This paper presents various points of view on enterprise integration and discusses tentatively the distinction between integration and interoperability. In the area of enterprise integration and interoperability, the standardisation will play an important role. Without standards, there is no integration, nor interoperability. Related standards and on-going projects are reviewed and compared and future perspectives are given.

The following list identifies the major groups involved in relevant standardisation:

• ISO TC184 (Industrial Automation Systems and Integration). The main activities are within two sub-committees: SC4 and SC5. The SC4 specifically focuses on standardisation of information/data involved in manufacturing applications while SC5 focuses on standards relating to enterprise modelling.
• CEN TC310 WG1 (System architecture). Three European pre-standards in this domain, initially proposed by CEN, are being revised in collaboration with the ISO TC 184 SC5/WG1.
• ISA (Instrument Society of America) and IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) are the sources of industrial "consensus" standards.
• Object Management Group (OMG) a consortium of software application vendors, developers and end-users. The main output is the Object Management Architecture (OMA) also known as CORBA, used as a reference model to develop object oriented applications.
• Open Applications Group (OAG) formed by the leading world-wide enterprise software vendors is working on standards that define the business object interoperability between enterprise business applications. Main result of OAG is the Open Applications Group Integration Specification known as OAGIS.

Following a general introduction to the theme of the paper emphasis was on a tool developed by the presenters organisation. The EDEN^TM platform combines sophisticated, state-of-the-art software and consultant services to provide a structured approach to planning for change. The unique capability is its integration of product and enterprise design, based on the concept that one cannot be changed without altering the other. It provides the following properties:

• Structuring of the engineering processes
• a platform forming the basis of the design process for both enterprise and product
• Ensuring that design data is managed in a structured fashion, and that users employ the same data
• Integration of the various components throughout the enterprise lifecycle
• Reducing the time and cost of a design or redesign operation

Integrated into EDEN's overall structure is a comprehensive plan of product design, either for a new product or the re-design of an existing one. The methodology employs control objectives to evaluate and ensure the attainment of design objectives, creating a seamless process that results in considerable savings of time and resources. The database contains a wealth of information about enterprise engineering and product development, which is continuously updated to keep track of new developments. In addition, EDEN links via the Internet to databases worldwide for the latest thinking in enterprise design and product development. The platform fully integrates with all Windows-based environments.

This paper contributes results of the European component PSIM (Participative Simulation) of the IMS/RTD project "Organizational Aspects of Human-Machine Coexisting Systems" (HUMACS). PSIM is developing and pilot-demonstrating a Participative Simulation environment for Integral (i.e., involving logistics, technology and human factors) Manufacturing enterprise renewal. It looks at the enabling role in knowledge management of a participative simulation environment built in reference to enterprise reference architecture and enterprise ontologies constructed in accordance with it.

Early ICEIMTs struggled with finding the best balance of what needs in the enterprise could be supported by enterprise-wide information infrastructure. Ten years ago, many users were content with any solution that allowed reasonable interoperability and data sharing. The system-wide capabilities gleaned were rudimentary and practically limited to scheduling and resource optimization. Solutions presumed that the product was well understood, the resource pool known and unevolving, and that all information resources in the value chain were re-engineerable to a significant extent.

This new enterprise integration agenda seems to mandate two key architectural principles: federation and agent systems. The notion of federation was identified as desirable in the first ICEIMT process as a complement to centralized or master models. A key notion of federation is that everyone is free to use the tools that they feel are best for their job; there is no artificial pressure to compromise for integration's sake. One pool of information and models is maintained, and this is done at the finest level of decentralization, as close to the process as possible. However, the amount of information, its integrity, formality and timeliness may be more robust than locally warranted. Federation preserves legacy systems, which is a benefit; but the more important advantages are allowing innovation in the domain and tapping the source as close as possible to actual information used to do work.

Technical difficulties do exist. The general approach for all such tasks is to create an "interlingua" and a formal definition, an "ontology" of the world in which it exists. Fortunately, this is a well studied problem. Formal methods had been developed for defining such ontologies, and significant effort has gone into understanding practical process ontologies that deal with vexing problems of state. The requirement for a federation ontology is much greater, or seemingly so. Representing processes actively is simply a matter of expanding the ambition of what one wants process models to do. In this vision, processes and process aggregations will (as one service) be "turned loose" within conditions constrained by enterprise goals to seek optimum solutions. For example, a specific product design would be set, some key partners and processes established, some constraints on processes set (for instance quality auditability) and the agent system set to produce a range of business and process combinations and their various costs and risks. The costs be determined by actual "virtual manufacturing;" the risks determined by many iterations (including similar cases).

