Development of an integrated methodology for enterprise engineering

Existing public domain enterprise engineering methodologies provide a backbone of modelling concepts designed to maintain consistency between common engineering concerns during different life phases of enterprise systems. The literature reports industrial examples of the use of such a backbone of modelling concepts to formally structure and support large-scale systems engineering. This has led to improved problem decompositions and improved reuse of models (and hence knowledge) describing large-scale systems integration issues, mainly within a single business. Generally, however, existing enterprise engineering methodologies and modelling backbones cover less well the development and reuse of models of collaboration and interaction between business units. This makes them less well suited to modelling certain dynamic aspects of partner interactions both between businesses and within a single business. Therefore there arises a need for an extended backbone of enterprise engineering methods and modelling concepts. This paper describes the Integrated Methodology for Enterprise Engineering (IMEE) which has been developed to meet key aspects of modelling multi-partner enterprises. IMEE incorporates two complementary kinds of modelling concept, namely (1) process oriented modelling in support of enterprise requirements capture and analysis, centred on ‘function’, ‘activity’ and ‘dynamic systems’ modelling and simulation approaches and (2) object-oriented modelling in support of the conceptual design of multiple business systems, centred on ‘function’, ‘information’ and ‘behaviour’ modelling. Where practical, existing and well proven concepts have been selected and integrated into the IMEE modelling backbone, the purpose being to improve the completeness, acceptability and practicability of its approaches to business integration.