CIMOSA - News
Vol. 4/5, date 97-11-20
Editor. M. Zelm, Gehenbuehlstr. 18A, D-70499 Stuttgart
Announcement:
The CIMOSA - News is published by the CIMOSA Association. The CIMOSA News
will report on CIMOSA applications, evolution of its technical specification,
advancements in standardisation and related items. Contributions from other
parties are welcome. The CIMOSA - News will be printed periodically and is
also available in the internet at the dedicated WWW server
http://cimosa.cnt.pl/News/
Contents
The ICEIMT'97 Conference held in Turin on October 28-30, has been the major
event of the 'Enterprise Inte-gration - International Consensus' (EI-IC)
initiative. The conference was attended by 100 experts in the fields of
engineering, business administration and computer sci-ence , from Europe
(81), America (14) and Far East (5).
The ICEIMT'97 Conference was organised on the base of invited papers only
which presented the many differ-ent views on enterprise integration. Starting
with posi-tion papers on standardisation from both Europe and the USA, the
different players in the field - academia, IT users and vendors - presented
their view on the current state of enterprise integration, future needs and
devel-opments. Basic principles of enterprise engineering and integration and
selected papers from European (ESPRIT), USA and international (IMS)
initiatives pro-vided details on ongoing work in the area.
Special emphasis was placed on the presentation of the results from the five
ICEIMT workshops which pre-ceded the conference. The following are highlights
from the different workshops:
- Enterprise integration has to consider and address human aspects in
addition to technical aspects (proc-esses and technologies) of the enterprise
operation. Human aspects like skill, trust, learning, communi-cation and team
organisation play an increasingly important role in enterprise integration.
- New concepts have been proposed to model proc-esses and organisations in
networks of enterprises.
- The business benefits of enterprise integration have to be identified and
communicated. Several formats have been proposed to which allow to apply
metrics for the degree of integration of business processes, operational
systems and technologies.
- The IFAC/IFIP developed enterprise engineering and integration framework
GERAM (Generalised Enter-prise Reference Architecture and Methodologies) has
been used to harmonise the many efforts in research and development.
- A global integrating infrastructure is needed that is pervasive as
Internet, but much more powerful.
Proposal for projects, which resulted from the different workshops, have been
presented. Additional work areas have been identified:
- Maintenance of current ICT installations with their legacy in old
applications represent a significant bar-rier for improved technical
integration. Migration of these systems is seen as a very important subject
for both research and standardisation.
- Research issues also arise from conflicting solutions and lack of a common
base and terminology.
- Standardisation is considered very important and necessary to push EI
forward, but industry is hesitant to support the effort.
- One predominant issue identified in the promotion and implementation of EI
in industry is how to con-vince management and decision makers to invest in
enterprise-level integration. Vendors are still waiting to provide better,
more integrated, applications to support EI users. Users are still looking
for metrics of enterprise integration to justify their investments, and they
are recognising the need for strategic stan-dardisation policies in the
information-technology domain
From a technical viewpoint, integration of information and communication
technologies (ICT) looks feasible today: Highly-integrated prototypes and
commercial solutions with limited integration capability through middleware,
componentware and integration protocols are available. Research in ICT is
moving in the direction of more interoperability of components and
distributed control.
The following relevant issues have been raised by con-ference speakers:
Interoperability is a major issue: We will move from enterprises, to extended
enterprises, to virtual enterprises to reduce cost. There must exist a common
or compati-ble infrastructure. A descriptive enterprise-reference
architecture which has to have common object defini-tions, common message
handling services and common procedures for workflow control will support the
new enterprise organisational paradigms. There is also a need for loosely
coupled distributed systems.
Why can't users get what they need? Systems are too rigid and too costly. A
latest binding capability is needed to cope especially with the human related
han-dling of in-deterministic and unpredictable situations.
Why can't we get to EI? A more feasible approach may be a bottom up
permissive rather than a top-down proscriptive one. The goal is moving as
fast as culture, technology, systems, etc. and therefore the perceived end of
integrated enterprises moves Many new tech-nologies create new islands. With
current usage trends we are moving away from integration, not toward it e.g.
PCs versus mainframes. We don't treat human resources at all or at least not
properly.
What about standards? Standards are the basis for consensus and allow to
manage interaction semantics. We need standards for languages and modelling
con-structs. We need to blend R&D and clever standardisa-tion and cannot do
our research in standards committees.
