Elsevier

Annual Reviews in Control

Volume 36, Issue 2, December 2012, Pages 300-308
Annual Reviews in Control

Customizable Interoperability Assessment Methodology to support technical processes deployment in large companies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arcontrol.2012.09.011Get rights and content

Abstract

Increasing competition on markets induces a vital need for companies to improve their efficiency and reactivity. For this, a solution is to deploy, improve and manage their processes while paying a special attention on the abilities of the resources those involve. Particularly, their interoperability is considered in this article as a challenge conditioning the success of the deployment. Consequently, this paper provides a comparison of existing interoperability assessment solutions and presents a methodology to assess interoperability of people, material resources and organisation units involved or that could be involved in a process, all along the deployment effort. This methodology is usable for prevention, detection and correction of interoperability problems.

Introduction

The deployment of new processes in a company results from a strategic decision. It consists in the progressive modification of existing activities or in the addition of new ones considered as required and relevant to the business strategy. The deployment effort can be broken down into three stages:

  • Stage 1: a pre-deployment stage including modelling activities (to capture the as-is situation), preparation of the deployment project and analysis of the effort required to define the processes to deploy.

  • Stage 2: a per-deployment stage consisting then in practical and effective implementation of the retained process.

  • Stage 3: a post-deployment stage including process management and continuous improvement.

Thus, a deployment involves many stakeholders and material resources belonging to the company or to its partners that may experiment collaboration difficulties. Therefore, to succeed in a deployment effort, companies have not only to organize their effort (Cornu & et al., 2011) but also, to master the complexity of required interactions between all people, organisations and material resources involved at:

  • Stage 1: in the definition of the process that will be deployed.

  • Stage 2: in the application of changes planned Stage 1.

  • Stage 3: in the daily execution of the process deployed and in their monitoring and continuous improvement.

The research at the origin of this article aims to propose a methodological guide to succeed in the deployment of Systems Engineering processes (ISO/IEC, 2008) in a large company. In this work, it is assumed that the risk of deployment failure is maximised by two major factors. The first factor is the lack of skills available in the company required by the process that will be deployed (e.g. the lack in Systems Engineering skills). The second factor is the lack of anticipation, during the pre-deployment phase, of interactions difficulties that may occur during Stages 2 and 3. This article focuses on this second factor and addresses the interoperability characteristic of entities (people, organisation units and material resources) that may have a role during the deployment. More precisely, it describes an Interoperability Assessment Methodology whose purpose is threefold:

  • To guide the selection and allocation of entities that are considered to take part in the new processes to be deployed by providing an estimation of interactions difficulties they will have.

  • To localize interoperability difficulties and propose corrective actions.

  • To monitor the evolution of the interoperability of entities to ensure that corrective actions are effective and efficient.

This article begins with a state of the art about interoperability assessment solutions. Then, the proposed methodology and its elements are presented first globally and then in details with their mathematical descriptions. Next, a set of questionnaires designed to apply the assessment methodology is introduced along with their interpretation methods. Finally, before concluding, an example showing how this methodology can be useful is provided.

Section snippets

Characterisation of interoperability assessment types

Among various available definitions of interoperability, we retain the definition of ISO (2011): “ability of enterprises and entities within those enterprises to communicate and interact effectively”. It is a key factor for successful partnerships between companies and for high satisfaction levels of customers. Thus, it is crucial for companies to become able to manage their interoperability, i.e. to detect problems, analyse situations, improve, and generalize improvement actions. Unfortunately

Overview of the proposed assessment methodology

This section aims to provide an outline of the assessment methodology we propose. First, it presents globally its elements and how they are connected and then, their details.

Mathematical formalisation of assessment methods

After presenting the notations and definitions used, this section goes deeper in the details of formalisation and provides all formulae required to perform assessments of atomic and non-atomic organisation units.

Questionnaires and their mathematical interpretations

To evaluate interoperability scores of resources, the Interoperability Assessment Methodology includes a set of 14 typical questionnaires along with their interpretation methods, improvement recommendations and clear identification of interoperability barriers concerned. Questionnaires can be divided into two categories: those for the computation of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Interoperability Scores. This Section presents their structures and interpretation methods so that any company could define

Application example

The purpose of this Section is to provide an application of the proposed methodology to illustrate its applicability, relevance and impact on a process deployment.

Let us take the example of a large company in the field of aeronautics that wants to improve the way it designs its products. To that end, it aims to deploy a process for the definition of physical architectures as described by Systems Engineering (ISO/IEC, 2008). One major problem happens to be the lack of a System Designer in the

Conclusion

The introduction of new processes in a company is a strategic decision that cannot fail considering the risks it implies. Throughout our work, we assume that the more interoperability of entities (resource units and organisations) involved or impacted by the deployment is maximised, the better the chances of success for the deployment are.

Indeed, on one hand, for entities leading the deployment, the better interoperability between them is, the more efficient collaborations are, the shorter the

Clémentine Cornu has a Master’s degree in engineering from the Ecole des Mines d’Alès (Alès, France) and is currently a PhD student under the direction of François IRIGOIN and Vincent CHAPURLAT. She is on a CIFRE contract with Eurocopter (Marignane, France), a helicopter manufacturer belonging to the EADS group. Her work focuses on processes improvement. More specifically, her work aims to help large companies to deploy Systems Engineering processes in their organisations considering

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    Clémentine Cornu has a Master’s degree in engineering from the Ecole des Mines d’Alès (Alès, France) and is currently a PhD student under the direction of François IRIGOIN and Vincent CHAPURLAT. She is on a CIFRE contract with Eurocopter (Marignane, France), a helicopter manufacturer belonging to the EADS group. Her work focuses on processes improvement. More specifically, her work aims to help large companies to deploy Systems Engineering processes in their organisations considering interoperability as a key factor. She is a member of the French chapter of INCOSE (AFIS) and of the Interop-Vlab.

    Vincent Chapurlat is currently Professor of Ecole des Mines d’Alès and head of the research team “Interoperable System and Organisation Engineering” (ISOE) at the Laboratory of Informatics and Production Systems Engineering (LGI2P). He received a habilitation level for research direction in 2007 and a PhD in control command systems specification and verification in 1994 from the University of Montpellier II. His research aims to develop and to formalize concepts and tools that enable supplying complex systems designers’ teams to model and to verify quality and adequacy of systems models. The concerned application domains are Enterprise Modeling and System Engineering domains. He is member of the French chapter of INCOSE namely AFIS (Association Française d’Ingénierie Système), of the Technical Committee 5.3 «Enterprise Networking» from IFAC Board and of the Working Group «Enterprise interoperability» from IFIP Board.

    Jean-Marc Quiot, during 20 years in the Automotive Industry, has developed critical systems as Electronic Engineer (INSA Toulouse). He has formalized some concepts of maturity to deploy Systems engineering methodologies also as member of the French chapter of INCOSE namely AFIS. Main focus was on IVVQ (Integration, Verification, Validation and Qualification) domain for complex systems. Since 2008, Jean-Marc Quiot is developing and promoting System Engineering (SE) in the field of Aeronautics (Eurocopter) and in particular on Avionics systems. He is also member of System Engineering Steering board (SESG) at EADS group and acts as Eurocopter’s representative in the field of CMMi.

    François Irigoin is director of the Computer Science department (CRI) at MINES ParisTech. He holds a PhD degree from Univ. Pierre et Marie Curie (1987). His main research area is the design and development of automatic tools for analyzing and transforming source programs, in order to lower development and maintenance costs and to improve reliability. He is a member of ACM and IEEE.

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