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Technical, semantic and organizational issues of enterprise interoperability and networking
Annual Reviews in Control 34 (2010) 139–144
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Annual Reviews in Control journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/arcontrol
Technical, semantic and organizational issues of enterprise interoperability and networking§ Franc¸ois B. Vernadat LGIPM: Laboratoire de Ge´nie Industriel et Production Me´canique, ENIM/Universite´ de Metz, Ile du Saulcy, F-57045 Metz Cedex, France
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Received 12 April 2009 Accepted 22 February 2010 Available online 7 April 2010
Enterprise networking refers to any kind of organization structures in which two or more geographically dispersed business entities need to work in interaction. This can happen within a single distributed enterprise (networked enterprise) or among several enterprises (network of enterprises), including the extended enterprise or virtual organizations. This concerns any kind of organizations, e.g. industrial firms, public organizations or large government agencies. Enterprise interoperability is a sine qua noncondition for enterprise integration and networking. It largely relies on information and communication technologies (ICT), especially Internet computing. The paper uses the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) as a foundational baseline to first discuss technical, semantic and organizational aspects of enterprise interoperability and networking and finally to address some open research issues. ß 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Enterprise networking Enterprise integration Enterprise Interoperability Framework EIF Systems interoperability Semantic interoperability Internet computing
1. Introduction Enterprise networking is becoming a reality for nearly any kind of business entities or organizations, be they industrial firms, service companies, public organizations or government agencies and institutions. None of these organizations can operate in isolation anymore. Due to the effect of market globalization, of ecommerce, of having to be a member of a large supply chain, of having to maintain strong partnership with other members of an enterprise network or a virtual organization or, for government organizations, of having to cooperate with other state institutions to offer advanced and compound services to citizens, business entities need to communicate, cooperate, collaborate or interoperate with other business entities, which can be located next door or anywhere on the planet. Information and communication technologies (ICT), and especially telecommunications and Internet computing (Singh, 2005), have made this possible at the technical level. However, enterprise networking also relies on enterprise integration and interoperability principles, which have strong semantic and organizational dimensions. Enterprise integration and interoperability come into play any time that two or more business entities need to work together or
§ An earlier version of this article was presented as a keynote paper at the 13th IFAC symposium on information control problems in manufacturing (INCOM’09), Moscow, Russia, 3–5 June 2009.
E-mail address: [email protected]. 1367-5788/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.arcontrol.2010.02.009
need to share common information. This can happen at the data level, at the information system or IT application level, at the service or organization unit level as well as at the business process level. This either concerns the internal business processes and services of a given enterprise or cross-organizational business processes spanning partner companies or flowing across enterprise networks. The paper first clarifies the articulation between enterprise integration and enterprise interoperability, which are two closely connected concepts that are too often opposed or confused in the literature. Next, the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) is introduced and will be used as the baseline foundation for discussing technical, semantic and organizational aspects of enterprise interoperability. Finally, some additional aspects of enterprise interoperability and networking are discussed from a research point of view before concluding. 2. Enterprise integration and systems interoperability Enterprise integration and underlying systems interoperability aim at facilitating seamless operations between business entities, be they from a single, networked or virtual organization. While enterprise integration has a strong organizational dimension, interoperability has a more technical nature. Enterprise integration (EI), which emerged after the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) era, has been heavily discussed and investigated since the late 80s with the seminal work on the CIMOSA architecture (AMICE, 1993; Petrie, 1992). According to the
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Webster dictionary, integration means ‘‘to make a whole’’ or ‘‘to bring parts into a whole’’. Thus, EI occurs when there is a need of removing organizational barriers and/or improving interoperation and collaboration among people, systems, applications, departments and even companies (especially in terms of material flows, information/decision flows and control or work flows). The goal is to create synergy within the enterprise or the enterprise network, i.e. creating a situation in which the integrated system offers more capability than the sum of its components would simply do. From a pure organizational standpoint, EI is concerned with facilitating information, control and material flows across organization units by connecting all the necessary functions and heterogeneous functional entities (e.g. information systems, devices, applications and people) in order to improve communication, cooperation and coordination within this enterprise so that it behaves as an integrated whole, therefore enhancing its overall productivity, flexibility and capacity for management of change (i.e. reactivity) (Vernadat, 1996). Li and Williams (2004) provide a broader definition of EI stating that enterprise integration is the coordination of all elements including business, processes, people and technology of the enterprise(s) working together in order to achieve the optimal fulfillment of the business mission of that enterprise(s) as defined by the management. From a technical standpoint, integration can range from loosely coupled to tightly coupled and further to fully integrated systems. Full integration means that component systems are no longer distinguishable in the integrated whole. Tightly coupled integration means that components are still distinguishable in the whole but any modification on one of them may have direct impact on the others. Loosely coupled integration means that component systems are autonomous and continue to exist on their own but can as well work as components of the integrated system. It can be argued that loosely coupled integration equates to interoperability. Enterprise interoperability provides two or more business entities (of the same organization or from different organizations and irrespective of their location) with the ability of exchanging or sharing information (wherever it is and at any time) and using functionality of one another in a distributed and heterogeneous environment. This has only been made possible due to international standardization efforts as reviewed in Chen and Vernadat (2004) and thanks to recent and rapid advances in the fields of ICT and Internet computing (Singh, 2005). Broadly speaking, interoperability can be approximated as a measure of the ability of performing interoperation between two or more different entities (be they pieces of software, processes, systems, business units, etc.). Thus, enterprise interoperability is concerned with interoperability between organizational units or business processes either within a large (distributed) enterprise or within an enterprise network. From a technical standpoint, it therefore relies on systems interoperability defined, according to the Webster dictionary, as ‘‘the ability of a system to use part of another system’’. Enterprise integration and interoperability are too often confused or opposed in the literature. In fact, they are complementary concepts. Enterprise integration should not be reduced to the single enterprise. Both can apply to the single or to the networked enterprise. Enterprise integration provides the global picture while enterprise interoperability is only a subset of EI. Enterprise integration nowadays strongly relies on systems interoperability, but interoperable enterprise systems do not necessarily need to be integrated. Loose coupling of systems is the state of the art and the easiest solution for EI implementation (Vernadat, 2006). Integration and interoperability are being addressed by three different communities, namely industrial engineering, software engineering and business sciences. For computer science and
software engineering, interoperability is a question of levels of compatibility in terms of communication protocols, communication interfaces, data accesses, data types, data semantics, application functionality and dynamic behavior (IEC, 2002) while integration is a matter of database schemas and information systems integration (Bernstein & Haas, 2009). For management sciences, integration and interoperability are more a question of business process alignment and optimal management of value chains. Industrial engineering looks at enterprise integration and interoperability in a more global point of view, using advances and techniques from system theory, management sciences and computer sciences to address the problem from its functional, information, technical and organizational aspects. To conciliate these various approaches, reference frameworks are necessary.
