Knowledge Sharing in the Integrated Enterprise

Participants of ISO TC184/SC 5/WG 1 will present a series of papers that address the group’s work and our thoughts on the direction we feel appropriate for the establishment of new international standards in manufacturing automation. The focus of WG1 is on architecture and modelling aspects in support of the automation standards objectives of TC184. This paper sets the stage, so to speak, upon which current and future group efforts will play out.

World-wide collaboration and co-operation of enterprises of all sizes increases the need for standards supporting operational interoperability in the global environment. Such standards are concerned with the communication aspects of information and communication technology (ICT), like communication protocols as well as the syntax and semantics of the communication content. Communicating parties have to have the same understanding of the meaning of the exchanged information and trust both the communication itself and the validity of its content. Focus of the paper is on business process modelling and its standardisation in the area of enterprise inter- and intra-organisational integration. Relations to the subject of interoperability are discussed.

Standards have been developed and are still developing for enterprise modelling frameworks and modelling constructs. Recently they have made increasing although informal use of UML to metamodel and hence to clarify the concepts involved. However, the relationships between those concepts (for example, positioning the modelling constructs within a framework) have not been defined to the degree of precision required. This paper describes an approach as a work-in-progress, which proposes to use metamodelling to ground the concepts within the framework, and so to resolve difficult issues such as federated views on an enterprise model. In the longer term it should also provide benefits through alignment with Object Management Group (OMG) developments, especially the Model Driven Architecture, MDA™.

Enterprise Modelling has been repeatedly proposed as a way to share knowledge within and among companies. However, industry practitioners —especially in Small and Medium Enterprises — are slow to take up this practice, and models are usually only built to support the development of application programs, databases or other information technology artefacts, rather then for the broader purpose of knowledge sharing.

The article examines knowledge categories previously proposed in the literature and proposes an extension of previous work in order to better understand the nature of knowledge sharing processes and the role of models in these.

This paper aims at presenting an overview of a European Integrated Project ATHENA to develop interoperability of enterprise applications and software. The first part of the paper tentatively maps the expected ATHENA solution components to ISO 15704 which is an important standard in the area of enterprise integration. This mapping allows categorising expected ATHENA research results according to ISO 15704 and evaluating the consistency and completeness of ATHENA solutions with respect to the ISO 15704 framework. The second part of the paper focuses on one solution component: enterprise modelling language. Possible use of UEML vl.0 in ATHENA Al project and related work to develop UEML 2.0 in INTEROP NoE will be discussed. Conclusions are given at the end of the paper.

This paper presents a number of principles related to the construction and use of enterprise architecture frameworks. These principles are intended to guide the development of a formal foundation for frameworks but also serve as guidance for efforts to enable the interoperability of enterprise models and model components. The principles are drawn from analyses of a number of existing frameworks and from observation of and participation in framework development.

This paper presents a further step towards a UEML (Unified Enterprise Modelling Language) starting from the result of the UEML project, funded by the European Commission under the IST-V

th

Framework Programme of Research. Specifically, the paper provides the basic theories and thinking underlying the project work as well as current improvements based on a data-integration perspective.

The article defines adaptability as the main target to solve the problem of enterprise architecture sustainability. Flexibility is an important steering mechanism to develop adaptability. Organisational modularisation is used to flexibilise enterprise structures. Business processes are changing permanently according to business requirements. Unfortunately it is a matter of fact that IT is disabling this business-driven change. Integration Technology is being introduced to improve the situation. Establishing step by step a multi service integration architecture creates new issues as handling internal charging routines, service monitoring and service life cycle management. The CC for EAI at Technical University is working on an approach and prototype of a service management module adressing the mentioned issues.

Presently, there is a great need for methodologies and reference models to assist and guide the creation and operation of various types of Collaborative Networked Organisations (CNO). The efforts to fulfil this need can be greatly assisted by a msta-methodology integrating diverse CNO creation and operation knowledge. This paper continues previous research on the concept, requirements, design, verification and potential implementations of a CNO life cycle meta-methodology, by describing an additional case study and subsequent reflections leading to the refinement and extension of the proposed meta-methodology.

