IMPROVING COLLABORATION IN MARITIME OPERATIONS USING BUSINESS PROCESS MODELING NOTATION

摘要

In one of the highly globalized fields such as Marine Industry, shipping operations are hugely dependent on the quick and readily accessible information about the people, machinery and services available both at port and terminal levels. The e-collaboration tools often result in improving the potential to take advantage of the information across various dimensions such as nations, organizations and professions. In the maritime transportation sector, collaboration is very much evident as intersection between various elements associated with it such as business processes (or service management), software tools (or technologies) and users. As a result, collaboration is crucial either to make good plans that are aligned with the different stakeholders or can be used as a tool for deviation management if such a thing occurs. Usually, the maritime shipping operations are carried out both on ship and also by various bodies affiliated with port and terminal services. However, establishing collaboration between operations and tools is often challenging as they are two very different disciplines. Therefore, the knowledge gathered via intersection of software engineering and processes involved holds the means for establishing the collaboration between the service providers and potential users. Normally the information is coming from sensors as well as traditional message based sources. These information sources can be used for identifying and capturing business processes which are part of maritime enterprise to achieve collaboration among various involved parties. In this thesis, a method is proposed to overcome the problem of process management by establishing a collaboration medium between the service providers and participants in a maritime enterprise. This work is based on literature study, industry test cases and validation of test case models using process centric approach. The process centric approach, which regards notion of developing enterprise based on process models and facilitating collaboration among participants of business process models, is the main result this work. The steps are to define goals, identify business processes and define collaboration in these. To support this we need the other contributions of the thesis; i.e. uncovering the collaboration space through intersection of entities, collaboration platform, collaboration-oriented architecture and collaboration matrix generation. BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) provided a means to model the industrial test case using the process-centric approach and study collaboration among tasks in business process. The analysis of test case BPMN model validates concepts of Marine Information Center (MIS) project at SINTEF and provides set of requirements for improving collaboration further