CIMOSA - News

Vol. 5/1, date 98-04-10

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

ICEIMT'97 Workshops

Within the joined European - USA Esprit Project 21859 'Enterprise Integration- International Consensus', a series of regional workshops will take place in 2Q 1998 in Berlin (May 7-8), Paris (May 18-19), Edinburg (June 02-03). A fourth workshop planned for Turin has been postponed (see Events below for details). All workshops will be held in the national language.

The workshops will provide a practical overview on enterprise integration and present successful industrial applications and their benefits. The workshops will build on the results of five international workshops and the international conference in Turin in October 1997. Deci-sion support tools will be presented by enterprise mod-elling tool vendors. Anticipated future developments in building on international consensus and standards will be presented, and there will be opportunities for discus-sion of the particular needs of the participants own or-ganisation.

CIMOSA Modelling Applications

Fiat Auto, in collaboration with Fiat Centro Ricerche, has developed partial (re-usable) enterprise models for decision support on the operational level. The approach FIAT is taking is that models are tools which are de-signed and developed by the users. For this purpose, a customisable, re-usable model, the Dynamic Emulator has been developed. In this emulator, representative components of the information and communication system are modelled and are integrated with the opera-tion logistic and the product flow. Particular models derived from this partial model are used for analysis, test and optimisation of new production processes or modi-fied manufacturing lines prior to the real start up, which results in a significant time-to-market benefit. In addi-tion, the models are employed for management and control of the operation in the production flow. This modelling approach has been employed for different business processes and scenarios like control of the material flow, work in process (WIP) or body assembly processes at several manufacturing locations.

Co-operation with PRIMA

The ESPRIT Project PRIMA II (EP 20775), represented through EniChem - one of its core member companies has become a member of the CIMOSA Association. PRIMA a project consortium of the European process industry, is represented by IT users and therefore its work on enterprise modelling is exclusively from a user perspective. Two relevant areas of strategic interest of PRIMA are the development of business functional requirements (BFRs) and enterprise modelling. To date, the BFRs of fifteen high level business processes have been developed and documented in textual form. The BFRs for in service inspection and for the product mar-ket forecast process have been implemented as CIMOSA requirement models on the CimTool of RGCP (Contact rgaches@aol.com).

In a plenary meeting with the PRIMA Project Associ-ates, the business values of BFRs - process visualisation, clarification, navigation and re-engineering - were dis-cussed. Some activities have started to further exploit and utilise BFRs through a common model documenta-tion in a process repository and through further imple-mentation on tools which enable business process simu-lation for decision support. In this context, a co-operation on enterprise modelling between PRIMA and the CIMOSA Association has been initiated.

CILT - CIMOSA Learning Tool (New Version)

A multimedia tool - CILT (CIMOSA Learning Tool for enterprise integration) - has been developed by GIP (Gestión e Ingeniería de la Producción) a Spanish re-search group at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia involved in R&D and education. The CILT tool guides the user in an interactive mode through the subjects of enterprise integration, CIMOSA enterprise modelling and the CIMOSA integrating infrastructure. Each chap-ter is devised into an introductory part giving a brief overview and a more detailed representation for the advanced reader. The tool is designed using hypertext technology, with animation and very impressive graph-ics. It is built in a simple layered structure for easy use and navigation. The tool comes on a CD and can be ordered from GIP, for more information contact Angel Ortiz Bas aortiz@omp.upv.es.

Reports from Events: DARIF Forum Karlsruhe

An open forum meeting of the DARIF project consortium was held in Karlsruhe/Germany on November 26/27, 1997 with over 100 participants. The objective of the forum was to demonstrate the project development, which is follows three main directions. (i) design and utilisation of transparent business processes - based on CIMOSA and Petri-Nets - in manufacturing and in hu-man communication processes. (ii) knowledge manage-ment with the Team Information System (TIS) in de-centralised enterprise structures and, (iii) applications of business process and workflow management with inter-net technologies, especially for SMEs. Prototypes of the three developments were shown, several of them have already been implemented at the four SMEs within the DARIF project. Parallel to the presentations, commer-cial demos set up by partners of the DARIF project were shown, which addressed internet enabled manufacturing and technologies to integrate legacy applications as SAP R/3 via the internet The forum presentations can be found at the server (http://www.darif.fh-offenburg.de).

