Artificial intelligence-enabled enterprise information systems

Abstract

The fourth industrial revolution has marked the end of the industrial automation era of simple and repetitive human tasks. Then, it opened a new arena for the efforts of mimicking human intelligence with a clear objective. This arena facilitates i) machinedriven decision-making, ii) seamless machine-to-machine communication using the formalisms easily expressed and understood by humans, iii) solving problems driven by uncertain and unknown variables, and iv) other activities that require more complex considerations and actions, in which humans typically implement in the past. With Artificial Intelligence (AI), Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) are becoming increasingly capable of sensing and perceive (even reach beyond the human cognitive horizon), analyse, or understand and respond, based on the acquired understanding. This combination was made possible using big data, significantly improved algorithms and sufficient computational power to train and run those algorithms with vast amounts of data. In this Special Issue, the concept of AI EIS enablement (Zdravković, Panetto, and Weichhart 2021) is introduced to provide the umbrella for a new way of thinking, architecting, designing, developing and using the EIS. It is placed on the top of the widely discussed data-enablement, sometimes in the context of so-called sensing enterprise. This enterprise continuously listens to its internal and external environments using the technologies, such as sensors, embedded electronics and multi-agent systems. Although today’s hype on AI is driven by the performance of complex deep learning architectures and models, both symbolic and non-symbolic AI applications were considered to reflect the equal importance of challenges and opportunities for logic-based and data-based methods. The Special Issue was advertised on the website of the publisher and by email. Also, the authors of the selected papers from the special session with the title ‘(Industrial) Internetof-Things for Smart & Sensing Systems’, organised at the 8th International Conference for Information Society and Technology (ICIST 2018) were invited to submit the extended versions of those papers to the Special Issue. Twenty submissions have been received, and after several rounds of reviews and revisions, six manuscripts were accepted for publication. Those manuscripts are shortly presented in the following section.