3. Enterprise Interoperability Frameworks and EIF Reference frameworks are useful instruments to position and relate to one another, but also to compare, concepts, principles, methods, standards, models and tools in a certain domain of concern. Some well-known examples concern Enterprise Architecture Frameworks or reference architectures for enterprise modeling and integration such as CIMOSA (AMICE, 1993), PERA (Williams, 1992), the Zachman Framework (Zachman, 1996) or GERAM (GERAM, 1997). A number of similar frameworks have recently been proposed for enterprise interoperability. They have been reviewed by Chen, Doumeingts, and Vernadat (2008). 3.1. Enterprise Interoperability Frameworks Among the major frameworks and maturity models proposed for interoperability, one can mention: - The LISI Reference Model: LISI or ‘levels of information systems interoperability’ has been proposed by the Architecture Working Group of the US Department of Defence (on Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance – C4ISR). It provides the common vocabulary and structure needed to discuss interoperability between IT systems. It defines five levels of interoperability as follows (C4ISR, 1998): Level 0 – isolated systems (manual extraction and integration of data). Level 1 – connected interoperability in a peer-to-peer environment. Level 2 – functional interoperability in a distributed environment. Level 3 – domain-based interoperability in an integrated environment. Level 4 – enterprise-based interoperability in a universal environment. - The ATHENA Interoperability Framework (AIF): This framework has been developed as part of the EU-funded R&D project ATHENA (http://modelbased.net/aif/). AIF provides a compound framework and associated reference architecture for capturing the research elements and solutions to interoperability issues that address the problem in a holistic way by inter-relating relevant information from different perspectives of the enterprise. The framework is structured in three parts, namely: 1. Conceptual integration, which focuses on concepts, metamodels, languages and model relationships. The framework defines an interoperability reference architecture that provides a foundation for systemizing various aspects of interoperability. 2. Application integration, which focuses on methodologies, standards and domain models. The framework defines a
F.B. Vernadat / Annual Reviews in Control 34 (2010) 139–144
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Fig. 1. European Interoperability Framework.
methodology framework that provides guidelines, principles and patterns that can be used to solve interoperability issues. 3. Technical integration, which focuses on the software development and execution environments. The framework defines a technical architecture that provides development tools and execution platforms for integrating processes, services and information. The AIF interoperability reference architecture considers interoperability at four levels: data/information (for information interoperability), services (for flexible execution and composition of services), processes (for cross-organizational processes) and enterprise/business (for collaborative enterprise operations). - The E-Health Interoperability Framework: E-Health has been developed by NEHTA (National E-Health Transition Authority) of Australia. The overarching nature of the framework brings together organizational, information and technical aspects related to the delivery of interoperable services across national health organizations (www.nehta.gov.au). A similar approach is under way in Europe under the name i2-Health (www.i2helath.org). - The European Interoperability Framework (EIF): This framework is being developed under the patronage of the European Commission to support the European Union’s strategy for providing user-centered eServices between public administrations, as well as between administrations and the public (citizens and enterprises) at the pan-European level (http://ec.europa.eu/ idabc/en/document/2319). Because of its logical and universal structure, the EIF will be used as the foundational baseline for the discussions developed in this paper. Indeed, while other frameworks mostly concentrate on technical (or syntactic) and organizational aspects of interoperability, the EIF nicely brings in perspective the semantic aspects.
3.2. European Interoperability Framework (EIF) EIF is a generic framework jointly developed by the European Commission (EC) and the member states of the European Union (EU) to address business and government needs for information
exchange (IDAbc, 2004). This framework defines three essential levels (or dimensions) of interoperability, namely technical, semantic and organizational levels, respectively from bottom up as depicted in Fig. 1. Further details on each of these dimensions are given in the subsequent sections.
4. Technical, semantic and organizational aspects of interoperability 4.1. Technical issues The technical aspects of enterprise systems interoperability provide the technical foundations. They are also called the syntactical aspects of interoperability. They deal with the ‘‘plumbing’’ aspects of interoperability, i.e. facilitating communication and interchange in terms of communication protocols, data exchange and message passing among application systems. These are the far most advanced aspects of interoperability, which are still rapidly evolving due to fast technical progress in various fields of ICT. The technological challenges to be solved concern system incompatibility due to high system heterogeneity, the existence of legacy systems, the various data formats in use and the heterogeneity of ICT solutions from different vendors (computer networks, operating systems, application servers, database systems, etc.). Technologies used at this level deal with building loosely coupled systems in which applications supporting company business processes, made of services performed by technical or human agents, exchange messages (in synchronous or asynchronous modes) using neutral formats (preferably XML or XML-based) and simple transfer protocols (e.g. HTTP/HTTPS, SMTP, MIME, JMS or SOAP over TCP/IP). Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOA) (Herzum, 2002; Khalaf et al., 2005) currently represent state of the art techniques for building integrated or interoperable enterprise systems that prove to be sufficiently agile to cope with the reactivity requirements of nowadays business conditions and markets.
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Indeed, the service orientation allows on one hand to wrap legacy systems or to expose functions of existing systems as services and, on the other hand, to build new systems as a composition of Web services executed on different servers, possibly remotely located and communicating over Internet. It enforces the principle of service reuse and even makes it possible to build applications reusing services available on the Web (service marsh-up and Cloud Computing). This has to be opposed to the previous generations of distributed computing of the 90s which were first based on the client/server architecture and then on Object Request Broker (ORB) or Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) platforms. These were assuming synchronous system communication and proved to be too rigid and monolithic. Thanks to XML and HTTP, which have revolutionized modern IT, EAI and ORB platforms are now being replaced by Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) platforms. The latter use a new stack of technologies based on new languages and standards, namely HTTP, SMTP or JMS (Java Messaging System) over TCP/IP at the data transport level, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) or RosettaNet at the messaging level, WSDL (Web Service Description Language) at the service description level, UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) repositories at the service publication and discovery level and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) at the service composition level (Chappell, 2004). The challenge for technology providers such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, HP and the others, is to deliver open, reliable, scalable, secure and fast-responding solutions. A major trend that can be observed in this area is, thanks to the Internet Protocol (IP), the rapid convergence of data, voice and video solutions for unified communications (UC) to reduce infrastructure and communication costs and to offer more integrated services to users. Getting instant and secured access to your applications from anywhere at any time is really becoming a reality using wired or wireless communication channels.
