On the strategies and challenges of human-centered collaborative enterprises

The design of human-centric collaborative systems requires an optimal integration of human aspects, collaboration, knowledge management and web-based technologies, such as e-commerce. Such a system provides collaborative interactions and enables organizations and individuals to work simultaneously and cooperatively, as well as independently. This dissertation focuses on the design of an architectural framework and implementation of a Human-centered Collaborative Enterprise (HuCE) to help individuals and organizations collaborate through a web-based system while maintaining some human aspects. Developing an architecture for a human-centered collaborative enterprise is not an easy task since it must incorporate many factors. Many researchers have been developing different architectures based on their interests; however, these attempts have fallen short of discussing geographically dispersed collaboration among sub-organizations and humans, considering human issues in the systems, and representing detailed system architecture. The main research objective of this dissertation is to develop an architectural framework to enable effective collaboration between users and machines by integrating a variety of external and internal components. In order to accomplish this goal, this work (1) presents the formal definitions and a comprehensive study of e-commerce, knowledge management, collaboration and human centeredness towards building human-centered collaborative systems (HCCS) as well as developing a sophisticated taxonomy of HCCS, (2) proposes an architectural framework and a novel six-layered architecture of the HuCE, and case studies of the aforementioned components, (3) develops a suitable scenario to demonstrate the proposed architecture, (4) models the scenario using developed symbolized workflow nets (SWF-nets) which is basically Petri net based workflow modeling, and (5) simulates the scenario using a selected Petri net simulation tool to show the interaction and collaboration between actors. Modeling the architecture using SWF-nets indicates that the complicated processes can be presented in a much simpler graphical as well as formulized form. Simulations of different case study scenarios demonstrate the validity of Petri net's behavioral properties—reachability, boundedness, and liveness.