Enterprise Engineering and Integration

The basic elements of the European strategy on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) standardization are described in the Commission’s Communication “Standardization and the Global Information Society: the European approach” [1]. As a general principle, it is recognised that ICT standardization should be market driven in order to reflect the dynamics of the market. This is due to the rapidity of technological advance which favours market led technical specifications from dominant suppliers and open industry fora. This is undoubtedly limiting the scope of formal standardization.

This paper describes the efforts by U.S. industry to develop the technology and standards needed to support the concept of Enterprise Integration. Several specific industry programs are described. Also included is a description of how the various U.S. Government agencies are working together through the Next Generation Manufacturing Initiative to address issues such as Enterprise Integration. The specific efforts by the National Institute of Standards and Technology are described, in terms of two programs, the National Advanced Manufacturing Testbed and the Systems Integration for Manufacturing Applications.

The paper addresses several unresolved classical questions about enterprise reference architectures. These questions are discussed in light of current developments in ITC, such as interoperability, component-based software, and configurable software.The discussion leads to four new areas of research, viz.: 1) how can external services be modelled? 2) how can man-machine systems be modelled? 3) what is the appropriate level of being generic? and 4) how can distribution of data applications and hardware be modelled?

The increasing pace of business change is emphasising the need to reconfigure business products, services, organisational structures, processes and even whole industries, where products can be created, delivered and abandoned in a fraction of the current time frame. The convergence of computers and communications technologies has provided the enterprise with new opportunities to redefine value chains, human roles, organisations and business processes. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will be a critical enabler for the future enterprise and will be strongly needed to meet the resulting reconfiguration requirements in a much shorter time.The future enterprise will focus on less core competencies, but will concentrate on forming and dissolving value added partnerships in order to assure high flexibility enabling response to business opportunities. The future enterprise will be distributed, collaborative, virtual, networked, agile and capable of adapting to changes in the environmental. Changes which may be introduced by markets, technologies, capital or even society.The paper will discuss the future enterprise and identify the technology gap existing between user needs and technological capabilities. Reference to AIT projects identifies current trends in technology development.

A new concept in manufacturing management information systems lets you create links between your relational database management system and your process control system. This basic transactional architecture provides a means to develop sophisticated systems where a Control System interacts directly with the Enterprise level databases. A Transaction Processor connects the Control System to the Enterprise Data System, which is generally one or more; multi-user databases, with associated Data Models designed to store the information required to operate an enterprise.The Transaction Processor manages the movement and/or modification of critical data from one system to another and guarantees the reliability of the data while enroute. With that capability, a PLC could query a database and directly download a set of operational parameters. A transaction is made up of three key components: a trigger, a data set and a set of actions. The trigger is the event that causes the transaction to execute. When the transaction executes, it runs the set of actions against the data set. A simple action would be to move information from one database to another. The real key to a successful transaction is that a Transaction Processor guarantees that all of the actions that are part of the transaction are executed as a group. The application of this scheme to meet the user requirements defined in the ISA SP95 standardization efforts will be addressed.

The paper is concerned with enterprise integration focussing on user support in operational system configuration and optimization. Starting from the R/3 support environment, the requirements for a configuration tool are defined, which take into account both business process modeling and process configuration needs. Following the description of business modeling and its elements the concept of integrating modeling and customizing is presented.

This paper presents an analysis of what it means for an enterprise to be integrated, what enterprises are really trying to achieve by integrating their processes, what is really going on among their processes, and how integration may, or may not, change that. Some approaches to analyzing enterprise operation are discussed.With an idea about how an enterprise really operates, the paper proposes a standards-making philosophy that will improve enterprise operations. The purpose is to create a standardization strategy for integration that matches the operating enterprise. If that is not done, the effort to produce the standards largely will be wasted. This is because an ill-conceived standards strategy will not alter the way enterprises actually operate at the activity level. Finally, there is a suggestion that, perhaps, enterprise-integration-related standards are in a category different from the usual standards for hardware, software, and protocols. Because these standards affect the entire enterprise, and even interacting enterprises, they are more in the category of horizontal standards such as quality and environmental standards.