1993; Panetto, Whitmann, & Chatha, 2005; Uschold, King, Moralee, & Zorgios, 1998). An ontology has been defined by Gruber (1995) as a formal specification of a conceptualization of the knowledge of some specific domain. It is used to describe in a unambiguous way, preferably in an axiomatic way, every concept used in this domain as well as their relationships and associations using axioms, predicates and formulae, for instance using first order logic or some formal notations. RDF (Resource Description Format) and OWL-S (Web Ontology Language) are state of the art languages used to express ontological models (W3C, 2004). Their use has recently been demonstrated in various research papers dealing with enterprise interoperability projects in manufacturing, oil-industry or the pharmaceutical sector. The ontology is used as a pivotal language to map concepts used in one system with concepts of another system and to resolve the semantic impedance mismatch. Ontology-based semantic interoperability is still a hot and long term research objective. One of the major challenges for integration and interoperability remains the semantic unification of concepts. There are simply too many ontologies around and no commonly agreed or standard representation of these ontologies, although OWL-S is a de facto standard. Among the problems to be solved is the ontology integration problem which can be approached from four different angles (Izza, 2009):
4.2. Semantic issues
Organizational aspects of interoperability deal with defining business goals, aligning and coordinating business processes and bringing collaboration capabilities to organizations that wish to exchange information and may have different internal structures and processes. Moreover, the aim of organizational interoperability is to address the requirements of the user community by making services available, easily identifiable, accessible and user centric. In other words, it is the ability of business organizations to provide services to each other as well as to users or customers or to the wider public in the case of administrative organizations. Common organizational problems to be solved in enterprise networking at this level include, but are not limited to: different human and organizational behaviors, different organizational structures, different business process organizations and management approaches, different senses of value creation networks, different business goals, different legal bases, legislations, cultures or methods of work and different decision-making approaches. To achieve organizational interoperability, it is necessary to coordinate business processes of cooperating business entities, define synchronization steps and messages and define coordination and collaboration mechanisms for inter-organizational processes. The use of Business Process Management (BPM) tools and methods is required for the modeling and control of these business processes, workflow engines for the coordination of the execution of the process steps defined as business services, collaborative tools and enterprise portals to provide user-friendly access to business services and information pages made available to end-users. BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) has become the de facto standard language for modeling and analyzing business
Semantic aspects of interoperability deal with data/information integration and consistency issues to support cooperation and collaboration, and especially knowledge and information sharing. Semantic interoperability can be defined as the ability to share, aggregate or synchronize data/information across heterogeneous information systems. In other words, it is about making sure that two communicating systems interpret common or shared information in a consistent way. Considering the number and variety of databases and information systems in use in any large corporation or within any supply chain, one can realize the complexity of the problem. Examples of semantic barriers and problems to be solved include: syntactic and semantic heterogeneity of information, semantic gap, i.e. different interpretations of the same concepts, database schema integration with naming problems (e.g. homonyms and synonyms), structural logical inconsistencies, etc. The goal is to provide systems with a way to interpret the meaning of data, information or knowledge. This is a hard problem and unfortunately there is no packaged or out-of-the-box solution. It is up to each company, once IT application interoperability is in place, to develop its own strategy and solution for addressing semantic interoperability. The simplest solution is to build shared metadata repositories (MDR) that describe the content and intent of data stored in the various information systems used in the enterprise or by partner companies. Examples include enterprise LDAP for users and IT resources metadata, UDDI repositories for Web service registries and thesauri. Another, more challenging, solution is to build an ontology (or ontological models) to support interoperability or integration (Fox,
Ontology mapping (i.e. establishing correspondence rules between concepts of two ontologies). Ontology alignment (i.e. bringing two or more ontologies into mutual agreement). Ontology transformation (i.e. changing the structure of the ontology to make it compliant with another). Ontology fusion (i.e. building a new ontology from two or more existing ones). 4.3. Organizational issues
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processes at the business level. The current version is BPMN 1.1 (BPMI, 2008). BPMN is a diagrammatic and semi-structured notation that provides businesses with the capability of representing their internal business procedures in a graphical language. It gives organizations the ability to depict and communicate these procedures in a standard manner. Furthermore, the graphical notation facilitates the understanding of the performance collaborations and business transactions between organizations. This ensures that companies will understand each other and that participants in their business will enable organizations to adjust to new internal and B2B business circumstances more efficiently and in due time. Obviously further research is needed in this area for better alignment of business goals and business processes in the context of enterprise networking. The theory of coordination and collaboration initiated by Malone and Crowston (1994) remains an excellent starting point.
