an ontology, a set of services and a methodology to support companies, particularly small and medium sized enterprises, in achieving an adequate collaboration framework.

This paper presents an innovative approach to support collaboration in manufacturing industry, especially related to intelligent monitoring of complex assembly and manufacturing systems in global settings. The new collaborative platform built based on service-oriented architectures principles is proposed. The innovative collaborative services to be combined with the existing tools for monitoring of assembly and manufacturing systems and information obtained via ambient intelligence systems installed within assembly and manufacturing systems are described. The application of such services in real manufacturing environment is presented.

Innovation is a critical factor in the success of industrial companies. Therefore, there is an urgent need to effectively master innovation processes in an Extended Enterprise (EE) context. This will pay back higher market share and faster market penetration. The main objective of the AIM Toolkit© is to provide the means of stimulating the creation of innovative ideas specifically on potential product/process improvements and on problem solving. Ideas are collected from people involved with the products and processes throughout the 'Extended Enterprise' and will be further developed into innovations. The AIM system is based on the general TRIZ principles.