CIMOSA - News
Editor: Martin Zelm, Gehenbuehlstr. 18A, D-70499 Stuttgart,
martin.zelm@t-online.de
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.
The CIMOSA Association has started a new Web site http://www.cimosa.de , which is intended to act as a focal point on Enterprise Engineering and Integration (EE&I), by identifying relevant publications (title, abstract and source) and structuring the information in different categories and sub-categories. To date three main categories have been populated:
IEMC'99 IFIP International Enterprise Modelling Conference, held in Verdal, Norway, 99-06-12/14. The conference was intended to bring together industrial practitioners and researchers to present, discuss and further develop experience with enterprise modelling. The conference was attended by an international audience of about 50 people from academia and industry. It was organised in plenary sessions with invited papers and 3 parallel sessions with a total of 30 papers. Group work on 1) Enterprise modelling in the future, 2) Enterprise modelling as a tool and 3) The extended enterprise complemented the paper presentations. As a common result of the group discussions, the development of an integrated meta-model, or at least of several meta-models - under one integrated meta-meta-model - is urgently needed. This task is to be done by formal meta-model/ontology developers and in languages such as UML, PSL, EDIF, CIMOSA.
The invited papers addressed very general topics in enterprise modelling. 1) P. Bernus, Griffith University, Australia: What, why and how to model in the enterprise; used GERAM as a generalising framework and addressed model interoperability, a reference model for virtual enterprises and plug-and-play enterprise engineering as the main research topics for future work. 2) R. Hysom, NCR, USA: Adding value to enterprise modelling, focussed on knowledge management and modelling as a means to capture the enterprise know-ledge. The paper identified a modelling framework of which two dimensions have been discussed: efficacy and perspective. Efficacy is on model ability (static, dynamic, effecting), perspective is on understanding (structure, behaviour, results). With emphasis on valuemetric models examples of static and dynamic result-type models have been presented. (modelling framework references are private publications only.) 3) N.M. Sadeh, EU, Belgium/Carnegie Mellon University, USA: MASCOT an agent based architecture for co-ordinated mixed-initiative supply chain planning and scheduling, which is built around a customisable agent wrapper concept. The conference proceedings have been made available by SINTEF, c/o G. Grøtan, N-7465 Trondheim, Norway. For copies please contact: gunnveig.grotan@indman.sintef.no.
SIIT'99 The IEEE Conference on Standardisation and Innovation, held in Aachen, Germany, 99-09-15/17 was attended by an international audience of about 70 people from standards organisations, academia and some industry. Following a keynote address by the CEU on the role of standards in the information society, several invited papers provided an overview on the situation in standardisation with emphasis on the role changes of Standard Development Organisations (SDOs) and industry consortia who develop informal and de facto industry standards. Main arguments for the establishment of industry consortia: a much stronger common interest on the subject to be standardised can be expected in a consortium rather than in the standardisation organisations, especially due to the question of IPRs (Intellectual Property Rights). Therefore, the consortia standardisation process becomes much faster, is less expensive, and its results may be more predictable than in SDOs. Panel discussions and a workshop on electronic tools to support standardisation with 4 presentations complemented the presentations.
The SIIT’99 Proceedings are published by IEEE, ISBN 0-7803-9935-8. For copies please contact: kai.jakobs@i4.informatik.rwth-aachen.de.
Enterprise modelling in the virtual enterprise using CIMOSA, is the subject of two projects at the SME Centre of the Engineering School, Chur, Switzerland.
Capricorn has the objective to commonly improve the resource utilisation of people and material, balance the manufacturing capacities and enable online communication between SMEs in the local metal cutting industry. Today, the three SMEs in the network are using a common data base containing their technical skills and machining capacities. Order planning and fulfilment operation is performed with inquiries to this data base using internet communication.
Shared Net Services is aiming at the evaluation of the pooling potential of internal and external services required by SMEs. For instance to elaborate which services needed for the value added processes can be provided by shared service pools or can a common organisation of services improve the competitiveness. Partners of the Engineering School Chur are ITEM University St.Gallen and seven SMEs. For more information contact Dr. Mathias Müller at mamu@fh-hwtchur.ch.
ICIMS-TC3, the technical committee on Systems Engineering of the European Project 23447 ICIMS-NOE (Intelligent Control Integrated Manufacturing Systems-Network Of Excellence) has the objective to promote a more global approach of modelling complex production systems, in interaction between industrialists and academicians. Intelligent Control and Integrated Manufacturing Systems (ICIMS) refers both to information and software-based intelligence to organise human beings and artificial machines into an entire Enterprise system to satisfy user's needs and to preserve environmental concerns through an engineering process.
Roadmap: Despite the increasing capabilities of information technologies, systems engineering, as an interdisciplinary process throughout a whole systems life cycle, is not yet efficient since industrial systems become more complex and inter related within a global market. That is on one hand a result of the dominant scientific approach to problem solving, based on the Cartesian paradigm enabling reductionism "to look inwards" into a system to locally optimise how it works, instead of enabling synthesis to "look outwards" from a system to globally understand its interactions both with its environment and other systems for tackling complex issues, messy problems and difficult situations as Systemic paradigm focuses.
It is on the other hand a result of the pragmatic industrial approach to real life situations solving, based on Standardised Capability Maturity Models to focus and guide engineer's improvement activities without rationally founding the correspondent emerging paradigms.
The challenge of Systems Engineering through the ICIMS-TC3 will be to scientifically founding the concepts, theories, models, methods, methodologies, languages and tools providing global systemic engineering to the IT user's friendly society for both Research & Development and Education & Training. The CIMOSA Association will co-operate with ICIMS-TC3. For information contact G. Morel, morel@apollo.cran.u-nancy.fr or http://www.lar.ee.upatras.gr
The DARIF project, supported by the German Ministry for Research and Education has been closed with a workshop held on 99-09-22 at the Institute for Machine Tools and Production Science at the University Karlsruhe. It is remarkable that the developed prototypes concerned with (CIMOSA based) business process modelling via timed Petri nets and model execution with a workflow management application have lead to follow up extensions and further industrial applications. Also the hypermedia based enterprise information system called 'collaborative information space', has found wide interest and has become a commercial product marketed by a consulting firm. For further information contact karlheinz.sternemann@mach.uni-karlsruhe.de.
Special Issue in Computers in Industry, on ‘CIMOSA: CIM Open Systems Architecture - Evolution and Application in Enterprise Engineering and Integration’ with papers on evolution and applications of Enterprise Engineering and Integration, tools and infrastructures as well as standardisation. The special issue will be published as Vol.40, Nr. 2-3 in November 1999.
‘Enterprise Engineering and Integration - Why and How', a primer on concepts, purpose and business value, CIMOSA Association, private publication.
‘CIMOSA - a primer on key concepts, purpose and business value’, CIMOSA Association
This brochure as well as other selected papers, abstracts and literature hyperlinks are available at www.cimosa.de and cimosa.cnt.pl.
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.