The fragmentation of current research activities in enterprise integration leads to multiple sub-solutions with many overlaps and even contradictions. This prevents potential users from employing the research results on a sufficient scale in their day-to-day operation and in turn reduces the interest of ICT1 vendors to invest in the necessary support technology for enterprise integration.Starting from the needs for enterprise integration and discussion of the state of the art the paper tries to define a base for building consensus on the EI issues. The GERAM framework (IFAC/IFIP task force) is proposed for identifying the position and the relations of the different ongoing research activities in the area of enterprise engineering and integration (EEI). Discussions on tools and infrastructures complement this part allowing identification of the ICT requirements.Last but not least the user community needs to become aware and accept enterprise integration. Only with a user community convinced of the benefits of enterprise integration will the ICT vendors invest in such a market and will all the many research and development efforts bear fruit.The vision: Enterprise engineering and integration to support the enterprise operation in ist day-to-day decision making across the entire operation from customer order acceptance and asset management to customer support. EEI tools will link decision makers on all organisational levels to relevant and real time information across organisational boundaries. Such tools will enable new cooperation paradigms like extended and virtual enterprises to become reality on a broad scale and in the long run will support operation control and monitoring.

This paper reports on the discussions and findings of the breakout session entitled, “Human-Machine Interaction” as part of the Workshop on Enterprise Organization and Human Modeling.

This is the report of Workgroup 2 which addressed Human Factors. The group had wide-ranging discussion which it was felt could be best organized by beginning at the beginning, with a definition of the problems of human centric enterprise integration. The original charter was human factors, but the group extended the scope to a larger range of soft factors.

The paper presents the conclusion of Working Group 3 of ICEIMT’97 Workshop I dealing with investigating the management of change in the context of Enterprise Integration taking into consideration human factors. The paper is concluded by a proposal for a research project on the impact of organisation structures on process structures and vice-versa for developing flexible, responsive organisational structures.

This paper considers Enterprise Integration (EI) as a further tool in developing business strategy and presents a methodology for its employment, including: (a) a profiling process, embracing benefits and capability, through which the EI status and potential of a business can be assessed, and (b) the em­ployment of models and standards in establishing appropriate action..The paper concludes by describing specific RTD actions to further develop and pilot the approach.

The subject of migration and subsequent integration of existing (heritage) applications has been overlooked by the enterprise integration community. The working group calls for the definition of an Application Integration Architecture, in the sense of a semantically uniform platform encompassing: models of services, migration constructs such as interfaces or wrappers, schema sharing (by services or by users) and model mapping facilities. Besides the basic features of this architecture, aspects of a stepwise method guiding its deployment are also considered.

This is a report of breakout sessions from Workshop 3, Workgroup 2 and Workgroup 3. The two groups combined on the second day. Recommendations which emerged were sufficiently strong that the group decided to present them in the form of a skeletal description of a project to address the nature of standards for enterprise integration that better address the virtual enterprise case of distributed control.

This paper describes the results of an international workshop on Enterprise Integration (EI) principles and fundamentals as part of the ICEIMT ‘97 initiative, and specifically reports on the activities of Working group 1, Workshop 4 (WG1WS4). The focus of the work was on the user oriented semantic issues. The outcome of the work was the extension to the ENV 12 204 standard, which describes enterprise modelling constructs and their inter-relationships, and included the identification of modelling constructs to address human communication. Specifically the extension to the existing standard involved the identification of two additional constructs — human role and business goals and objectives. To further progress knowledge within the domain of Enterprise Integration and Modelling a set of project proposals have resulted from the workshop.

The paper provides a summary of the discussions held in a working group during ICEIMT Workshop 4 (Enterprise Integration Principles and Fundamentals). The topic of the working group was “Formal Semantics of Enterprise Models”. In the paper, we suggest that enterprise integration is currently hindered by shortcomings of enterprise modelling languages (section 1), that a better language should be defined and that its semantics should be defined in terms of a formal theory (section 2). The paper concludes with two proposals for research and standardisation projects (section 3).

