Economic Models - Convex Optimization

126 Nikitas Spiros Koutsoukis
(3) Up-date the information in real time to reflect the actual state of the
enterprise operation: enterprises must be able to adopt changes regarding
both their external environment i.e., technology, legislation, and
their internal environment i.e., production operations in order to protect
the enterprise goal and objective from becoming obsolete.
(4) Co-ordinate business processes: This requires decisional capabilities
and know-how within the enterprise for real-time decision support
and evaluation of operational alternatives based on business process
modeling.
The aims of EI are:
• to enable communication among the various functional entities of the
enterprise;
• to provide interoperability of IT applications (plug-and-play approach)
and
• to facilitate coordination of functional entities for executing business
processes so that they synergistically fulfill enterprise goals.
The main motivation for EI is to make possible true interoperability
among heterogeneous, remotely located, systems within, or outside the
enterprise in an independent IT vendor environment.
Enterprise integration, especially for networked companies and large
manufacturing enterprises is becoming a reality. The issue is that EI is both
an organizational and a technological matter. The organizational matter
is partly understood so far whereas the technological matter lies with the
major advances over the last decade. It concerns mostly computer communications
technology, data exchange formats, distributed databases, object
technology, Internet, object request brokers (ORB such as OMG/CORBA),
distributed computing environments (such as OSF/DCE and MS DCOM,
and now Java to enterprise edition and execution environments (J2EE).
Some important projects developing integrating infrastructure (IIS)
technology for manufacturing environments include:
• CIMOSA IIS: The CIMOSA integrated infrastructure (IIS) enables
business process control in a heterogeneous IT environment. In IIS, an
enterprise is composed of functional entities, which are connected by a
communication system. Functional entities can be a machine, a software
application, or a human (Vernadat, 2002).
• AIT IP: This is an integration platform developed as an AIT project and
based on the CIMOSA IIS concepts (Waite, 1998).