The second of our three major problems concerns a key feature of the federation suggested by prior workshops: the notion of persistent indices. Most enterprise-wide, system analyses potentially require nearly all information in the enterprise, but practically need only a small portion of that information. Federation should provide some sort of index that characterizes elements of each process to indicate which ones should be "fetched" for each analyses or simulation.

The third problem is perhaps the most challenging. We propose a solution that leverages the notion of emergence. It does not address all concerns of strategic planners, but it does address some rather high value problems. The notion is simple: to recognize that essentially all the components of strategic management are artifacts of imperfect tools in the infrastructure (and the accident of the conflation of the management of production with the management of capital). A truly frictionless infrastructure would integrate business processes as an intrinsic layer over operational processes. Abstractions from one to the other would define both some behavior of the layer and elements within the layer.

We believe that the foundation for all such infrastructures should begin with the core value-producing processes, those covered by PSL (Process Specification Language).

Following a short overview about knowledge management activities at IPK, the paper focusses on knowledge management aspects identified by industry. Quoting from a large industry survey core activities (generate, store, distribute and apply) and critical success factors (corporate culture, structure and processes, IT, skills and motivation, and top management support) are identified. Corporate culture is seen as the most critical success factor. IPK focus is on business processes as the core of knowledge management. The resulting Fraunhofer IPK Reference Model is the base for holistic knowledge management solutions. At IPK business process modelling is based on their Integrated Enterprise Modelling (IEM) method, which is very much related to the European pre-standard ENV 12204. The paper emphasises the synergy effects of business process modelling and knowledge management in many areas of the enterprise operation. Examples stated are enterprise planning, concept developments, quality management, personnel development.

This paper describes a methodology by which information from large numbers of independently developed sources can be associated, organized, and merged. The central hypothesis is that a multiplicity of ontology fragments, representing the semantics of the independent sources, can be related to each other automatically without the use of a global ontology. That is, any pair of ontologies can be related indirectly through a semantic bridge consisting of many other previously unrelated ontologies, even when there is no way to determine a direct relationship between them. The relationships among the ontology fragments indicate the relationships among the sources, enabling the source information to be categorized and organized. A preliminary evaluation of the methodology has been conducted by relating 53 small, independently developed ontologies for a single domain. A nice feature of the methodology is that common parts of the ontologies reinforce each other, while unique parts are de-emphasized. The result is a consensus ontology.

The advent of the new enterprise paradigms of extended, virtual and agile enterprises causes new requirement on organisational concepts and supporting technologies. Capturing knowledge and using it across organisational boundaries will be a major challenge for the new types of businesses. This real-time knowledge needed to support the establishment, deployment and discontinuation of the inter-organisational relations. Business-process modelling will provide for knowledge capturing and its management as well as for model based decision support and enable the new forms of enterprise operation. It will support the forming of such enterprises by providing detailed analysis and evaluation of partner-business processes and their contribution to the overall goals and objectives as well as any re-planning and restructuring of the operation in the course of exception handling.

The paper is concerned with the capturing of knowledge and its management in the light of operational decision-support. It illustrates business process based knowledge capturing and presents standardisation activities in the field of EE&I (Enterprise Engineering and Integration).

We present in this paper a novel approach for integrating enterprise modeling and knowledge management in dynamic networked organizations. The approach is based on the idea of active knowledge models (AKM™). An AKM is a visual model of enterprise aspects that can be viewed, traversed, analyzed, simulated, adapted and executed by industrial users.

To integrate particular process technologies from the enterprise perspective of generic business process types to the individual work tasks at the instance level, our work is based on our process modeling reference model. It identifies 4 layers of process knowledge representation, from general process logic to actual, situated work performance. Process modeling occurs at several levels concurrently, and may start at any level. Learning within and between levels is supported using a framework for process knowledge management.

The AKM-approach is currently tested out in the EXTERNAL-project (IST 1999-10091), where experiences from three comprehensive case studies are used as a basis for the further development of the approach and infrastructure. Parts of the approach are in parallel tested out in industrial projects.

There is an increasing need to represent what we refer to as knowledge in an electronic form. The reasons for this need are many. We may need to consolidate the intent of designers from various desks and brains in a central repository in a common format, to protect corporate knowledge from attrition, and to provide wherewithal to software agents that are negotiating with other enterprises so that the agents behave as desired. However, just what is it that we are storing and what are its characteristics? Is there a legitimate discipline called knowledge engineering that accomplishes this representation?

If there is indeed a knowledge engineering, as with any engineering, there needs to be some foundation for that engineering in physical reality somewhere. But with knowledge what is it that exists, where is it, what are its components, and how do we measure it? Knowledge is really information that is arranged in some pattern by the human brain to give the information. That is, given some information, using sensors and intelligence, the brain surrounds that information with other information in a pattern such that there is context and understanding. The understanding of information in a context is the knowledge. So, then, what is it that exists?