The conference was accompanied by a demonstration of advanced modelling and
simulation tools, which sup-port enterprise integration. The following tools
were shown :
- SIMPLE++/VICTOR (AESOP Stuttgart/University Karlsruhe, Germany)
- FirstSTEP (Interfacing Technologies, St.Laurent-Quebec, Canada)
- ARIS Easy Design (Prof. Scheer, IWi University Saar-bruecken, Germany)
- PrimeObjects (Prof. Bruno, Politecnico di Torino, Italy)
- StructWare (TEMAS, Frasnacht, Switzerland)
The conference proceedings printed by Springer-Verlag (ISBN 3-540-63402-9)
provide with about 70 papers a very comprehensive overview on the
state-of-the-art in of enterprise integration.
The ICEIMT initiative
(For further information see
http://www.mel.nist.gov/workshop/iceimt97)
will hold further workshops. The next workshop, linked
to the European IT Conference, will take place on November 27, 1997 in
Brussels with the goal to further consolidate the EI consensus, to elaborate
awareness and acceptance in industry and to pursue the proposals for
projects. Additional workshops in 1998 will involve industry, providing
relevant feed-back from the ICEIMT, demonstrating results from applications,
modelling tools and standardisation.
Workshop Virtual Organisations - Towards the Agile Enterprise: To succeed in
the information society it becomes crucial for companies to develop new
business rules and new organisational forms. New socio-economic and working
realities emerge for the workforce and new skill profiles are required. The
Telematics Engineering Sector and ESPRIT of the Commission services have
therefore organised a work-shop, composed of a virtual part on the web site
www.nectar.org/ and a physical workshop held on No-vember 6, 1997 in
Brussels. The TELEflow project and Dr. B. Katzy, Erasmus University,
Rotterdam provided the conceptual preparation of the workshop with the
objectives to:
- Provide an overview of the state-of-the-art with a prospective trend and
identify synergies.
- Investigate how ICT will impact the development of virtual organisations.
- Identify needs and issues, establish objectives for future European
research in the 5th Framework, and facilitate networking among projects.
More than twenty projects from various EU programs contributed to the
workshop revealing a broad basis of knowledge and initiatives from multiple
backgrounds. The abundance of business practices, which are col-lected or
prototyped today manifest the industrial rele-vance of virtual organisations
and agile enterprises. There is a need of future conceptualisation and
structur-ing. The workshop results will be presented in the Euro-pean
Conference on Digital Commerce 1998 in Genoa.
Fiat Auto, in collaboration with Fiat Centro Ricerche, are developing an
integrated architecture, based on a core model representing the new products
design proc-ess, enabling the optimisation, simulation and manage-ment of
several parallel projects related to different models. Furthermore, Fiat Auto
Mains, is implementing a reference enterprise model (FCMS - flexible, modular
manufacturing system) enabling, in the future, to define, implement and
validate new enterprise systems with different context realities in a cost
and time efficient way In addition, Fiat Auto Mains is collaborating inside
the PRIMA project to apply CIMOSA methodology to the definition of a
reference model for process indus-tries. The same kind of collaboration is
given to Elf Atochem.
- November 27
-
'Increasing International Consensus in Enterprise Integration' EI-IC Workshop,
Brussels, Contact : K. Kosanke (kosanke@ipa.fhg.de)
- November 26/27
-
'DARIF Expert Forum', FZK Karlsruhe, Contact U. Mampel (mampel@iai.fzk.de)
- April 1998
-
'European Conference on Digital Commerce', Genoa/Italy,
Contact B. Katzy (katzy@fac.fbk.eur.nl)
- June 22-25, 1998
-
'EURISCON'98, the Third European Robotics, Intelligent Systems and Control Conference', Athens
- June 22-25, 1998
-
'SOFTCOM'98, IMACS International Symposium on Soft Computing in Engineering
Applications', Athens. For both events Contact S. Tzefastas
(tzafesta@softlab.ece.ntua.gr)
'CIMOSA - a primer on key concepts, purpose and busi-ness value', and
selected papers at CIMOSA web site www.cimosa.cnt.pl.
'CIMOSA - Open System Architecture for CIM', Technical Baseline, Version 3.2;
CIMOSA Association e.V., 96/02/15. A hypertext version of the Business Modelling
part of the Technical Baseline is available.
The CIMOSA Association is involved in promotion of CIMOSA, its active support in
national, European and international standardisation and in consolidation of the
evolution of its technical specifications. Members of the CIMOSA Association are
industrial and research organisations involved in exploitation of CIMOSA or interested in
the subject of enterprise integration (EI).
www-cimosa@cnt.pl, 9.12.1997 (last update: 10.12.1997)