The development of a theory of design for virtual organisations or enterprises has been identified and presented in form of a potential research programme. The required results include a theory that explains the dynamic interactions among partners that create the virtual enterprise and a proposal for the representation of the result. Ensuing would be a methodology specialised to the case of the dynamic creation of enterprises using design transactions, typical models for the enterprise engineering process, typical models for virtual enterprises (to be reused in this process), and the potential extension of the enabling enterprise modelling languages and tools.

The paper presents the results of Working Group 1 of ICEIMT’97 Workshop 5 dealing with benefits of enterprise integration with focus on human teaming in process chains which extend over organisation boundaries. The paper is concluded by a proposal for a research project on improved enterprise cohesion through teaming.

This paper reports on the discussions and findings of the breakout session “Services for Integration” as part of the Workshop on Vendor Support for Users of Enterprise Integration.

The history of ICEIMT is briefly reviewed and some issues from both ICEIMT92 and ICEIMT’97 are highlighted. Selected outcomes from the recent workshops are discussed. The purpose is not to repeat the excellent reports of the workgroups, but to identify some issues from the workshops in a context that spans them all. Also to includes the larger context of both workshops and the problem of industry needs. In some cases, we’ll focus on an incidental finding of a workshop or cast the results in a different light. Thus, we’ll complement the workgroup reports.

An overview of the structure of the generalised enterprise reference architecture and methodology (GERAM) is given together with the discussion of its role to systematise the activities of the disciplines that contribute to enterprise integration, and its use as a shopping list of capabilities, or components that individual enterprises need for small and large scale programmes of change.

An Enterprise Model is a computational representation of the structure, activities, processes, information, resources, people, behaviour, goals and constraints of a business, government, or other enterprise. It can be both descriptive and definitional spanning what is and what should be. The role of an enterprise model is to achieve model-driven enterprise design, analysis and operation.

The engineering science of enterprise integration holds great promise for the enhancement of the capabilities of all kinds of enterprises, regardless of their individual missions or the environment in which they operate. However, the implementation of a full-scale enterprise integration project as currently known is always a monumental task because of the multifaceted activities in which most enterprises engage and the extremely high number of variables to be taken into account. At the same time, many partial solutions such as CIM, business process reengineering, etc., have proven disappointing because of their incomplete treatment of the needs of the enterprise which they represent.Thus engineering methodologies which can realistically treat the whole problem of enterprise integration are vitally needed. The work of the IFAC/IFIP Task Force on Architectures for Enterprise Integration and of many other similar organizations around the world have recently focused their work on this problem in hopes of achieving the generic solution needed.This paper will present an overview of the present capabilities in this important field to accomplish the work which needs to be done to achieve widespread application of enterprise integration technologies and projects.

Enterprise modelling is the process of building models of whole or part of an enterprise (e.g. process models, data models, resource models, new ontologies, etc.) from knowledge about the enterprise, previous models and/or reference models as well as domain ontologies using model representation languages. This paper reviews commonly used languages for enterprise modelling (CIMOSA language, ARIS ToolSet language, ER models / EXPRESS, GRAI nets, IDEF suite of models, IEM, OOA / OMT, Petri nets, SA/RT, logic-based languages) and compares them on the basis of a list of essential requirements for enterprise modelling.

This paper stresses the importance of quick reaction to process changes, high interactivity and flexibility, and high capability of human cooperation in a complex environment. People at decisional and operational level, involved in production and business processes, face more and more the demand for. fast decision making. The recognition of the human role in enterprise integration will result in improved quality of the process, the overall organisation performance and the social aspects of working life. The proposed means to achieve these objectives are twofold:Firstly, it is proposed to design and test new application of GroupWare and workflow management systems, in order to fundamentally improve business processes in their relations to the existing production systems in manufacturing. The technology-to-be-designed is a cooperative IT system, based on a workflow management platform and on GroupWare applications to support production planning and control, with particular emphasis on the handling of exceptions in manufacturing control.Secondly, it is proposed to define a framework for change management as a strategic tool for re-design of networked industrial organisations. The proposed concepts include re-engineering of business processes and cooperative structures, and continuous improvement through employee involvement. Furthermore, it comprises of a framework for the change process which takes into account the socio-technical dimensions of today’s manufacturing environment. It addresses in particular the issues of learning, coping with change and chaos, and the quality of working life.This combination of both, software tools supporting people and management strategies recognising the importance of people in enterprise integration, fully corresponds to the demands of markets today.