Information exists. Everything else with respect to knowledge exists only in the human brain. Information exists in the universe whether or not it is interpreted or transferred to a human. A book contains information whether or not the book is read or the information understood. The information must be transferred or conveyed into the brain and put into personal context so that it has meaning. Therefore, information has an independent reality. Knowledge (patterns of context) and meaning (semantics) do not. There then needs to be a way to quantify information and a general theory of information to establish a basis for knowledge engineering.

The theory of information advocated by Tom Stonier in Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe, states that information and organization are intimately related, that all organized structures contain information, and no organized structure can exist without information content. The addition of information to a system manifests itself by causing a system to become more organized, or reorganized. If organization and disorganization are related to order and disorder, information has an inverse relationship with entropy. Therefore, there appears to be a basis for a general theory of information, a logical way to quantify and measure information content in the physical universe, and to relate quantitatively matter, energy, and information.

Enterprise modelling contributes to understand enterprise structure by providing an explicit description of enterprise processes. Among many key issues in an engineering project, formalisation appears to be a suitable technique to check the global consistency between all the various specifications a system is intended to cover. Formalising not only the modelling language construct definitions and their relationships, but also the constraints they have to meet in order to gain common semantics.

This paper deals with the use of UML semantics representation by means of stereotypes and OCL invariant formalisation to cope with a global consistency of the UEML definition. The practical issues in formalising constructs aim to represent them using class diagrams from UML and to formalise constructs constraints and relationships using OCL (Object Constraint Language) as defined in UML standard.

In this paper a proposal of extending the IE-GIP Architecture and Methodology is presented, focused on the problem of change management and knowledge management of Human Resources and Organizational structures involved in the integration process.

With change, the task is to teach people how to adapt continuously to a dynamic environment, how to think strategically, recognize patterns, and anticipate problems and opportunities before they occur. This paper poses and analyses some of the human aspects related with the application of Engineering and Integration projects in an enterprise, focusing on knowledge management and Human resources as one of the most essential key points in the success of such project.

A knowledge view is suggested in order to promote change and to establish a procedure that can allow us to identify, develop ,maintain, save, create, reuse ,and improve the core knowledge in an enterprise. Based on the IE-GIP proposal, these ideas are been applied and validated in a textile industry (four small and medium firms- SMEs- are collaborating in a pilot of this project).

Knowledge Management practices are seen as a crucial element of the 'global business process' within organisations and they should reflect a constellation of changes in the business environment, especially the convergence of information and communication technologies in the emerging field of WWW technologies.

Many successful (inter- and intra- organisational) Knowledge Management solutions are based on the knowledge sharing using current WWW infrastructure. But current WWW is designed for human-consumption primarily and some drawbacks of the WWW, e.g. information overload, implied by implicit semantic of information, make the performances of the corresponding KM solutions less robust and effective.

In this paper we present the possibilities to improve Knowledge Management practices in a inter- and intra- organisational environment using technologies of the second generation of the WWW, so called Semantic Web, which is based on formal and real-world semantics of information. We focus on the using of ontologies, as a common-shared conceptualisation of a domain, in the exchange of knowledge in the high-distributive and heterogeneous environments.

This paper aims to describe different barriers encountered in the New Product Introduction Process (NPIP) of an extended enterprise in the telecommunication sector, which were identified along the course of the European project IST-1999-12685 CORMA – Practical Methods and Tools for Corporate Knowledge Management. Following definitions of knowledge and knowledge management inter-organisational knowledge management and the related barriers as found in the above mentioned project are discussed Further, it is the intention of this paper to propose a human-centred solution framework for the identification of key drivers and enablers for inter-organisational knowledge management.

The paper elaborates on user oriented methodologies in standards based enterprise modelling to identify, acquire, localise, share and utilise knowledge. User tasks applied to the knowledge base in knowledge management can be compared to equivalent process modelling steps in model engineering or model operation as for instance defined in the CIMOSA specification. An example of order processing illustrates model based connecting of an enterprise activity and knowledge capture. The example identifies the relations between the information view and the function view using only function inputs and outputs of an activity. All the information - or knowledge - used and produced by the activity is part of the respective enterprise object and is represented in the information view as sub-objects.

Benefits: Following the structured approach of an enterprise model with its views, the knowledge base is presented in a transparent structure as well. Further, due to the different aspects of an information object, also knowledge can be presented under one aspect hiding others and in different formats like templates. Tool supported navigation through the model enables the identification and localisation of knowledge in a dynamic way.

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