Interoperable enterprise systems: Principles, concepts, and methods

Information Systems and e-Business Management, 2014

Computers in Industry, 2008

The paper defines and clarifies basic concepts of enterprise architectures. Then an overview on architectures for enterprise integration developed since the middle of the 1980s is presented. The main part of the paper focuses on the recent developments on ...

… Journal for E-Commerce Tools and …, 2008

2013

Abstract. The application of enterprise modelling supports the common understanding of the enterprise business processes in the company and across companies. To assure a correct cooperation between two or more entities it is mandatory to build an appropriate model of them. This can lead to a stronger amplification of all the cross-interface activities between the entities. Enterprise models illustrate the organisational business aspects as a prerequisite for the successful technical integration of IT systems or their configurations. If an IT system is not accepted because its usefulness is not transparent to the staff members, then it quickly loses its value due to erroneous or incomplete input and insufficient maintenance. This at the end results in investment losses. The paper exemplifies the strengths, values, limitations and gaps of the application of enterprise modelling to support interoperability between companies. It illustrates a proposal for a common enterprise-modelling f...

Systems Engineering, 2015

During the last decades, many enterprises have transformed to technology based organizations. However, in order to manage this transformation, technology-intensive enterprises have to deal with new opportunities and threats that the information age has created. Many enterprises use a wide range of heterogeneous systems and networks to support a variety of users. In practice, the development and operation of these heterogeneous systems is usually distributed and unsynchronized, although operational interoperability and system integration are required to support cross-enterprise processes and decision making. Enterprise systems engineering (ESE) processes can provide the opportunity to deal with these new challenges of achieving better operational interoperability as well as system interoperability. Our basic claim is that ESE differs significantly from systems engineering (SE). This paper identifies the differences between them and discusses complex emerging challenges of ESE. Our contribution in this paper is to identify relevant state of the art research and practice frontier in ESE that are closest to meet ESE challenges and clarify existing gaps. By recognizing the gaps in existing methods, we define a foundation for a new approach to address these gaps. The main realization of this research involves the need to use systems engineering methodologies, tailored to, and driven from, the enterprise specific operational processes, to improve the effectiveness of these processes, as part of the enterprise strategy.

Computers in Industry, 2015

The rapid changes in today's socio-economic and technological environment in which the enterprises operate necessitate the identification of new requirements that address both theoretical and practical aspects of the Enterprise Information Systems (EIS). Such an evolving environment contributes to both the process and the system complexity which cannot be handled by the traditional architectures. The constant pressure of requirements for more data, more collaboration and more flexibility motivates us to discuss about the concept of Next Generation EIS (NG EIS) which is federated, omnipresent, model-driven, open, reconfigurable and aware. All these properties imply that the future enterprise system is inherently interoperable. This position paper presents the discussion that spans several research challenges of future interoperable enterprise systems, specialized from the existing general research priorities and directions of IFAC Technical Committee 5.3 1 , namely: context-aware systems, semantic interoperability, cyber-physical systems, cloud-based systems and interoperability assessment.

2007

Interoperability is central to any form of collaboration between organizations, as it enables information and knowledge sharing by cooperating entities within and across organizational boundaries. Interoperability is particularly important in the public sector where collaboration between public agencies is necessary to realize the notions of seamless services and one-stop government. Enterprise Architectures comprise models and tools to support decisionmaking and development particularly related to IT applications within an enterprise. This paper presents a survey of Enterprise Architectures focused on the question to what extent they support interoperability among organizations. The work has been carried out as part of a project to build a foundation for the development of an interoperability infrastructure for Electronic Government.

Proceedings of CENT, 2011

Enterprise Interoperability is perceived as a capacity of two or more enterprises, including all the systems within their boundaries and the external systems that they utilize or are affected by, in order to cooperate seamlessly, in an automated manner, in depth of time for a common objective. The different layers of Interoperability define in high level the necessary stack for interoperable systems, however, their abstraction level hinders researchers and practitioners to really identify problems and provide solutions, as those ...

IFAC Proceedings Volumes, 2006

Enterprise integration (EI) is the re-engineering of business processes and information systems to improve teamwork and coordination across organizational boundaries, thereby increasing the effectiveness of the enterprise as a whole. EI is enabled by interoperating enterprise models. This paper presents an IDEF0 model specifying an approach for interoperating dissimilar enterprise models. Enterprise models are transformed by the activity, "interoperate enterprise model" into interoperable enterprise models. This activity is decomposed into the following five functions: Define metamodels, Validate the meta-model, Investigate and define the relations between the enterprise modelling languages, and Validate unified meta-model. These functions are described in detail in this paper.

2006

The interoperability in enterprise applications can be defined as the ability of a system or a product to work with other systems or products without special effort from the customer or user. The possibility to interact and exchange information with internal and external collaborators is a key issue in the enterprise sector. It is fundamental in order to produce goods and services quickly, at lower cost, while maintaining higher levels of quality and customisation. Interoperability is considered to be achieved if the interaction can, at least, take place at the three levels: data, applications and business enterprise through the architecture of the enterprise model and taking into account the semantics. It is not only a problem of software and IT technologies. It implies support for communication and transactions between different organisations that must be based on shared business references. The I-ESA conference aimed at bringing together researches, users and practitioners dealing with different issues of Interoperability for Enterprise Software and Applications. The conference focused on interoperability related research areas ranging like Enterprise Modelling to define interoperability requirements, Architecture and Platforms to provide implementation frameworks and Ontologies to define interoperability semantics in the enterprise.