Business drivers for manufacturing industry are generating new demands for flexible, extended, inter-operating information processes, and in turn for Information and Communication Technology to support them. Explicit modelling and other techniques may provide a solution, but themselves place requirements on the infrastructure that is needed to integrate model components.Some progress has been made in the development of European and international standards, but a review of the present situation shows much remains to be done, both for the resolution of practical industrial concerns in developing and applying enterprise models and for creating specific technical standards, in particular for the Enterprise Model Execution and Integration Services (EMEIS) that are required to provide this integrating infrastructure.Building on an evaluation of various approaches, European work has identified both general and manufacturing-specific requirements and proposals are made for an approach to meeting these requirements in the development of a European pre-standard for EMEIS.

Globalisation of markets, enhancements in information and communication technology (ICT) and world-wide competition of companies have led to significant changes in the requirements of organisations for ICT-support. The need to enhance effectiveness and efficiency in enterprises and the need to be closer to the customers reanimates the topic of CIM in a broader sense. Companies are urged now to implement integrated but open solutions together with workflow support. This has to be closely coupled to what is called warehouse technology — the transparent access to distributed information. The resulting requirement is an integrated information and process support, based on heterogeneous distributed ICT-components. In this area a lot of effort has been made in the last decade on enterprise modelling and integration as a supporting technology for enterprise engineering. In this paper we try to give an overview about the status of ICT-support for enterprise integration (EI) with special focus on integrating architectures. Integrating architectures (or frameworks) describe software technologies to implement a development and execution platform for client/server applications, data and processes in distributed heterogeneous environments. Some thoughts about future research directions and exploitation actions will be presented as well.

AIT is a user led initiative on a European scale where user companies (Automotive, Aerospace and their suppliers), research organisations and IT Vendors work together as a partnership in order to become and remain a unique, cross-sectorial, widely recognised initiative to promote advanced IT solutions for the product life-cycle in manufacturing industry.

PRIMA is an Europe-wide initiative of process industries companies to establish medium and long term requirements for IT (including standards). The project initiates- through a dialogue between the different sectors of the process industries and the IT vendors — joined projects aimed at satisfying the user requirements. The paper describes the PRIMA project and its basic framework for guiding enterprise evolution in the process industries.

CAM-I is an international not-for-profit, co-operative membership consortium, established in 1972 to support research and development in areas of strategic importance to manufacturing industries. It is an industry-based, industry-driven consortium that is owned, governed and directed by its members.

This paper surveys the activities and results of the IMS test case entitled: ‘Holonic Manufacturing Systems: System Components of Autonomous Modules and their Distributed Control.’ This one-year project (1993) covers a wide range of manufacturing systems, encompassing discrete, continuous and/or batch processing. It puts forward a new paradigm for manufacturing: the holonic manufacturing system.Currently, a European follow-up project is expected to start by the end of this year. Up-to-date information concerning the IMS/HMS project can be down-loaded from internet [1].

Manufacturing plays a central role in successfully competing in international markets. Improving a company’s manufacturing capability and, consequently its posture in global markets, requires that the company respond more rapidly to market opportunities. The rate at which new product ideas mature to commodity status is increasing, resulting in a growing emphasis on time-to-market as a key competitive differentiator. Realizing these new efficiencies in product development requires that organizations interconnect, software systems interoperate, and individuals interact. These challenges are being addressed by the National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocols (NIIIP) Consortium in its work to define and develop virtual enterprise technology. This paper will present an overview of NIIIP technology and discuss in more detail a program deploying NIIIP technology to establish new standards for integrating manufacturing applications, focusing on manufacturing execution systems.

