The project is about the application of formal methods to enterprise engineering, for business organisations in general and for manufacturing organisations in particular. We study formally-based notations, methods and tools to analyse, design and re-design an enterprise as an engineering artifact. We emphasise the need for building representations of enterprises at different levels of abstraction and the need for formal underpinning for such representations to allow comparing them. The issues range from building enterprise models, relating models at different levels of abstraction, analysis of models at given level, refinement from abstract to concrete models, composition of models to represent virtual organisations, implementation using current information technology etc.
By addressing such issues formally, we aim to provide a technical context to express and support newly emerged concepts like outsourcing and virtual organisations, business process engineering and re-engineering, recycling and product life-cycle, lean and just-in-time production, concepts which are increasingly adopted by manufacturing organisations worldwide to address challenges of global competition and unstable market conditions.
September 1997 - May 1999 (Phase 3)
In the current phase we concentrate on modelling of virtual organisations, composed from the enterprises for manufacturing discrete-parts products. We adopted a unified view on modelling core activities of an enterprise in terms of product-related resources, processes and business goals. The goal is to fulfill a set of orders for manufacturing and delivery of products to customers (other enterprises). Each customer order is implemented by a single process which executes a sequence of manufacturing operations on the shared resources, concurrently with other processes. The process may also issue orders for buying products from other enterprises, making its own goal conditional on the satisfaction of such orders. In the virtual organisation we are able to model supply-chains, outsourcing and cooperation between individual enterprises. We allow enterprises to interact by matching one enterprise's purchase orders with another enterprise's customer orders. We allow them to cooperate by a process which partly executes on the resources of one enterprise and partly on another's, crossing organisational boundaries. We also allow them to compete for purchase orders, by marketing activities which can influence the consumer's choice.
In this stage, we revised Research Report 92 about the integration of enterprise models and models for marketing analysis, which was presented by Gustavo Lugo at the 2nd IFIP Conference "Design of Information Infrastructure Systems for Manufacturing" (DIISM98), Denver, USA, May 1998 [1]. We also produced report Research Report 131 about composition of enterprise models, which was presented by Tomasz Janowski at the 3rd IEEE/IFIP International Conference: Information Technology For Balanced Automation Systems in Manufacturing (BASYS98), August 1998, Prague, Czech Republic [2]. Finally, we also produced report Research Report 137 about operational semantics for enterprise models, which was presented by Zheng Hongjun at the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods (ICFEM'98), December 1998, Brisbane, Australia [3].
The project is expected to continue. With two fellows from CIMS Centre in Tsinghua University, China, we aim to extend the model to include service-based interaction between members of a virtual enterprise, including but not limited to manufacturing services (e.g. logistics, sales, product design, production planning). With Liu Yonghe we also aim to design prototype software for partner selection for the virtual enterprise.