Enterprise and Organizational Modeling and Simulation

Supply chain integration provides a potential opportunity for companies that seek better performance in terms of shorter delivery time and lower price at a guaranteed quality, yet an effective tool that helps decision makers select and combine various components including the possible outcomes of a specific chain during process of integration still is missing. Modelling and simulation modelling is an accepted approach for advancing this shortcoming. Due to uncertainty and complexity of supply chains that stem from its nature perhaps system dynamics provides a better insight compared to the other simulation models for studying the concept. Therefore, this paper aims to provide an insight that why and whether system dynamics has application in integration of supply chain management.

The paper provides a survey comprising meaningful organisational approaches to Multi-Agent-Systems (MAS) that exist in the computational theory field. The organisational concepts are collected and represented as a metamodel of some commonly agreed organisational ontology of human systems. Next, this metamodel - a proposal for the extension of the Agent-Object-Relationship (AOR) simulation language with organisational constructs - will be analysed and improved by taking into consideration the organisational approaches originating from the fields of social sciences. Our account is exemplified by a case study where we model an academic environment with the help of the organisation-oriented concepts defined by the AOR simulation language.

In the last decades simulation has been widely used for training and education. Traditionally used on military and medicine education, history shows that analyzing systems through simulation models reveal to be an interesting, safe, few-resources consuming and less disruptive with the real system. Students can experiment and test their knowledge in the simulators, this is, can learn by doing. In order to increase the simulation interactivity and competition spirit, games were added, generating a new concept: simulation games. Business world sees this technique as an opportunity to improve professionals’ skills at low cost. This paper discusses the simulation, games and challenges contribution in schools and enterprises.

Rapid business change demands the ability to adapt, rearrange and reinvent business processes while keeping the alignment with supporting information systems. However, such tasks require a business process to be consistently specified and modelled. To address this issue, this paper describes an organizational taxonomy that defines a controlled vocabulary to design business processes using the concepts of information entity, business process, organizational unit, actor, business schedule and business goal.

Business process modeling is an important part of information systems design. Business process modeling techniques provide a standard way of presentation and communication of business processes. One important problem in this context is to assess the quality of business processes as well as their ontological constructs, which raises several issues, such as the identification of business process constructs as well as the quality dimensions and factors relevant to these constructs. In this paper, our goal is twofold. First, we present a business process meta-model containing all possible constructs of a business process. Second, after discussing a set of quality factors suitable for business processes constructs, we present a quality oriented meta-model resulting from the enrichment of the business process meta-model with quality related information.

We investigate the question if BPMN can be used for simulation modeling by evaluating it against ABDESO, a foundational ontology for agent-based discrete event simulation. Since a simulation model is intended to capture a real-world system, BPMN, if used as the modeling language for making the simulation model, should have a “real-world semantics” based on a founda tional ontology for agent-based discrete event simulation.

This paper discusses the redesign of the clinical test order processes at a medium-sized Dutch hospital in the context of the extension of the Digital Order Entry information system. In the study, the waste in the current process is identified and quantified, and finally an alternative business process is proposed and assessed using modeling and simulation. The proposed approach led to the identification of substantial gain areas and provided additional insight in the requirements of the future information system.

The goal of this contribution is to show that incorporating ontological analysis into modelling of enterprise information and knowledge systems during the software engineering process may bring considerable benefits. Necessary terms related to ontological analysis are defined, the most important being the Concept Map of the Domain (CMoD). The BORM method is then analysed from the ontological point of view and the ontological analysis is showed in the context of the layered Model Driven Architecture approach. Possible gaps that may occur between the layers in practice are studied. Two methods how to incorporate the ontological analysis into the modelling process to overcome those gaps are presented and discussed.

We present instance-level modeling and simulation approach and related software environments. First part of this paper describes the role of the instance-level modeling and simulation in the area of software engineering and presents our approach affiliated with lambda-calculus theory. Next, a supporting tool we developed is discussed. Instance-level modeling and simulation is based on manipulation with particular object instances containing real data in similar way as in database querying. This enables to validate, verify and refine the conceptual model even before its final software implementation. The idea of object-level modeling is already being implemented in several educational or development tools, however these tools are too much oriented to target programming environment (typicaly mainstream C-based languages like Java or C#) and are focused on class-level models of software implementation. This is why in the second part we propose to work with ODMG-compliant object databases and also describe our own modeling and simulation tool. Our approach has been used for rapid prototyping in our software development projects and in formal design and software engineering courses at several european and U.S. universities. Interesting outcomes of this experience are not only related to application development, but also to business engineering, where instance-level models refines the business process design.

This article aims to put a basis for formal definitions of conceptual normalisation. In the following it briefly describes our approach, and then proposes the definitions, and eventually shows how relational and object normalisation are connected with it. The primary objective of this contribution is a definition of four basic conceptual forms, both formally and informally. Further it elaborates a connection between them and relational normal forms, on one hand, and object normal forms, on the other hand. In the end, the Author argues for herein proposed ideas and definitions.

An effective approach to modelling and prototyping of business applications is presented in this paper. The approach is based on three concepts: The concept of data structure abstraction, the concept of a behavioural model based on the dynamic functional approach and a design approach based on creating multiple levels of a domain-specific language. The characteristics of each concept are presented. A technique how to combine them together to create highly detailed descriptive models that may be easily turned to prototypes is shown and demonstrated. Limitations are formulated and benefits over the object-oriented approach are discussed, as well.

Management literature is renowned for producing concepts and frameworks but few of these are translated into software-based tools, even when they could be valuable to management. The area of innovation modelling is unfortunately a case in point. Management has heretofore been unable to effectively capture, communicate, and share its innovation models. Owing to the limited cognitive abilities of the human mind and the complexity and ambiguity surrounding innovation in organisations, the role of software-based tools in the future of innovation modelling should not be overlooked. But no standard approach to representing innovation models exists. The objective of this paper is to describe a prototype of an innovation modelling tool that resulted from our 24-month research initiative. We also include descriptions of an ontology upon which the prototype is built and the design science approach through which it emerged.