The Next-Generation Manufacturing Project was initiated in 1995 to develop a framework for action that U.S. manufacturers, individually and collectively, can use as a guide to chart a course for success in an increasingly complex and competitive global business environment. Individuals from more than 100 companies, industry associations, government agencies, and academic institutions have worked together to develop a broadly accepted framework for next-generation manufacturing enterprises. They identified key competitive drivers of the next-generation environment; defined attributes and imperatives required to respond to these drivers; and developed recommendations for actions that industry, government, and academia can take to help American manufacturers thrive in the intensely competitive and dynamic global markets of the 21st Century.

The Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing — International (CAM-I) is an industry based, industry-driven organization, that is owned, governed and directed by its members. Its sole purpose is to support member companies in its quest for excellence in today’s highly competitive global marketplace.

Many enterprises are passing through a costly learning curve at the design and construction of operational solutions, which in the past have been mostly isolated ones. These have been the result of short-term solution-oriented problem solving instead of an integrated enterprise wide system approach. The purpose of Enterprise Integration (EI) is to ensure a healthy competitive industrial base. A new approach, based on three different orders of business systems is introduced.To reach the target of profitable enterprise integration not only further research is necessary, but also achievements regarding industry awareness, acceptance and commitment are needed. Therefore a roadmap to profitable EI is proposed.

Enterprise integration today is a tool to optimize the division of labor and to co-ordinate the resulting inter-dependent tasks. In the paper, enterprise integration is revisited from the point of view of dynamic competition. In dynamic competition constantly new business objectives emerge, and constantly new enterprises are needed to achieve them. Thus it is argued, that enterprise integration starts from identifying the new business objectives. Then, partner and resources need to be integrated into a co-operation to achieve the business objectives. From this point of view, the new human role is to set the new business objectives and to design the new enterprise, as the business architect.

Integration in Manufacturing which allows to make more efficient the plant operation through a rationalised automation involving not only the control but also the maintenance and the technical management islands, is not yet the reality despite the increasing of Information Technology capabilities. Indeed the industrial ways of thinking are changing slowly because they require standardised solutions and rationalised engineering process to move from automation hierarchical architectures to automation distributed ones.

To achieve competitive performance contemporary enterprise systems need to be aligned closely to changing business needs. This paper explains how consultancy methods and enterprise modelling can help to conceptualise business requirements in a holistic way. It also explains how component and infrastructure technology can be expected to facilitate the rapid design, construction and change of future manufacturing systems.

An operational semantics is defined for enterprise formulae (EF) -a language for specifying enterprise models- and artefact possible lives models (APLM) -a language for specifying product (life cycle) models-. The semantics is explained by means of the MiViPoRo framework. The conceptual background for the paper is drawn from early definitions of syntax and semantics, and from work on the operational semantics of programming languages. The operational semantics of EF and APLM involves the possible flows of proxies in a network of cells.

An IT based enterprise model is a computational representation of the structure, activities, processes, information, people, machines, behaviour, goals and constraints of a business, government or other enterprise. It can be both descriptive and definitional — spanning what is and what should be. The role of an enterprise model is to achieve model-driven enterprise design, analysis, and evaluation.

We propose a framework combining several formalisms for the Requirements Engineering (RE) of discrete manufacturing systems. Each formalism relies upon a set of concepts that together form an ontology.

The context of our research is the distribution of manufacturing systems associated with the emergence of new types of organization (Virtual or Extended Enterprise, Holonic Manufacturing Systems, D-CIM…) which tend to distribute activities, competence, responsibilities and decision making capacities of the enterprise on units having a high level of autonomy. The study of these types of organization lead us to propose and define the DME (Distributed Manufacturing Enterprise), a conceptual framework for a knowledge based modeling of distributed manufacturing systems. Then, we present the principal behavioral and descriptive knowledge reference sets which participate to an ontological definition of the DME. Finally, we conclude on perspectives concerning the elaboration of a formal modeling framework of the distributed manufacturing systems.