ISO TC184/SC5/WG1 Meeting Boulder

Objective of the meeting held on February 23/24 was to review the last version of ISO/WD 15704 'Requirements for Enterprise Reference Architectures and Methodolo-gies', document N418. Comments on the document, which have been distributed and discussed at the meet-ing, have lead to a new version of the working draft (N420). Issues are how to incorporate parts of ENV 40003 - e.g. the mandatory model views - in order to enable replacement of the CEN pre-standard by ISO 15704. The next meeting will be held in Paris, May 10/12. Deadline for the CD 15704 (Committee Draft) is September 1998.

CEN TC 310 Meeting on EMEIS

The meeting on April 2 focused on the new work item 'ENV for EMEIS' (Enterprise Model Execution and Integration Services) for which a mandate has been issued by CEN. EMEIS will cover both model develop-ment services (MDS) and model execution services (MXS). This will make the ENV relevant for both mod-elling tool providers and those infrastructures providers who will support model execution as well. Contact to tool vendors and infrastructure projects (e.g. AIT) will be established to get early feedback on the draft ENV contents.

The ENV will identify service functionality required for model development and model enactment for simulation and model based monitoring and control. The standard will enable model portability and model interworking using both the ENV 40003 Framework for Enterprise Modelling and the ENV 12204 Constructs for Enterprise Modelling as part of its technical baseline.

The next meeting is planned for Brussels, May 26-27 1998. The draft document of the ENV will become available by the end of the year.

Book Review

The thesis of Barbara Janusz from University Karlsruhe/Germany about 'Model based re-organisation of business processes' , describes a new mathematical approach for model based software supported re-organisation of business processes - especially to find deficiencies in As-Is processes and to optimise To-Be processes. The approach provides algorithms both for the quantitative analysis of the As-Is process as well as for optimisation of the To-Be process. It starts from a CIMOSA (requirements) model of business processes or activity chains. The CIMOSA templates provide enough rigidity for a formal specification of the model. The CIMOSA model is converted into an analytical model, complete activity chains can be represented as matrices or received through matrix algebra. Mathematical crite-ria have been developed to detect deficiencies in the As-Is process - redundant activities, serial instead of paral-lel activities - as well as solution algorithms to optimise the To-Be process.

Upcoming Events (see also this page)

EI-IC Regional Workshops on Enterprise Integration in Industrial Enterprises are planned in 1998: contact K. Kosanke (kosanke@ipa.fhg.de) for all workshops

Other Events :

CIMOSA promotion material

'CIMOSA - a primer on key concepts, purpose and busi-ness value', and selected papers at CIMOSA web site www.cimosa.cnt.pl.

CIMOSA Literature

'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.

ICEIMT Proceedings

'Enterprise Engineering and Integration: Building In-ternational Consensus; Proceedings of ICEIMT'97 Intern. Conf. on Enterprise Integration and Modelling Technology; Kosanke, K., Nell, J.G. (Ed's) Springer Verlag 1997, (ISBN 3-540-63402-9)

CIMOSA Association (see also this page)

The CIMOSA Association (COA) is a non-profit organi-sation involved in promotion of Enterprise Engineering and Integration based on CIMOSA and its active support in national, European and international standardisation. Members of the COA are industrial and research organi-sations involved in the exploitation of CIMOSA or in-terested in the subject of enterprise engineering and integration (EI).

www-cimosa@cnt.pl, 24.04.1998 (last update: 24.04.1998)