Currently, several enterprise architecture frameworks exist, and there is a need to be able to communicate about them. To this end we have proposed an Architecture Framework Ontology (AFO) providing characteristics to be assigned to the framework under consideration. AFO is then used to characterise and compare six existing frameworks, and results from this task are presented.

Enterprise processes are characterised to specify a conceptual model of MEs. The model is developed, with reference to processes classes, resource system types, product flows, and organisational views, so as to exemplify general interoperability needs and to highlight deficiencies in current EM and EI provision. One significant deficiency relates to modelling human resources. Hence ME enhancements are proposed centred on the coherent modeling of human systems and enterprise processes.

In this paper we investigate the development of an appropriate business model associated with B2B transactions, designed according to the newly introduced ebXML standards. We explain the added value of such business model in complement to the more technical models defined by ebXML. In particular we explain the importance of achieving a better definition of the economic value associated with a B2B transaction. Together with the proposed business model ontology we also introduce a tool for supporting its management as well as a simulation tool for supporting decision making between different models.

Building a better team focuses on the need for efficient teamwork in order to maximize project or business process success. The paper first investigates what constitutes a team environment, and then, puts forward an educational model/framework in order to better foster a team environment. By using the ARTS tool, businesses and/ or project teams can develop evaluative and visual aids to build a more efficient team.

The focus of this paper is to adopt an interdisciplinary approach of the education system’s strategic planning process, by drawing insights and critically evaluating the possibility of applying a mechanistic view of the work force development inspired from the vast and numerous literature of supply chain management. The outcome of the study is a proposed high-level reference model for Human Supply Chain (HSC) integration.

This article presents a work in progress, which aims at associating a systemic reference modeling approach with formal verification concepts in order to improve the user’s toolbox concerning risk analysis. This approach is here applied to a manufacturing process.

Knowledge Provenance (KP) is proposed to address the problem about how to determine the validity and origin of information/knowledge on the web by means of modeling and maintaining information sources and dependencies as well as trust structures. Four levels of KP are introduced: Static, Dynamic, Uncertain, and Judgmental. In order to give a formal and explicit specification for the fundamental concepts of KP, a static KP ontology is defined in this paper.

This paper proposes an object model for planning and scheduling integration in system development on discrete manufacturing. The model can deal with frequent changes of the market much more agile than the traditional models for production management. In addition, the object model can be translated to another model, which additionally has table, property and data type objects for automatic translation to a RDB schema. A modification procedure to adjust it to each case in industries is also described.

Recently, Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) has been proposed to take into account the development of large software systems, such as B2B applications on the Internet. However, before this becomes a reality, some issues need solutions, such as the definition of various Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) and also automatic transformation between these domain languages representing business concerns and those offering platform executability. In this paper, we provide some insights into transformation between some specific DSL particularly relevant to Business-to-Business (B2B) applications.

This paper develops a research framework to investigate measures of enterprise integration. In our view the term enterprise integration is an umbrella term that incorporates what we term integration types. The integration types are connectivity, information sharing, interoperability, coordination, and alignment. To determine which technology and/or enterprise integration method is best in a given situation we believe measures of integration are needed and must be grounded in empirical findings.

Enterprise Integration (EI) is a key concept of Enterprise Engineering (EE) programs. This paper modifies the definition of Enterprise Integration through a broad vision of the field. Typical approaches are studied and reclassified based on recent results from the use of the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture. Theories of descriptiveness and prescriptiveness are proposed to support the newly established concept of Approach 2 Architectures as well as their general requirements.

This paper describes how Business Process Management has been implemented based on a Reference Framework defined based on Enterprise Integration Engineering concepts. The Reference Framework includes the following components: strategy definition (competitive, supply chain, operational), performance evaluation system, process design/re-design, and enabling technologies. It describes how all these issues have to be considered in an integrated way to align the company strategy with process improvement projects in order to achieve excellent performance. One case study is reviewed to describe how the reference model has been used in a OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) to achieve change management and best manufacturing practices implementation.