5. Other aspects of enterprise networking Enterprise networking poses additional challenges to building integrated or interoperable systems. They require further investigations and they include: - Trust management: Enterprise networking is by nature based on the fact that two or more business entities work together, either temporarily (virtual organization) or for a long term (networked organization). Negotiation must therefore happen between partners and has been studied (for instance for risk sharing, for negotiating due dates, for building production plans, etc.). Another aspect of collaborative work is trust management, which is a function of the partner’s reliability, behavior and commitment. - Security issues: Enterprise networking forces companies to exchange a lot of information and knowledge, to open their information systems and to freely share services over Internet infrastructures. This goes against the principle of private networks on dedicated lines. However, virtual private networks (VPN) over public lines are commonly used, data and messages must be encrypted, private key infrastructures (PKI) and digital signatures may be required. There is therefore a trade-off to be balanced between openness and security, which poses new challenges in terms of IT security as opposed to ubiquitous computing. - Confidentiality issues: This point is to some extent related to the previous one. For each partner of an enterprise network, questions are: What can be shared and what cannot? Which confidentiality levels are necessary and what protection levels are associated? What happens to the my data that I share with other partners? - Legal issues: In a global economy, enterprise networking usually means working with partners in other member states or in foreign countries. Legislations are not the same. Data protection regulations may be different. Intellectual property rights (IPR) differ. So, what is the minimal common denominator that exists and what are the rules in international commerce that protect me so that I can do fair and sustainable business with my partners? - Linguistic issues: The world is multi-cultural and different populations do not necessarily speak the same language. For instance, in the European Union there are currently 27 member states which use 23 different languages. While the business world tends to use international English as a common communication language, it is not always the rule. Moreover, supra or national government organizations must provide services to citizens in the local languages, even if these services are shared
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by several countries. This later aspect makes the semantic interoperability problem even more complicated when ontologies have to take into account subtleties of different languages. Two other aspects are the focus of the research community on interoperability: metrics and scientific foundations. On scientific foundations of interoperability, it is the opinion of the author that systems theory and domain-specific microtheories sustained by ontologies must be the way. On metrics and methods for measuring enterprise system interoperability, if interoperability is a measure of the ability of two systems to perform interoperation, the metrics must measure how good or bad is this interoperation. 6. Conclusion Thanks to recent advances in Internet computing and to the service orientation (SOA), enterprise integration and enterprise systems interoperability have become a reality that largely contributes to make enterprise networking more agile, more collaborative and seamlessly interoperable. Enterprise integration and systems interoperability are fairly mature at the technical level, and they will further improve with more progress in ICT, but they fail to be fully satisfactorily addressed at the organizational level and specifically at the semantic level. Other aspects still need to be considered. They concern trust management, security issues, confidentiality issues, legal aspects and linguistic aspects, as discussed in the paper, especially in the case of international contexts (multi-national firms, international organizations or cooperation between member states). They obviously have a political dimension which can be much harder to solve than pure technical or organizational issues mentioned in this paper. References AMICE. (1993). CIMOSA: CIM open system architecture (2nd revised and extended ed.). Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Bernstein, P. A., & Haas, L. M. (2009). Information integration in the enterprise. Communications of the ACM, 51(9), 72–79. BPMI. (2008). Business Process Modeling Notation, Version 1.1. Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI). Available from http://www.bpmn.org. C4ISR. (1998). C4ISR Architecture Framework, Vers. 2.0. Washington, USA: Architecture Working Group (AWG), Department of Defence (DoD). Chappell, D. A. (2004). Enterprise Service Bus. USA: O’Reilly Media Inc. Chen, D., Doumeingts, G., & Vernadat, F. (2008). Architectures for enterprise integration and interoperability: Past, present and future. Computers in Industry, 59(7), 647– 659. Chen, D., & Vernadat, F. (2004). Standards on enterprise integration and engineering—A state of the art. International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 17(3), 235–253. Fox, M. S. (1993). Issues in enterprise modeling. IEEE conf. proc. on systems, man, and cybernetics, Vol. 1 (pp. 86–92). GERAM. (1997). Generalized enterprise reference architecture and methodology, GERAM Vers. 1.5. IFIAC-IFIP Task Force on Enterprise Integration. Gruber, R. T. (1995). Towards principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 43(5/6), 907–928. Herzum, P. (2002). Web services and service-oriented architecture, Cutter Consortium, Executive Report, Vol. 4, No. 10. IDAbc. (2004). EIF: European Interoperability Framework, Version 1.0. Brussels: European Commission. Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/2319/5644. IEC. (2002). International Electro-technical Commission, IEC-65-290-DC – TC65: Industrial Process Measurement and Control. Izza, S. (2009). Integration of industrial information systems: From syntactic to semantic integration approaches. International Journal of Enterprise Information Systems, 3(1), 1–58. Khalaf, R., Curbera, F., Nagy, W., Mukhi, N., Tai, S., & Duftler, M. (2005). Understanding Web services. In M. Singh (Ed.), Practical handbook of Internet computing. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC Press. Li, H., & Williams, T. J. (2004). A vision of enterprise integration considerations: A holistic perspective as shown by the purdue enterprise reference architecture. Proc. 4th int. conf. on enterprise integration and modeling technology (ICEIMT’04). Malone, T. W., & Crowston, K. (1994). The interdisciplinary study of coordination. ACM Computing Surveys, 26(1), 87–119.
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Panetto, H., Whitmann, L., & Chatha, K. A. (2005). Ontology for enterprise interoperability in the domain of enterprise business modeling. In H. Panetto (Ed.), Interoperability of enterprise software and applications (pp. 103–113). London: Hermes Science Publishing. Petrie, C. J. (Ed.). (1992). Enterprise integration modeling. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Singh, M. P. (Ed.). (2005). The practical handbook of Internet computing. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC Press. Uschold, M., King, M., Moralee, S., & Zorgios, Y. (1998). The enterprise ontology. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 13(1), 31–89. Vernadat, F. (2006). Interoperable enterprise systems: Architectures and methods. Proc. 12th IFAC symposium on information control problems in manufacturing (INCOM’06), Vol. 1 (pp. 13–20). Vernadat, F. B. (1996). Enterprise modeling and integration: Principles and applications. London: Chapman & Hall. W3C. (2004). OWL (Web Ontology Language). World Wide Web Consortium. Available from http://www.w3.org//2004/OWL. Williams, T. J. (1992). The purdue enterprise reference architecture. Instrument Society of America. Zachman, J. (1996). The framework for enterprise architecture: Background, description and utility. The Zachman Institute for Advancement. Available from www.zifa.com. Dr Franc¸ois Vernadat has been a research officer, first at the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC), Ottawa, in the 80s and then at the Institut National de
Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA), France, in the 90s. Since 1995 he has been a professor at the University of Metz in automatic control and industrial engineering. At the end of 2001, he joined the European Commission, DG Eurostat in Luxemburg, as an administrator in the IT Directorate and then DG Infomatics. He recently moved to the European Court of Auditors in Luxemburg, another European institution, where he is the head of the IT Development unit. His research work deals with enterprise architectures, enterprise modeling and integration, information systems design and analysis, CIM and various aspects of industrial engineering (facility layout, performance evaluation, cost estimation, and competency modeling). He has lectured in many countries in Europe, North and Latin America, China, and North Africa. He has consulted several large- and medium-sized companies in France and Canada (automotive industry, aeronautics industry, and software houses). He is the author of over 270 scientific papers in journals, conferences, and edited books. He is the author of the textbook ‘‘Enterprise Modeling and Integration: Principles and Applications’’, co-author of the book ‘‘Practice of Petri nets in Manufacturing’’ and co-editor of the book ‘‘Integrated Manufacturing Systems Engineering’’, all published by Chapman & Hall. He is as an associate editor for Computers in Industry, International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing and International Journal of Enterprise Information Systems, and he has been on the editorial board of International Journal of Production Research and Robotics and CIM. He served as vicechairman of several technical committees of the IFAC, he is a member of IEEE and ACM and he has been chairman or vice-chairman of several international conferences on industrial engineering.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Annual Reviews in Control journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/arcontrol
