Enterprise Integration : operational models of business processes and workflow systems

The complexity of modern enterprises makes enterprise modeling a major issue. The need for integrating several different features requires a powerful modeling technique, such as CIMOSA, able to represent functional, control, informational and organizational aspects. However, the study of a system yields limited results as long as it only consists of inspecting a static model. More effective results can be achieved if an operational (i.e. executable) model is available. This paper presents an approach to enterprise integration and a technique for building operational enterprise models based on the modeling language Opj. An interesting feature of Opj is the possibility of deriving a workflow prototype from an enterprise model. 1. Introduction While there is an increasing number of enterprises that are changing their business operations from a functional approach to a process-oriented approach, enterprise modeling is perceived as a necessary step to perform this change. Current modeling technology allows the use of enterprise models to go far beyond descriptive purposes; in fact, such models can play a major role in defining and managing business processes and in mapping business processes to support systems such as workflow systems. Enterprise models can be used for different purposes, but it is important to observe that, at least, they act as a repository that semantically organizes the knowledge about the enterprise; this knowledge can be used to achieve specific goals by means of suitable tools. Models describe processes, their interactions and their relationships with the organization and the information system and provide qualitative and quantitative results during the whole lifecycle of the process. However, building effective enterprise models is difficult as it requires handling a large number of classes which are needed to express the functional, information, organization and resource views and managing a complex hierarchical architecture where many interactions take place between subsystems. Making such models operational is even more difficult because execution mechanisms have to be associated with the modeling constructs. This paper presents a methodological and architectural approach to enterprise integration and a technique for building operational enterprise models based on the modeling language Opj (Operational Objects)[4]. Section 2 discusses model-based enterprise integration; section 3 illustrates operational enterprise modeling with Opj by presenting a case study that concerns a travel-approval business process and showing the architecture of the resulting workflow prototype. The complexity of the interactions between the variables influencing the manufacturing and commercial scenario has dramatically increased in the last ten …