Model-Based Systems Engineering for Next- Generation Enterprise Information Systems

dr Milan ZDRAVKOVIĆ, Laboratory for Intelligent Production Systems, University of Niš, Serbia, http://www.masfak.ni.ac.rs/milan.zdravkovic Email: [email protected] Prof. dr Hervé PANETTO, Research Centre for Automatic Control, University of Lorraine, CNRS. School of Engineering in Information Technology, France, http://www.panetto.fr/ Email: [email protected] Background and motivation Transformation of the environment in which Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) are operating today is posing the new challenges to their modeling, design, implementation and use. One of the crucial circumstances of this transformation is removal of their traditional boundaries. The challenges arising from the increased requirements for flexibility in enterprise collaboration put a lot of pressure to the research on EIS integration and interoperability; they also urge for tools and approaches for rapid and active adaption of those EISs to the changing environment . The research and development of multi-agent systems paradigm are enabling EISs with multiple identities which are now representing enterprises in the digital space. The development of the Cyber-physical networks and the Internet of Things expanded the EIS scope, by introducing sensing and location-awareness aspects. The advances in cloud-based computing clearly established the distribution of the EISs’ functional and storage capabilities as the default approach to their designs. In a recently submitted position paper, based on the above circumstances, the Technical committee for Enterprise Integration and Networking of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC TC5.3) proposed the concept of the Next Generation EIS (NG EIS), which is federated, omnipresent, model-driven, open, reconfigurable and aware. All these properties imply that the future NG EIS is inherently, natively interoperable. Goals and topics One of the important effects of the foreseen properties, as EISs are becoming more complex, the gap between the problem-level software abstractions of the EIS aspects on one side and their implementations, on another, will significantly increase. This increase will put a lot of pressure on the traditional model-based system engineering (MBSE) theory and practice. In attempt to anticipate the directions for their future development, the special issue aims at addressing the implications arising from the foreseen evolution towards NG EIS. Some of the open problems are described, as it follows: Runtime models. Runtime models can facilitate removing complexity from EIS architecture. Hence, in the future, EIS may in fact become core execution platforms which only interpret and execute different models. Is this vision far from reality? Context models. The context models can specify the surrounding environment of one EIS, including its behavior http://www.springer.com/ /10257 CALL FOR PAPERS