Technical, semantic and organizational issues of enterprise interoperability and networking§ Franc¸ois B. Vernadat LGIPM: Laboratoire de Ge´nie Industriel et Production Me´canique, ENIM/Universite´ de Metz, Ile du Saulcy, F-57045 Metz Cedex, France
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Received 12 April 2009 Accepted 22 February 2010 Available online 7 April 2010
Enterprise networking refers to any kind of organization structures in which two or more geographically dispersed business entities need to work in interaction. This can happen within a single distributed enterprise (networked enterprise) or among several enterprises (network of enterprises), including the extended enterprise or virtual organizations. This concerns any kind of organizations, e.g. industrial firms, public organizations or large government agencies. Enterprise interoperability is a sine qua noncondition for enterprise integration and networking. It largely relies on information and communication technologies (ICT), especially Internet computing. The paper uses the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) as a foundational baseline to first discuss technical, semantic and organizational aspects of enterprise interoperability and networking and finally to address some open research issues. ß 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Enterprise networking Enterprise integration Enterprise Interoperability Framework EIF Systems interoperability Semantic interoperability Internet computing
1. Introduction Enterprise networking is becoming a reality for nearly any kind of business entities or organizations, be they industrial firms, service companies, public organizations or government agencies and institutions. None of these organizations can operate in isolation anymore. Due to the effect of market globalization, of ecommerce, of having to be a member of a large supply chain, of having to maintain strong partnership with other members of an enterprise network or a virtual organization or, for government organizations, of having to cooperate with other state institutions to offer advanced and compound services to citizens, business entities need to communicate, cooperate, collaborate or interoperate with other business entities, which can be located next door or anywhere on the planet. Information and communication technologies (ICT), and especially telecommunications and Internet computing (Singh, 2005), have made this possible at the technical level. However, enterprise networking also relies on enterprise integration and interoperability principles, which have strong semantic and organizational dimensions. Enterprise integration and interoperability come into play any time that two or more business entities need to work together or
§ An earlier version of this article was presented as a keynote paper at the 13th IFAC symposium on information control problems in manufacturing (INCOM’09), Moscow, Russia, 3–5 June 2009.
E-mail address: [email protected]. 1367-5788/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.arcontrol.2010.02.009
need to share common information. This can happen at the data level, at the information system or IT application level, at the service or organization unit level as well as at the business process level. This either concerns the internal business processes and services of a given enterprise or cross-organizational business processes spanning partner companies or flowing across enterprise networks. The paper first clarifies the articulation between enterprise integration and enterprise interoperability, which are two closely connected concepts that are too often opposed or confused in the literature. Next, the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) is introduced and will be used as the baseline foundation for discussing technical, semantic and organizational aspects of enterprise interoperability. Finally, some additional aspects of enterprise interoperability and networking are discussed from a research point of view before concluding. 2. Enterprise integration and systems interoperability Enterprise integration and underlying systems interoperability aim at facilitating seamless operations between business entities, be they from a single, networked or virtual organization. While enterprise integration has a strong organizational dimension, interoperability has a more technical nature. Enterprise integration (EI), which emerged after the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) era, has been heavily discussed and investigated since the late 80s with the seminal work on the CIMOSA architecture (AMICE, 1993; Petrie, 1992). According to the
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Webster dictionary, integration means ‘‘to make a whole’’ or ‘‘to bring parts into a whole’’. Thus, EI occurs when there is a need of removing organizational barriers and/or improving interoperation and collaboration among people, systems, applications, departments and even companies (especially in terms of material flows, information/decision flows and control or work flows). The goal is to create synergy within the enterprise or the enterprise network, i.e. creating a situation in which the integrated system offers more capability than the sum of its components would simply do. From a pure organizational standpoint, EI is concerned with facilitating information, control and material flows across organization units by connecting all the necessary functions and heterogeneous functional entities (e.g. information systems, devices, applications and people) in order to improve communication, cooperation and coordination within this enterprise so that it behaves as an integrated whole, therefore enhancing its overall productivity, flexibility and capacity for management of change (i.e. reactivity) (Vernadat, 1996). Li and Williams (2004) provide a broader definition of EI stating that enterprise integration is the coordination of all elements including business, processes, people and technology of the enterprise(s) working together in order to achieve the optimal fulfillment of the business mission of that enterprise(s) as defined by the management. From a technical standpoint, integration can range from loosely coupled to tightly coupled and further to fully integrated systems. Full integration means that component systems are no longer distinguishable in the integrated whole. Tightly coupled integration means that components are still distinguishable in the whole but any modification on one of them may have direct impact on the others. Loosely coupled integration means that component systems are autonomous and continue to exist on their own but can as well work as components of the integrated system. It can be argued that loosely coupled integration equates to interoperability. Enterprise interoperability provides two or more business entities (of the same organization or from different organizations and irrespective of their location) with the ability of exchanging or sharing information (wherever it is and at any time) and using functionality of one another in a distributed and heterogeneous environment. This has only been made possible due to international standardization efforts as reviewed in Chen and Vernadat (2004) and thanks to recent and rapid advances in the fields of ICT and Internet computing (Singh, 2005). Broadly speaking, interoperability can be approximated as a measure of the ability of performing interoperation between two or more different entities (be they pieces of software, processes, systems, business units, etc.). Thus, enterprise interoperability is concerned with interoperability between organizational units or business processes either within a large (distributed) enterprise or within an enterprise network. From a technical standpoint, it therefore relies on systems interoperability defined, according to the Webster dictionary, as ‘‘the ability of a system to use part of another system’’. Enterprise integration and interoperability are too often confused or opposed in the literature. In fact, they are complementary concepts. Enterprise integration should not be reduced to the single enterprise. Both can apply to the single or to the networked enterprise. Enterprise integration provides the global picture while enterprise interoperability is only a subset of EI. Enterprise integration nowadays strongly relies on systems interoperability, but interoperable enterprise systems do not necessarily need to be integrated. Loose coupling of systems is the state of the art and the easiest solution for EI implementation (Vernadat, 2006). Integration and interoperability are being addressed by three different communities, namely industrial engineering, software engineering and business sciences. For computer science and
software engineering, interoperability is a question of levels of compatibility in terms of communication protocols, communication interfaces, data accesses, data types, data semantics, application functionality and dynamic behavior (IEC, 2002) while integration is a matter of database schemas and information systems integration (Bernstein & Haas, 2009). For management sciences, integration and interoperability are more a question of business process alignment and optimal management of value chains. Industrial engineering looks at enterprise integration and interoperability in a more global point of view, using advances and techniques from system theory, management sciences and computer sciences to address the problem from its functional, information, technical and organizational aspects. To conciliate these various approaches, reference frameworks are necessary.
