When research in the area of office automation began more than 25 years ago [4] the typical enterprise infrastructure consisted of heterogeneous computing platforms and operating systems, different networking standards, a variety of email products and limited user interface technologies. These technical inconsistencies and the lack of processorientation within enterprises led to a slower-than-e...

A workflow management system (WFMS) supports the design, execution and monitoring of in general long-lasting business processes that typically involve multiple activities and multiple collaborating persons. WFMSs originate from the office automation efforts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and from the imaging-based systems in the 1980s, both of which aimed at automating office paper processi...

The history of machine vision and its applications pioneered by the authors and their colleagues at Hitachi during the past three decades is reviewed. A variety of applications, especially in factory automation and office automation, were made possible by the evolution of real-time imageprocessing techniques. In recent years, social automation is becoming another application area of image proce...

Over past decades industrial IT evolved separately in the field automation and office automation domains. Nowadays increasing complexity of manufacturing requiresmore advanced control, which can be achieved only by integrating these, formerly separated, areas. This article focuses on two aspects of such integration: communication-related, interconnecting networks of different kinds, and functio...

A s we approach the 21st century and enter the Information Age, we see the uniquely qualified electronics industry playing a vital role in realizing the new era by providing state-of-the-art technology through microelectronics, telecommunications, computer networks, and software. The advent of 32-bit microprocessors that offer the processing power of minis at a fraction of the cost opens up new...

This ___-paper describes a component of an office automation system classifying office documents for later processing, filing and retrieval. This task is managed by a PROLOG knowledge-based system connected to a relational database managemerit system. The main goal of this work is to get practical experience with the integration of expert system features in an existing software system.

Cloud computing has rapidly emerged as an accepted computing paradigm in many areas such as office and enterprise systems worldwide. But still industrial automation domain has slow movement toward this technology due to the automation’s certain requirements which are differed in many aspects from common IT systems. Thus far, existing works related to cloud computing for automation frequently co...