This Is a Publication of The American Association for Artificial Intelligence

The material herein is copyrighted material. It may not be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from AAAI. s To remain competitive, enterprises must become increasingly agile and integrated across their functions. Enterprise models play a critical role in this integration, enabling better designs for enterprises, analysis of their performance, and management of their operations. This article motivates the need for enterprise models and introduces the concepts of generic and deductive enterprise models. It reviews research to date on enterprise modeling and considers in detail the Toronto virtual enterprise effort at the University of Toronto. A n enterprise model is a computational representation of the structure, activities, processes, information, resources, people , behavior, goals, and constraints of a business , government, or other enterprise. It can be both descriptive and definitional—spanning what is and what should be. The role of an enterprise model is to achieve model-driven enterprise design, analysis, and operation. From a design perspective, an enterprise model should provide the language used to explicitly define an enterprise. We need to be able to explore alternative models in the design of enterprises spanning organization structure and behavior. To reason about alternative designs for enterprises, we need to reason about different possible sets of constraints for enterprises within the model. We need to ask the following questions: Can a process be performed in a different way, or can we achieve some goal in a different way? Can we relax the constraints in the enterprise such that we can improve performance or achieve new goals? We also need to be able to determine the impact of changes on all parts of the enterprise. For example, how will relaxation of policies affect the quality of products or services provided by the enterprise? How will the purchase of a new machine affect the activities that are performed? Will we need to retrain people in the enterprise to give them the skills to use the machine? How will changing the activities change resource consumption? From an operations perspective, the enterprise model must be able to represent what is planned, what might happen, and what has happened. It must supply the information and knowledge necessary to support the operations of the enterprise, whether they be performed by hand or machine. It must be able to provide answers to questions …