3. Enterprise Interoperability Frameworks and EIF Reference frameworks are useful instruments to position and relate to one another, but also to compare, concepts, principles, methods, standards, models and tools in a certain domain of concern. Some well-known examples concern Enterprise Architecture Frameworks or reference architectures for enterprise modeling and integration such as CIMOSA (AMICE, 1993), PERA (Williams, 1992), the Zachman Framework (Zachman, 1996) or GERAM (GERAM, 1997). A number of similar frameworks have recently been proposed for enterprise interoperability. They have been reviewed by Chen, Doumeingts, and Vernadat (2008). 3.1. Enterprise Interoperability Frameworks Among the major frameworks and maturity models proposed for interoperability, one can mention: - The LISI Reference Model: LISI or ‘levels of information systems interoperability’ has been proposed by the Architecture Working Group of the US Department of Defence (on Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance – C4ISR). It provides the common vocabulary and structure needed to discuss interoperability between IT systems. It defines five levels of interoperability as follows (C4ISR, 1998): Level 0 – isolated systems (manual extraction and integration of data). Level 1 – connected interoperability in a peer-to-peer environment. Level 2 – functional interoperability in a distributed environment. Level 3 – domain-based interoperability in an integrated environment. Level 4 – enterprise-based interoperability in a universal environment. - The ATHENA Interoperability Framework (AIF): This framework has been developed as part of the EU-funded R&D project ATHENA (http://modelbased.net/aif/). AIF provides a compound framework and associated reference architecture for capturing the research elements and solutions to interoperability issues that address the problem in a holistic way by inter-relating relevant information from different perspectives of the enterprise. The framework is structured in three parts, namely: 1. Conceptual integration, which focuses on concepts, metamodels, languages and model relationships. The framework defines an interoperability reference architecture that provides a foundation for systemizing various aspects of interoperability. 2. Application integration, which focuses on methodologies, standards and domain models. The framework defines a
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Fig. 1. European Interoperability Framework.
methodology framework that provides guidelines, principles and patterns that can be used to solve interoperability issues. 3. Technical integration, which focuses on the software development and execution environments. The framework defines a technical architecture that provides development tools and execution platforms for integrating processes, services and information. The AIF interoperability reference architecture considers interoperability at four levels: data/information (for information interoperability), services (for flexible execution and composition of services), processes (for cross-organizational processes) and enterprise/business (for collaborative enterprise operations). - The E-Health Interoperability Framework: E-Health has been developed by NEHTA (National E-Health Transition Authority) of Australia. The overarching nature of the framework brings together organizational, information and technical aspects related to the delivery of interoperable services across national health organizations (www.nehta.gov.au). A similar approach is under way in Europe under the name i2-Health (www.i2helath.org). - The European Interoperability Framework (EIF): This framework is being developed under the patronage of the European Commission to support the European Union’s strategy for providing user-centered eServices between public administrations, as well as between administrations and the public (citizens and enterprises) at the pan-European level (http://ec.europa.eu/ idabc/en/document/2319). Because of its logical and universal structure, the EIF will be used as the foundational baseline for the discussions developed in this paper. Indeed, while other frameworks mostly concentrate on technical (or syntactic) and organizational aspects of interoperability, the EIF nicely brings in perspective the semantic aspects.
3.2. European Interoperability Framework (EIF) EIF is a generic framework jointly developed by the European Commission (EC) and the member states of the European Union (EU) to address business and government needs for information
exchange (IDAbc, 2004). This framework defines three essential levels (or dimensions) of interoperability, namely technical, semantic and organizational levels, respectively from bottom up as depicted in Fig. 1. Further details on each of these dimensions are given in the subsequent sections.
4. Technical, semantic and organizational aspects of interoperability 4.1. Technical issues The technical aspects of enterprise systems interoperability provide the technical foundations. They are also called the syntactical aspects of interoperability. They deal with the ‘‘plumbing’’ aspects of interoperability, i.e. facilitating communication and interchange in terms of communication protocols, data exchange and message passing among application systems. These are the far most advanced aspects of interoperability, which are still rapidly evolving due to fast technical progress in various fields of ICT. The technological challenges to be solved concern system incompatibility due to high system heterogeneity, the existence of legacy systems, the various data formats in use and the heterogeneity of ICT solutions from different vendors (computer networks, operating systems, application servers, database systems, etc.). Technologies used at this level deal with building loosely coupled systems in which applications supporting company business processes, made of services performed by technical or human agents, exchange messages (in synchronous or asynchronous modes) using neutral formats (preferably XML or XML-based) and simple transfer protocols (e.g. HTTP/HTTPS, SMTP, MIME, JMS or SOAP over TCP/IP). Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOA) (Herzum, 2002; Khalaf et al., 2005) currently represent state of the art techniques for building integrated or interoperable enterprise systems that prove to be sufficiently agile to cope with the reactivity requirements of nowadays business conditions and markets.
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Indeed, the service orientation allows on one hand to wrap legacy systems or to expose functions of existing systems as services and, on the other hand, to build new systems as a composition of Web services executed on different servers, possibly remotely located and communicating over Internet. It enforces the principle of service reuse and even makes it possible to build applications reusing services available on the Web (service marsh-up and Cloud Computing). This has to be opposed to the previous generations of distributed computing of the 90s which were first based on the client/server architecture and then on Object Request Broker (ORB) or Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) platforms. These were assuming synchronous system communication and proved to be too rigid and monolithic. Thanks to XML and HTTP, which have revolutionized modern IT, EAI and ORB platforms are now being replaced by Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) platforms. The latter use a new stack of technologies based on new languages and standards, namely HTTP, SMTP or JMS (Java Messaging System) over TCP/IP at the data transport level, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) or RosettaNet at the messaging level, WSDL (Web Service Description Language) at the service description level, UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) repositories at the service publication and discovery level and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) at the service composition level (Chappell, 2004). The challenge for technology providers such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, HP and the others, is to deliver open, reliable, scalable, secure and fast-responding solutions. A major trend that can be observed in this area is, thanks to the Internet Protocol (IP), the rapid convergence of data, voice and video solutions for unified communications (UC) to reduce infrastructure and communication costs and to offer more integrated services to users. Getting instant and secured access to your applications from anywhere at any time is really becoming a reality using wired or wireless communication channels.