The Business Process Modeling is nowadays core activity within many business concepts and applications. Its use has achieved importance within the Computer Integrated Manufacturing Concept, because of the development of CIM Components as well as a method to provide the integration on a logical level. With the concept of Business Process Reengineering, the modeling has got its broad dissemination and mature. Nowadays, other concepts use the modeling of business processes as starting point, as for instance quality certification programs, activity based cost and management, continuous improvement and so on. A Methodology for Enterprise Integration has been proposed and validated by different industrial applications using the Business Process Modeling as a core activity. The current paper describes this methodology and the recent and integrated use of modeling with simulation and workflow management. Specifically, this paper describes aspects that need to be.considered if an existing integration methodology exists and what happens if the business process model is used for simulation and workflow management. This description is based on a practical experience within a research project with a manufacturing enterprise.

The complexity of modern enterprises makes enterprise modeling a major issue. The need for integrating several different features requires a powerful modeling technique, such as CIMOSA, able to represent functional, control, informational and organizational aspects. However, the study of a system yields limited results as long as it only consists of inspecting a static model. More effective results can be achieved if an operational (i.e. executable) model is available. This paper presents an approach to enterprise integration and a technique for building operational enterprise models based on the modeling language Opj. An interesting feature of Opj is the possibility of deriving a workflow prototype from an enterprise model.

Agility is the ability of a manufacturing system to produce a variety of products of high quality at low cost. This paper presents some insights into the benefits of concurrent design of products and assembly systems and offers a methodology for design for an agile assembly environment. Several rules for design for agile assembly are proposed and illustrated with examples.

An assessment study to analyse the level of integration in Mexican micro-, small- and medium-, and large- companies was undertaken. The results of the exploratory exercise where: medium companies, in average, are the more integrated enterprises, large companies have a lot of strategic planning, but they have problems in implementing and integrating technology, finally micro-companies are not aware of the need of enterprise integration. Based on these findings a research programme called IMMPAC (Acronym in Spanish for Integration and Modernisation of Small and Medium Enterprises to Achieve Competitiveness) targeted to introduce and transfer EI concepts, and design and implement EI solutions in Mexican SMEs has been initiated. The methodology developed by IMMPAC integrates the concepts of core processes, core competencies, strategic and technology planning, and technology implementation in order to define the necessary activities to develop a complete EI plan for SMEs. This methodology is based on the concepts developed in GERAM.

Flexibility and acceleration of development, planning and production processes is very important for the industry. This paper describes how workflow-technology can support this requirements. It shows how to develop and transform common business process models to executable workflow models using a structured procedural model. The validation has taken place and will be shown on two fields of industrial applications: an engineering data analysis process in the semiconductor manufacturing and a customer service process in the steel production. The main items of the work are based on a framework of model-based business process management which is developed in the research project “Business Process Engineering with integrated Process and Product Models“. Further information about the project is available at http://www.siemens.de/zt_pp/gipp/ and http://www.iwi.uni-sb.de/gipp/.

This paper provides a synopsis of the results of a two year research project to specify a Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) methodology for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). A framework of nine elements is used to structure the specification. These elements are the conceptual basis, scope, structure, tools and techniques, participants, outputs, and delivery mechanism. The paper describes the conceptual basis of the methodology. The specification of each element was based on experiences from action research projects undertaken with a number of small and large companies, surveys and interviews conducted with a number of industrialists, published methodologies and literature.

Based on a reference model, a methodology has been developed, which enables a Simultaneous Engineering (SE) approach to integrate design and process planning. Main objective is to realise concurrent processing of design and process planning activities with regard to different components of a product. The methodology covers planning methods as well as execution methods, to support early transmission of information to downstream activities and a feedback of information to upstream activities within the process chain of design and process planning.

The research project DARIF funded by the German ministry of Research and Education has developed a framework of methodologies to improve enterprise integration through enterprise modelling, communication analysis and intranet-based information systems suited for SME’s. The paper describes, the DARIF project goals and defines the framework of methods for integration. Then it presents an industrial application of CIMOSA based enterprise modelling and simulation with Petri-nets. The application demonstrates the practical usability and benefits of model deployment in the daily operations control in SME’s.

