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 http://www.cimosa.de.

• ICEIMT’02 Conference
• Reports from Events
• The UEML Project
• EE&I Standardisation
• Upcoming Events

ICEIMT'02 Conference

The ICEIMT’02 - International Conference on Enterprise Integration Modelling Technology - was held at the Politechnic University of Valencia, Spain, 2002.04.24-26. Attended by over 70 people from industry and academia, the focus was on inter and intra-organizational integration for e-commerce. The conference had a single stream of presentations and the agenda was organised according to the themes and sequence of the workshops. These were:

• Knowledge management in inter- and intra-organization environments (Workshop 1)
• Enterprise inter- and intra-organization engi-neering and integration (Workshop 2)
• Interoperability of business processes and en-terprise models (Workshop 3)
• Common representation of enterprise models (Workshop 4)

Each theme session started with an overview paper on the subject followed by the workgroup reports. Papers on selected topics supplemented the information obtained from the workgroups. The opening sessions started with welcome addresses by the Valencia regional government and the University followed by presentations from the two main sponsors – the European Commission and the National Institute of Standards and Technology - and a keynote paper on enterprise modelling. A special session near the end of the conference provided information on international projects. With participants approval, the closing session of the conference was changed to an interactive discussion on the future of the initiative on international consensus.

The discussion identified discrete areas of need. These are listed below in no particular order. Discussants had a diversity of opinion on priorities. Everyone agreed that the core emphasis on enterprise integration must be maintained. Also, voices expressed unanimous agreement that the interdisciplinary approach to the work be emphasized. Most participants seemed to agree that the primary focus should be on consistently improving solutions and the supply of practitioners rather than attracting users.
In supporting the "supply" side, all agreed that the future of the community should be taken into its own hands as an international concern rather than relying on forthcoming support from the EU as the driving factor. Independently, the immense influence of the web indicates that the EI community needs to be more active in relevant web developments.

List of identified needs and actions:

• Establish an educational program to create a science of enterprise integration (Mark Fox)
• Create a publication venue: Mark Fox also offered to host the first EI Conference in Toronto in 2004.
• Continue the workshop process: Many people spoke of the value of the ICEIMT workshops as the primary vehicle for sharing ideas, getting reality checks, and establishing research directions.
• Support EI standards: The reasoning was that the EI community depends on standards as a key strategy and focus for interaction.
• Develop a clear business case, probably to be satisfied through practical user consciousness in the above listed actions.

These abstracts of the presentations will be pub-lished on the CIMOSA web site http://www.cimosa.de as soon as the server will become available again (currently out of service due to continuous hacker attacks). The conference proceedings will be published by Kluwer Academic Publishers and will become available in August 2002.

Reports from the preceding EI3-IC workshops

Workshop 4: Common representation of enterprise models, IPK Fraunhofer, Berlin, 02-02-20-22, with two working groups. The main focus of WG1 was on user enabled process modelling, trying to identify the pros and cons of model re-engineering for decision support by the people involved in the process to be changed. WG2 focused on radical, but practical strategies for greatly improving enterprise modelling and process modelling in an enterprise context. The group’s work centred on improving user benefits in the context of common models, enterprise context and enterprise views. Major problems addressed: multiworld views, soft modelling and meta-modelling theories. Several research projects have been proposed.

Reports from events

The PRO-VE'02 Conference was organised by the University of Lisbon and held in Sesimbra, Portugal, on 2002-05-01/03, with an attendance of over 100 people from academia and industry coming from all five continents. The conference was organised in 6 plenary and 19 parallel sessions with a total of 82 presentations that covered the following Virtual Enterprise (VE) related themes, with the detail themes in parentheses:
 

• Creation (Strategic Planning, Negotiations and Contracting, Virtual Communities, Training and New Ways of Work)
• Implementations (Economic Aspects and Per-formance Metrics, Brokerage in VE, Virtual Laboratories and Remote Collaboration)
• Management (Contract Management, Knowledge Management, Workflow Management, Order Planning and Optimisation)
• Models (Enterprise Modelling Frameworks, VE Creation Models, Reference Models)
• Infrastructures (Requirements, Agent-Based Infrastructures, Support Infrastructures)


In addition, papers on applications (Industry Case Studies, New Application Cases, Best Practice Methodologies), request for VE collaboration and related EU Programmes were presented. Proceedings of the conference have been published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, titled ‘Collaborative Business Ecosystems and Virtual Enterprises’, ISBN 1-4020-7020-9
 

The UEML Project

Initiated by F. Vernadat in the UEML section of the IFAC/IFIP Taskforce, an UEML project - Unified Enterprise Modelling Language -has been launched to prepare the development of core constructs that will serve as a standard user interface to access existing Enterprise Modelling tools, as neutral model exchange format among tools and as the basis for building Enterprise Repositories deployed via shared enterprise model servers. The main goal of the UEML Project is to provide industry with a unified and expandable Modelling Language. For this purpose, the project is setting up an UEML Working Group, which aims at:
 

• creating a European consensus on a common Enterprise Modelling Language and to facilitate interoperability within the frame of ongoing standardisation efforts in this domain. The common language representing this consensus will be defined in terms of a core set of modelling constructs.
• building an UEML demonstrator to promote, test, and collect comments, validate and improve the proposed Modelling Language Constructs.
• preparing the launching of a project to define, implement, and promote the complete UEML.


The core group of this European Project IST – 2001 – 34229 consists of eight partners from five countries, namely, GRAISOFT (associated to the LAP/GRAI-University Bordeaux 1 and LABRI-University Bordeaux 1) (F) as prime contractor, INRIA (associated with CRAN-University Henri Poincaré Nancy 1) (F), COMPUTAS AS (N), CIMOSA Association (D), IPK/FhG Berlin (D), University of Torino (I), University of Namur (B), Polyechnic University of Valencia (E). The current activities - started in March 2002 for a 15 month period - are focussing on preparing the UEML network, gathering the state of the art, as well as the requirements for the language constructs, a demo scenario and the demonstrator. More info can be found at  http://www.UEML.org .
.

EE&I Standardisation

The IEC/ISO JWG15 meeting was held at AFNOR in Paris, France, on March 13, 2002. For information: dennis_brandl@bellsouth.net.

ISO TC 184 SC5 WG 1 and WG4 held their meetings at the University of Valencia, Spain, on April 22/23, prior to the ICEIMT’02. For information on WG1 nell@cme.nist.gov and  WG4 matsuda@ic.kanagawa-it.ac.jp
 

Upcoming Events

• CARS&FOF, 18th International Conference on CAD/CAM, Robotics and Factories of the Future, Porto, Portugal, 2002-07-03/05, contact jjpf@fe.up.pt
• SCI 2002, the 6th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, Orlando, Florida, USA, 02-07-14/18, http://www.iiis.org/sci2002
• ICE 8th International Conference on Concur-rent Enterprising, Rome, Italy, 2002-07-17/19, http://www.ice2002.org
• XV IFAC'02 World Congress, Barcelona, Spain, 2002-07-21/26, http://www.ifac2002.org.
• IST 2002 Copenhagen, 4-6 November, 2002, http://www.woco.dk

CIMOSA Association

The CIMOSA Association (COA) is a non-profit organisation involved in promotion of Enterprise Engineering and Integration based on CIMOSA and its active support in national, European and international standardisation. COA members are industrial and research organisations.