1993; Panetto, Whitmann, & Chatha, 2005; Uschold, King, Moralee, & Zorgios, 1998). An ontology has been defined by Gruber (1995) as a formal specification of a conceptualization of the knowledge of some specific domain. It is used to describe in a unambiguous way, preferably in an axiomatic way, every concept used in this domain as well as their relationships and associations using axioms, predicates and formulae, for instance using first order logic or some formal notations. RDF (Resource Description Format) and OWL-S (Web Ontology Language) are state of the art languages used to express ontological models (W3C, 2004). Their use has recently been demonstrated in various research papers dealing with enterprise interoperability projects in manufacturing, oil-industry or the pharmaceutical sector. The ontology is used as a pivotal language to map concepts used in one system with concepts of another system and to resolve the semantic impedance mismatch. Ontology-based semantic interoperability is still a hot and long term research objective. One of the major challenges for integration and interoperability remains the semantic unification of concepts. There are simply too many ontologies around and no commonly agreed or standard representation of these ontologies, although OWL-S is a de facto standard. Among the problems to be solved is the ontology integration problem which can be approached from four different angles (Izza, 2009):
4.2. Semantic issues
Organizational aspects of interoperability deal with defining business goals, aligning and coordinating business processes and bringing collaboration capabilities to organizations that wish to exchange information and may have different internal structures and processes. Moreover, the aim of organizational interoperability is to address the requirements of the user community by making services available, easily identifiable, accessible and user centric. In other words, it is the ability of business organizations to provide services to each other as well as to users or customers or to the wider public in the case of administrative organizations. Common organizational problems to be solved in enterprise networking at this level include, but are not limited to: different human and organizational behaviors, different organizational structures, different business process organizations and management approaches, different senses of value creation networks, different business goals, different legal bases, legislations, cultures or methods of work and different decision-making approaches. To achieve organizational interoperability, it is necessary to coordinate business processes of cooperating business entities, define synchronization steps and messages and define coordination and collaboration mechanisms for inter-organizational processes. The use of Business Process Management (BPM) tools and methods is required for the modeling and control of these business processes, workflow engines for the coordination of the execution of the process steps defined as business services, collaborative tools and enterprise portals to provide user-friendly access to business services and information pages made available to end-users. BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) has become the de facto standard language for modeling and analyzing business
Semantic aspects of interoperability deal with data/information integration and consistency issues to support cooperation and collaboration, and especially knowledge and information sharing. Semantic interoperability can be defined as the ability to share, aggregate or synchronize data/information across heterogeneous information systems. In other words, it is about making sure that two communicating systems interpret common or shared information in a consistent way. Considering the number and variety of databases and information systems in use in any large corporation or within any supply chain, one can realize the complexity of the problem. Examples of semantic barriers and problems to be solved include: syntactic and semantic heterogeneity of information, semantic gap, i.e. different interpretations of the same concepts, database schema integration with naming problems (e.g. homonyms and synonyms), structural logical inconsistencies, etc. The goal is to provide systems with a way to interpret the meaning of data, information or knowledge. This is a hard problem and unfortunately there is no packaged or out-of-the-box solution. It is up to each company, once IT application interoperability is in place, to develop its own strategy and solution for addressing semantic interoperability. The simplest solution is to build shared metadata repositories (MDR) that describe the content and intent of data stored in the various information systems used in the enterprise or by partner companies. Examples include enterprise LDAP for users and IT resources metadata, UDDI repositories for Web service registries and thesauri. Another, more challenging, solution is to build an ontology (or ontological models) to support interoperability or integration (Fox,
Ontology mapping (i.e. establishing correspondence rules between concepts of two ontologies). Ontology alignment (i.e. bringing two or more ontologies into mutual agreement). Ontology transformation (i.e. changing the structure of the ontology to make it compliant with another). Ontology fusion (i.e. building a new ontology from two or more existing ones). 4.3. Organizational issues
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processes at the business level. The current version is BPMN 1.1 (BPMI, 2008). BPMN is a diagrammatic and semi-structured notation that provides businesses with the capability of representing their internal business procedures in a graphical language. It gives organizations the ability to depict and communicate these procedures in a standard manner. Furthermore, the graphical notation facilitates the understanding of the performance collaborations and business transactions between organizations. This ensures that companies will understand each other and that participants in their business will enable organizations to adjust to new internal and B2B business circumstances more efficiently and in due time. Obviously further research is needed in this area for better alignment of business goals and business processes in the context of enterprise networking. The theory of coordination and collaboration initiated by Malone and Crowston (1994) remains an excellent starting point.