In this report, the concept of Socio-technical Systems is described. It is applied to the design of Human-centered Systems for production. The report includes the influence of this concept on Enterprises Modelling and Enterprise Integration. Some brief case studies are reported applying this concept.

ACNOS is a research project funded by the French ministry for research and technology and devoted to the analysis of structured and non-structured activities in production systems. The paper first describes the ACNOS project and defines structured and non-structured activities and processes. Then it presents the approach for functional modelling based on IDEF3x, an extension of the IDEF3 formalism. Finally, it discusses the approach for organisation analysis using an economic model for performance evaluation (based on performance indicators and drivers) and a cognitive model for soft issues (i.e. to understand and represent how decisions are made and to explicit knowledge, know-how and human competencies required for non-structured activities).

Emerging organisational alternatives to hierarchy and extreme division of labour are changing the landscape of the organisational culture and practice. Most concepts march far away from the taylor-fordist tradition and have one element in common: they are the result of focusing on processes rather than on functional responsibilities [3,4,12,13]. These processes are either primary processes or operational processes, i.e., material, informational and relational/communicative business processes [11,12,13], or the change processes, i.e., continuous improvement and redesign processes.All processes are always challenged by the dramatic changes within the general setting (competition, new technologies, new public regulations, etc.) as well as by local breakdowns (accidents, disturbances, variances, etc.). In all cases real persons in the organisation have the duty to detect, avoid and absorb changes and breakdowns and to re-design or reassess the process and the way to deal with change and breakdowns. Re-design and control of a process is possible only if people have enough knowledge of the process. People working in processes have to have the process in their mind to guarantee the achievement of its goals.Management structures and process innovation (process management structures) are becoming important. Process owners, project team, continuous improvement teams, quality teams and others are examples of these tendencies. Meaningful business process are often run by new patterns of macrostructure like project structures, divisional structures, brand organisations, matrix organisations, etc.The developments from Tayloristic work organisations towards process-oriented structures will be shown as they are presently being demanded and tested. The scope of the paper is to motivate the analysis and design of business processes as co-operative workflows in the language/action perspective.

This paper discusses the inclusion of the human element in enterprise modelling as a possible means to support socio-technical design. Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of modelling architectures in the derivation of information specifications for shop floor information systems for small companies. The need for including the human element in enterprise modelling is identified and an approach to modelling the human interactions in a company is proposed. This work is set in the context of contemporary approaches to enterprise modelling.

The Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (PERA) has developed a unique methodology for determining the place of the Human in any particular enterprise. This methodology will be described in this paper to initiate discussion of this important topic in the ICEIMT97.

Organizational and human issues are often crucial to the successful use of technology in organizations. Enterprise models that make these issues explicit can assist in analyzing issues, finding solutions, and in evaluating alternatives. This paper outlines the i* modelling framework, in which organizations and work processes are modelled in terms of dependency relationships among strategic actors.

The paper describes the CIMOSA modelling concepts and building blocks with focus on the organisational constructs and their relationships to other model entities. CIMOSA defines two constructs to represent enterprise organisations: Organisation Unit and Organisation Cell. Organisation Unit is an entity, usually a decision making person, defined by its skills, responsibilities and authorities. Organisation Cell is a construct to be used recursively for describing aggregations of Organisation Units or cells. Using these two constructs with guidelines and a component element, organisation structures of different types — e.g. hierarchical, network, matrix - and of any complexity can be represented.The paper demonstrates the usability of CIMOSA based modelling to capture, represent and manage organisations integrated with processes, information, resources and other organisations. An application of the methodology to a virtual enterprise is provided.