Enterprise Engineering and Enterprise Integration have been leveraged as key topics in Enterprise Management. Since the 80s multiple approaches, methodologies, languages and, frameworks have been proposed. Despite the numerous results currently existing, new trends and solutions are continuously emerging. This paper provides a landscape of the current problems on Enterprise Engineering and Integration, the strategies, solutions and our vision about future trends.

Organizations today face increasing pressure to reduce time to market, i.e. to improve the design and the operations of business processes in terms of lead time and meeting due dates. Formal analysis using a mathematical graph-based approach can help to achieve this kind of improvement.

We will apply business graphs to scheduling workflows in terms of time-based optimization. We will concentrate on performance measures like completion time, flow time and tardiness. From a business process network we derive two types of directed graphs, one representing the task net (task graph) and the other one representing the resource net (resource graph). In the task graph a node is representing a task and its duration and arcs are representing different kinds of precedence constraints between tasks. The resource graph is similar to a Petri net and represents resource constraints and flows of jobs.

In order to compute optimal or near-optimal workflow schedules the algorithms have to relate to the structure of the business graphs. We will show that a variety of data structures commonly assumed in modern scheduling theory can be represented within the framework of business graphs. Based on these data structures specific scheduling algorithms to optimize time-based performance measures can be applied with the objective to reduce time to market.

Enterprise Integration and Networking has been the topic of extensive research. Achievements deal with theoretical definition of reference models and architectures, modeling languages and tools, and development of relevant standards. The impact on today business has somehow been limited; therefore a revision of relevant issues and trends is required to establish a coherent vision for future research. This paper summarizes the underlying principles and challenges for enterprise modeling and integration, and its impact on enterprise networking.

This paper chronicles the different approaches for enterprise integration used in the field of healthcare over the past decade, and which approach succeeded and which failed. It ends with the new approach just launched through the Health Level 7 standards organization with support from the Health and Human Services in US.

Teams are engineered by dependent processes involving a spectrum of activities commencing with the initial identification of need, extending through to the realisation of that need and in some cases dissolution of the team. A new model of the team systems engineering life cycle is described in this paper which includes four main groupings of activities corresponding to: ‘design’, ‘build’, ‘operate’ and ‘maintain’ (DBOM) life phases through which a typical team system progresses. The paper illustrates how Enterprise Modelling concepts and the DBOM model can be innovatively deployed in order to systematically capture published knowledge about teams; thereby providing an analytic basis on which teams can be designed, built, operated and maintained. Here EM modelling constructs were used to document and visually represent relatively enduring aspects of team systems. This paper illustrates the approach by creating a semi-generic model of project teams.

Customer satisfaction and service reliability are not any more the assets but the unavoidable condition for a company to be accepted as a supplier of a product or service. The creation of value added in a company concerns all functions and specifications that are involved in delivering a product or service to the customer. Part of that value enhancing chain is the Supply Chain Management (SCM) conception which is defined as all management principles by which the supply chain is considered as a whole.

In order to support European industry in its transition process towards the knowledge-based enterprise a set of novel information-based tools for enabling knowledge, skill and data transfer is needed. Their design depends on the organic and functional enterprise infrastructure features and relations between the heterogeneous agents involved across the whole value added chain. This paper presents two approaches aiming at overcoming interoperability barriers arising in communication process among humans and machines. First one is an ontological approach, which focuses on computer-supported human collaboration and human-machine interaction by means of natural languages, enabling semantic independence of shared knowledge and data contents. The second one proposes an approach for machine data exchange and sharing, applying standards as highly extruded common knowledge.

The advent of a global economy is forcing companies to improve competitiveness more than ever and to increase collaboration by providing for ICT based interoperability. These needs generate the necessity to focus on company core processes and increase operational flexibility to satisfy customer requirements. The paper is aimed on strengthening the enterprise adaptation to changing markets focusing on the integration between strategic planning and business processes, using enterprise modeling as documented in CEN/ISO 19439 and 19440.