5. Other aspects of enterprise networking Enterprise networking poses additional challenges to building integrated or interoperable systems. They require further investigations and they include: - Trust management: Enterprise networking is by nature based on the fact that two or more business entities work together, either temporarily (virtual organization) or for a long term (networked organization). Negotiation must therefore happen between partners and has been studied (for instance for risk sharing, for negotiating due dates, for building production plans, etc.). Another aspect of collaborative work is trust management, which is a function of the partner’s reliability, behavior and commitment. - Security issues: Enterprise networking forces companies to exchange a lot of information and knowledge, to open their information systems and to freely share services over Internet infrastructures. This goes against the principle of private networks on dedicated lines. However, virtual private networks (VPN) over public lines are commonly used, data and messages must be encrypted, private key infrastructures (PKI) and digital signatures may be required. There is therefore a trade-off to be balanced between openness and security, which poses new challenges in terms of IT security as opposed to ubiquitous computing. - Confidentiality issues: This point is to some extent related to the previous one. For each partner of an enterprise network, questions are: What can be shared and what cannot? Which confidentiality levels are necessary and what protection levels are associated? What happens to the my data that I share with other partners? - Legal issues: In a global economy, enterprise networking usually means working with partners in other member states or in foreign countries. Legislations are not the same. Data protection regulations may be different. Intellectual property rights (IPR) differ. So, what is the minimal common denominator that exists and what are the rules in international commerce that protect me so that I can do fair and sustainable business with my partners? - Linguistic issues: The world is multi-cultural and different populations do not necessarily speak the same language. For instance, in the European Union there are currently 27 member states which use 23 different languages. While the business world tends to use international English as a common communication language, it is not always the rule. Moreover, supra or national government organizations must provide services to citizens in the local languages, even if these services are shared
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by several countries. This later aspect makes the semantic interoperability problem even more complicated when ontologies have to take into account subtleties of different languages. Two other aspects are the focus of the research community on interoperability: metrics and scientific foundations. On scientific foundations of interoperability, it is the opinion of the author that systems theory and domain-specific microtheories sustained by ontologies must be the way. On metrics and methods for measuring enterprise system interoperability, if interoperability is a measure of the ability of two systems to perform interoperation, the metrics must measure how good or bad is this interoperation. 6. Conclusion Thanks to recent advances in Internet computing and to the service orientation (SOA), enterprise integration and enterprise systems interoperability have become a reality that largely contributes to make enterprise networking more agile, more collaborative and seamlessly interoperable. Enterprise integration and systems interoperability are fairly mature at the technical level, and they will further improve with more progress in ICT, but they fail to be fully satisfactorily addressed at the organizational level and specifically at the semantic level. Other aspects still need to be considered. They concern trust management, security issues, confidentiality issues, legal aspects and linguistic aspects, as discussed in the paper, especially in the case of international contexts (multi-national firms, international organizations or cooperation between member states). They obviously have a political dimension which can be much harder to solve than pure technical or organizational issues mentioned in this paper. References AMICE. (1993). CIMOSA: CIM open system architecture (2nd revised and extended ed.). Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Bernstein, P. A., & Haas, L. M. (2009). Information integration in the enterprise. Communications of the ACM, 51(9), 72–79. BPMI. (2008). Business Process Modeling Notation, Version 1.1. Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI). Available from http://www.bpmn.org. C4ISR. (1998). C4ISR Architecture Framework, Vers. 2.0. Washington, USA: Architecture Working Group (AWG), Department of Defence (DoD). Chappell, D. A. (2004). Enterprise Service Bus. USA: O’Reilly Media Inc. Chen, D., Doumeingts, G., & Vernadat, F. (2008). Architectures for enterprise integration and interoperability: Past, present and future. Computers in Industry, 59(7), 647– 659. Chen, D., & Vernadat, F. (2004). Standards on enterprise integration and engineering—A state of the art. International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 17(3), 235–253. Fox, M. S. (1993). Issues in enterprise modeling. IEEE conf. proc. on systems, man, and cybernetics, Vol. 1 (pp. 86–92). GERAM. (1997). Generalized enterprise reference architecture and methodology, GERAM Vers. 1.5. IFIAC-IFIP Task Force on Enterprise Integration. Gruber, R. T. (1995). Towards principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 43(5/6), 907–928. Herzum, P. (2002). Web services and service-oriented architecture, Cutter Consortium, Executive Report, Vol. 4, No. 10. IDAbc. (2004). EIF: European Interoperability Framework, Version 1.0. Brussels: European Commission. Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/2319/5644. IEC. (2002). International Electro-technical Commission, IEC-65-290-DC – TC65: Industrial Process Measurement and Control. Izza, S. (2009). Integration of industrial information systems: From syntactic to semantic integration approaches. International Journal of Enterprise Information Systems, 3(1), 1–58. Khalaf, R., Curbera, F., Nagy, W., Mukhi, N., Tai, S., & Duftler, M. (2005). Understanding Web services. In M. Singh (Ed.), Practical handbook of Internet computing. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC Press. Li, H., & Williams, T. J. (2004). A vision of enterprise integration considerations: A holistic perspective as shown by the purdue enterprise reference architecture. Proc. 4th int. conf. on enterprise integration and modeling technology (ICEIMT’04). Malone, T. W., & Crowston, K. (1994). The interdisciplinary study of coordination. ACM Computing Surveys, 26(1), 87–119.
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Panetto, H., Whitmann, L., & Chatha, K. A. (2005). Ontology for enterprise interoperability in the domain of enterprise business modeling. In H. Panetto (Ed.), Interoperability of enterprise software and applications (pp. 103–113). London: Hermes Science Publishing. Petrie, C. J. (Ed.). (1992). Enterprise integration modeling. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Singh, M. P. (Ed.). (2005). The practical handbook of Internet computing. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC Press. Uschold, M., King, M., Moralee, S., & Zorgios, Y. (1998). The enterprise ontology. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 13(1), 31–89. Vernadat, F. (2006). Interoperable enterprise systems: Architectures and methods. Proc. 12th IFAC symposium on information control problems in manufacturing (INCOM’06), Vol. 1 (pp. 13–20). Vernadat, F. B. (1996). Enterprise modeling and integration: Principles and applications. London: Chapman & Hall. W3C. (2004). OWL (Web Ontology Language). World Wide Web Consortium. Available from http://www.w3.org//2004/OWL. Williams, T. J. (1992). The purdue enterprise reference architecture. Instrument Society of America. Zachman, J. (1996). The framework for enterprise architecture: Background, description and utility. The Zachman Institute for Advancement. Available from www.zifa.com. Dr Franc¸ois Vernadat has been a research officer, first at the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC), Ottawa, in the 80s and then at the Institut National de
Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA), France, in the 90s. Since 1995 he has been a professor at the University of Metz in automatic control and industrial engineering. At the end of 2001, he joined the European Commission, DG Eurostat in Luxemburg, as an administrator in the IT Directorate and then DG Infomatics. He recently moved to the European Court of Auditors in Luxemburg, another European institution, where he is the head of the IT Development unit. His research work deals with enterprise architectures, enterprise modeling and integration, information systems design and analysis, CIM and various aspects of industrial engineering (facility layout, performance evaluation, cost estimation, and competency modeling). He has lectured in many countries in Europe, North and Latin America, China, and North Africa. He has consulted several large- and medium-sized companies in France and Canada (automotive industry, aeronautics industry, and software houses). He is the author of over 270 scientific papers in journals, conferences, and edited books. He is the author of the textbook ‘‘Enterprise Modeling and Integration: Principles and Applications’’, co-author of the book ‘‘Practice of Petri nets in Manufacturing’’ and co-editor of the book ‘‘Integrated Manufacturing Systems Engineering’’, all published by Chapman & Hall. He is as an associate editor for Computers in Industry, International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing and International Journal of Enterprise Information Systems, and he has been on the editorial board of International Journal of Production Research and Robotics and CIM. He served as vicechairman of several technical committees of the IFAC, he is a member of IEEE and ACM and he has been chairman or vice-chairman of several international conferences on industrial engineering.