Applications of computers in industrial environments

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The objectives of the proposed research are to investigate selected theoretical and experimental topics related to the application of computers in an industrial milieu as a continuation and a development on a new level of the applicant's on-going research works. The research area related to applications of computers in industrial environment witnessed dramatic changes and evolutions in the last few years on both the hardware and software sides. Complex applications for the enterprise supervision and control, such as CRM, ERP, BI, etc pushed and push the computer technologies towards new boundaries. Recent evolutions in the distributed computing paradigm fundamentally changed the way that enterprise supervision and control architectures were designed. Growing adoption of cloud based services by government departments and enterprises requires new architectural models, while new dimensions such as user mobility and collaboration have stretched the research in this field at its extremes. Industry analysts (Gartner Quadrants) report that there is a strong need for converged, collaborative, unified and self-managed products or platforms capable to seamlessly unify the computer supervision and control applications across the enterprise. Consequently, for the present phase of our research, we propose to investigate new distributed computing models, which fundamentally disrupt the traditional way of offering services and applications at the enterprise level. The usage of mixed mobile and fixed computing devices in enterprise operations and management processes requires new communications and distributed computing principles, algorithms, and protocols. We are aiming therefore, at investigating fundamental and experimental aspects of new models for autonomic computing, peer-to-peer, web-services and cloud computing technologies in the design of enterprise supervision and control architectures. We will also investigate the design of generic converged, unified, and collaborative environments for the above. A part of our research efforts will also be dedicated to the investigation of reconfigurable architectures as applied to the supervision and control of enterprises as a continuation of present research efforts.