The work described in this paper was undertaken at the INESC Porto Manufacturing Systems Engineering Unit. An overview of PROFIT, a commercial product, and the outcome of the ESPRIT project 5478 Shop Control, is the starting point of this paper. This introduction gives a special emphasis to the PROFIT modelling environment supported by Simple++, a state-of-the-art object oriented modelling and simulation tool, and to its integrating infrastructure. Further improvements in the PROFIT modelling environment were motivated by the need of a software modelling language, not provided by Simple++. Our basic objective was to enhance its modelling facilities by allowing the construction of integrated information and material flow models. This target led to the construction of the Modelling Workbench (MW), resulting from the integration of a formal description language (Specification and Description Language - SDL) modelling primitives into Simple++, which is then presented in this paper. Further improvements in the MW were achieved with the additional development of “SDL-based” techno-organisational modelling constructs. More recent developments on the MW are then presented, they were mainly related with the SDL modelling facilities ease of use, leading to its integration with a CASE tool. This fostered the use of an agent-based approach to software development, by introducing the concept of a software Lego, whose building blocks were organised as a library, of both data and processes, for re-use in the creation of new software models. This concept, which is not new, gained extra relevance through the combination of the CASE tool and the object oriented software modelling and simulation environment provided by the modelling workbench. This paper closes with our view on how the Modelling Workbench fits into the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture, by illustrating the usage of its tools along the “shop floor control system” engineering life-cycle.

The operation of a railway system can benefit significantly from enterprise modelling. In the present paper, the metro enterprise is viewed as a regulated enterprise enacting a correct model, externally mapped as the Operating Procedures Manual. Furthermore, the general characteristics of those models and their external schemata and views are analysed, followed by a description of the enterprise engineering environment at Attiko Metro, the future operator of the new Athens metro lines.

Facing the slow development of standards for Enterprise Integration and its supporting methods and tools, this paper tries to demonstrate the important needs of the industry for enterprise business integration, efficient change management and capitalisation of know-how acquired during the enterprise life cycle. The user needs and requirements are common to several industrial sectors such as the automotive and aerospace industries. AIT, the European Initiative on Advanced Information Technology for design and manufacturing is particularly concerned with the integration of IT innovations in its business processes.

The paper discusses issues in model building and use, drawing on two principal perspectives: a top-down strategic framework, and a methodological framework (with related user support). These should inform the establishment of metrics, interfaces and standards.

Most of the development effort in simulation software (as a particular case of modelling tools) has been concentrated on support to model creation. With users of modelling tools increasingly non-specialists, greater support is required to the application of models, in particular in experimentation, or an increased risk of error is being tolerated.

Recent developments in global commerce have witnessed the advent of the virtual enterprise1. Groups of companies are forming short-term relationships to collaborate on one-off projects. Typically these enterprises form a consortium to bid for a project for which they do not have the capability of winning as individual concerns. In order that the virtual enterprise operates effectively the systems which underpin the separate enterprises must be capable of interoperation2. One means to achieving this is by the adoption of suitable international standards. This paper addresses this issue by considering the requirements placed on standards activities for the support of virtual enterprises. It then proposes a means by which current standards can be classified and scoped within an overall framework. Finally the paper considers the various approaches taken within these standards activities and proposes a strategy for future development.

Business re-engineering and enterprise integration efforts are supported very efficiently by enterprise modelling and supporting information technology. However, with the large number of competing modelling methodologies available and the incompatibilities of their supporting information technology, success in the market place is rather marginal. On the other hand the need for enterprise integration is increasing and will be even more so with the new paradigms of extended and virtual enterprises asking for global cooperations.Standardisation efforts are needed which improve the understandability of enterprise models and provide easy interoperability between models from different partners. This will not only be very helpful for the users of such models but for the providers of the supporting information technology as well. Users will be able to link and evaluate their business processes in temporary cooperations and IT vendors will gain confidence in the market and see a return on investments in their product developments.The paper will review the state of the art in enterprise modelling and integration and will draw conclusions on standardisation strategies.

The project, ‘Quality by CIM’ (QCIM), the German DIN initiative for development accompanied standardisation has produced a framework for an integrated information model which consists of a core model and specialised partial models. The modelling language and the methodology are following an object oriented approach and enable integration of application scenarios, simultaneous engineering, production control and quality management. The resulting models have been formally defined in EXPRESS. The paper gives an overview of the methodology and an application example.