This introductory paper to the DIISM’04 volume explains the DIISM problem statement and applies principles of architecture descriptions for evolutionary systems (IEEE 1471–2000) to the information infrastructure for engineering and manufacturing. In our vision, knowledge and skill chains depend on infrastructure systems fulfilling missions in three kinds of environments: the

socio-industrial domain

of society and its production systems as a whole, the

knowledge domain

for a scientific discipline, and the

sectorial domain

, which includes the operational entities (companies, organizational units, engineers, workers) in engineering and manufacturing.

The relationships between these different domains are captured in a

domain paradigm

An information infrastructure that enables responses to global challenges must draw on a wide range of both industrial and academic excellence, vision, knowledge, skill, and ability to execute. Responses have a scope, from the company, the

factory floor

and the engineering office to

external

collaboration and to

man-system

collaboration. In all scopes a system can offer services to different operational levels:

operations

, development or

engineering

, and

research

. The dimensions of scope and service level are briefly explained in relation to the architecting of an infrastructure. Papers are grouped according to their contribution to an infrastructure scenario or to an infrastructure component.

In this paper, the creation of ontology of manufacturing features for the development of a feature library is described. The designer’s intention described in functional data of the feature constructing face elements is considered for the creation of the ontology. The creation of the manufacturing feature ontology is intended to make the feature library be useful for the extraction of manufacturing information for process plans generation.

A planning method for linear object manipulation, especially knotting is shown. At first, topological states of a linear object are described. Next, transitions between states are defined. Then, we can generate possible sequences of state transition, from which, we can choose an adequate path from the initial state to the objective state. Furthermore, a method to determine the grasping points is proposed. In the fourth, a planning method is proposed. Finally, our system based on proposed methods is demonstrated

Production cost is one of the most important factors for manufacturing. The production cost associated with each machine tool is calculated from total cost of factory in general. The operation status of machine tools, however, is different, so accurate production cost for each product can’t be calculated. Hence, accounting method of production cost for machine tool operation is proposed using the concept of Activity-Based Costing and is embedded to virtual machining simulator for the cost prediction.

Product lifecycle modelling is to define and represent product lifecycle data and to maintain data interdependencies. This paper presents a framework of product lifecycle model that comprises three parts: product information model, process model based on product life cycle, and extended enterprise resource model. Further, the relationship and formation of product models at different stages are described. Finally, an integrated information architecture is proposed to support interoperability of distributed product data sources.

In the conventional system development life cycle (SDLC), the system performance evaluation phase comes after the implementation phase. Our strategy is to project system performance estimate at the requirement analysis and design phase itself much before the implementation phase. To achieve this objective, we propose a technology-neutral integrated environment for the core life cycle of system development. This core life cycle consists of three phases: system modelling, performance evaluation and performance improvement.

This paper describes an implementation of the Integrated Process Management System, which includes manufacturing process management for building parts, and also construction process management at construction site. To observe the flow of the building parts, RFIDs are stuck to all parts to be managed, and several checkpoints, which we named “gates”, are introduced within the coherent process through part-manufacturing and building construction. The requirements of the RFID directory services are also discussed.

We propose the effective tools of operation standardization for mass production of a new product. The cycle of operation standard consists of three stages of design, improvement and evaluation, and divided into seven steps, that is, decision, communication and understanding, observance, supervision, notice, decision again, and evaluation. The proposed seven tools of operation standardization (OS7) correspond to these steps. These tools enable us to realize mass production of a new product and to stabilize a product quality much earlier.

A key requirement for a successful facility planning and design is to become suitable for new use as well as to be adaptable for new products, technologies or capacities. The software solution “Workbench” is designed for an Information Infrastructure System for the planning of large logistics networks as well as for the network structures of the facilities in an enterprise. The “Workbench” ensures a better information flow and basis for Factory planning and enables planners without great expert planning knowledge.