From Energy Management Systems, we expect comprehensive information about energy streams that can be used to improve the energy efficiency. Due to their inherent demand for high energy, such systems are especially demanded by production companies. The companies also look for novel optimization approaches that based on comprehensive energy data lower their energy cost. The article describes a data model and a novel heuristic method for energy data enhanced shop floor scheduling. For the set of production orders that are augmented by individual priorities for cost, quality, and energy demand, a “best-fitting schedule” is generated. The optimization towards the priorities takes advantage out of the fact that for many products it is possible to define multiple alternative work plans. The proposed concepts are exemplified by a real world case study in the context of the Eco Factory that is currently being established at our university.

It is possible to streamline corporate Environment, Health, and Safety (EH&S) duties through the use of workflow management technology. This approach requires a specification of workflow models that among others are composed of activities. A domain-specific workflow meta data model is proposed. The model consists of modelling concepts for the detection of failures of EH&S activities that already occurred and also failures that are likely to occur. A system concept is described that extends the usual data log of Workflow Management Systems (WMS) by data items for the detection of activity failures. Failure monitoring data together with typical EH&S regulation management data is stored in a common database. Through specialized queries against this database activity failures are detected and reported. This can help to prevent and to mitigate critical situations such as safety enforcement measures that are behind their deadlines.

A novel database system service called a playout management service, which performs multimedia presentations was proposed by the authors recently [1st Int. Workshop on Multimedia Database Mgmt. Systems, pp. 38-47, 1995]. In distributed multimedia database systems without end-to-end guarantees, such a playout management service faces the potential problem that system performance can become insufficient when realizing a stored presentation. This problem can be overcome by making the playout management service reactive, such that it balances the amount of data to be fetched from a remote multimedia database with the system performance that is available. For the users, this means that a running presentation is adapted by the playout management service. In this paper, we propose the concept of a /spl delta/-set to adapt the execution of arbitrary multimedia presentations in an optimized way. We present a heuristic scheme to identify the most adequate /spl delta/-set with respect to (1) the actual system state, (2) the user preferences, and (3) the specific properties of multimedia presentations.