This book is a groundbreaking exploration of the historical and contemporary challenges in systems collaboration and integration. This exceptional book delves into engineering design, planning, control, and management, offering invaluable insights into the evolving nature of systems and networks. In an era defined by the ongoing cyber and digital transformation, coupled with artificial intelligence and machine learning, this book offers insights into the future of systems collaboration and integration. Over the past three decades, the PRISM Center and its affiliated PRISM Global Research Network (PGRN) have spearheaded pioneering theories, technologies, and applications in the realm of systems collaboration and integration. Their research, driven by the motto “Knowledge through information; Wisdom through collaboration,” has yielded remarkable advancements. Those achievements and papers presented and updated by the PGRN scholars in the 26th ICPR are included in this book.

This book gathers papers presented at the 11th International Conference on Construction in the 21st Century, held in London in 2019. Bringing together a diverse group of government agencies, academics, professionals, and students, the book addresses issues related to construction safety, innovative technologies, lean and sustainable construction, international construction, improving quality and productivity, and innovative materials in the construction industry. In addition, it highlights international collaborations between various disciplines in the areas of construction, engineering, management, and technology. The book demonstrates that, as the industry moves forward in an ever-complex global economy, multi-national collaboration is crucial, and its future growth will undoubtedly depend on international teamwork and alliances.

To survive and thrive in the competition, firms have strived to achieve greater supply chain collaboration to leverage the resources and knowledge of suppliers and customers. Internet based technologies, particularly interorganizational systems, further extend the firms’ opportunities to strengthen their supply chain partnerships and share real-time information to optimize their operations. Supply Chain Collaboration: Roles of Interorganizational Systems, Trust, and Collaborative Culture explores the nature and characteristics, antecedents, and consequences of supply chain collaboration from multiple theoretical perspectives. Supply Chain Collaboration: Roles of Interorganizational Systems, Trust, and Collaborative Culture conceptualizes supply chain collaboration as seven interconnecting elements including information sharing, incentive alignment, goal congruence, decision synchronization, resource sharing, as well as communication and joint knowledge creation. These seven components define the occurrence of collaborative efforts and allow us to explain supply chain collaboration more precisely. Collaborative advantages are also divided into five components to capture the joint competitive advantages and benefits among supply chain partners. The definitions and measures developed here examine some central issue surrounding supply chain development but this is also followed up with real-life managerial practicalities. This balance of theory and practical application makes Supply Chain Collaboration: Roles of Interorganizational Systems, Trust, and Collaborative Culture a strong resource for industry practitioners and researchers alike.

Data mining deals with finding patterns in data that are by user-definition, interesting and valid. It is an interdisciplinary area involving databases, machine learning, pattern recognition, statistics, visualization and others. Decision support focuses on developing systems to help decision-makers solve problems. Decision support provides a selection of data analysis, simulation, visualization and modeling techniques, and software tools such as decision support systems, group decision support and mediation systems, expert systems, databases and data warehouses. Independently, data mining and decision support are well-developed research areas, but until now there has been no systematic attempt to integrate them. Data Mining and Decision Support: Integration and Collaboration, written by leading researchers in the field, presents a conceptual framework, plus the methods and tools for integrating the two disciplines and for applying this technology to business problems in a collaborative setting.

A System of Systems (SoS), as distinct from a system of parts, is a system comprised of pre-existing autonomous and interdependent systems. This book provides two unique contributions to the body of knowledge of System of Systems (SoS) theory, management, and engineering. Firstly, it assesses the dynamics of a SoS through the use of five core characteristics, namely autonomy, belonging, connectivity, diversity and emergence. Secondly, it describes a mechanism of collaboration whereby the characteristics of autonomy and belonging are satisficing for the SoS constituents and the resultant emergent behavior provides value for the observer.

With the rapid advances in computing and Internet technologies, an integrated and collaborative environment, which is based on the complementary functions of concurrent engineering and Internet-based collaborative engineering, is imperative for companies to facilitate and expedite the product realization processes. Topics such as concurrent and collaborative engineering, feature-based design and manufacturing, evolutionary computational techniques such as Tabu Search, Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithms features, intelligent and computer-aided process planning are important strategies and enabling technologies for developing an integrative environment, facilitating modern product design and development. This book covers the state-of-the-art research and development status of these strategies and technologies. Implementation strategies and case studies are provided with an emphasis on technical details to help readers understand the underlying algorithms and infrastructures.

Solve business problems, uncover new opportunities, and ignite innovation using the newest collaborative technologies The Collaborative Organization gives you a strategic approach to building, implementing, and using social and collaborative technologies—such as those created by Jive and Yammer—to create innovative products, solve business problems, and create new processes that will foster lasting success and growth. Jacob Morgan is the principal and cofounder of Chess Media Group, which helps organizations understand how to use social and collaborative tools to solve business problems.