< Project Sponsors Participate in the Second ADiWa Consortia Meeting in Kaiserslautern

Third Consortia Meeting with Focus on Demos

On February 8th and 9th, the third consortia meeting of the project ADiWa took place in Saarbruecken.

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On February 8^th and 9^th, the third consortia meeting of the project ADiWa (Alliance Digital Product Flow) took place in Saarbruecken. Main focus was the overview of the several demos and scenarios within the project and the next steps regarding the integration of the components towards an integrated demonstrator.

The research project ADiWa, publicly funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, is in the third and last year (project duration: January 2009 – December 2011). The goal of ADiWa is to model, optimize and control dynamic business processes with direct information of the physical world,  supported by ‘Real-World Awareness‘ technologies and ‘Digital Product Memory‘. This is a major building block for the ‘Digital Enterprise‘. ADiWa is one of three projects of the Digital Product Memory innovation alliance that also consists of the projects Aletheia and SemProM. SemProM finished at the end of January 2011 and provides research results, e.g. the definition of semantic data format.

In the welcome speech, Mr. Feld, Software AG, as host of the consortia meeting in Saarbruecken strengthened that ADiWa’s research topic about the vertical link of business processes with the Internet of Things is very interesting.

As host, Dr. Jost, CTO of Software AG, gave a presentation about “Business Excellence: Changing the World – One Process at a Time”. Based on the three dimensions of the success for global enterprises – agility and flexibility through process excellence, growth and expansion through globalization and value creation through innovation – he pointed out the importance of process excellence for bridging the gap between business and IT. In an outlook regarding Cloud he mentioned the following use cases: Process modeling and dash boarding as a service, Integration and SOA as a service, process development and execution as a service. Extreme collaboration of business experts, data architects, developers, business analysts, IT-architects as well as customers, suppliers and partners will be needed to bring together technical and functional innovation together. The cloud will create new organizational models of enterprises.

Regarding the general project status, Christian Kuhn, SAP, as project lead pointed out, that at milestone 24 at the end of January 26 Deliverables are finished on time and the main next steps are the integration of the components on one platform, the development and testing of prototypes with the goal to present an integrated demo at CeBIT 2012. The project partners INIGraphics officially left the project related to its insolvency, the partner TU-Darmstadt took over the tasks. Further the project partner Sopera was taken over by Talend and IDS-Scheer merged with Software AG.

On the thirst day of the consortia meeting, the focus was on the demos of the technology work packages like:

• General system architecture, integration of components and quality management
• Event processing components (CEP engine, Event bus)
• Event modelling
• Security management of dynamic processes
• Collaborative task management

And on the second day, main focus was on the scenarios of the application work packages like:

• Use Case A1 “Logistic”: A truck with RFID sensors sends information regarding temperature, traffic jams etc. to the organizer, who can influence proactive the delivery with the help of an assistant tool e.g. changing the route, set-up a new express delivery etc.
• Use Case A2 “Dynamic Generated Service Products”: In case of maintenance of machines on board of ships, the service receives in a planning tool actual information of the sensors on board, historic information and best practices from the data base to prepare and suggest the right service need.
• Use Case A3 “Dynamic Adjustment of Business Processes in Retail”: The handling of special offers and remnants including the import tracking and an electronic shopping list for assisted shopping are the two scenarios related to retail.
• Use Case A4 “IT for Lean and Green Production and Logistic”: In the scenario about demand-side energy management, the energy offer controls the process execution.

The main next step is the development and testing of prototypes with the goal to present an integrated demo at CeBIT 2012. This year at CeBIT 2011, there are shown two ADiWa related demos – one at the SAP Research booth and another at the DFKI booth.

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