Guest editor of the special issue on Integration and Information in Networked Enterprises
Résumé
The purpose of this issue is to focus about the research and its applications on “Integration and Information in Networked Enterprises”. It is dedicated on the study of methods, models, tools and technologies to make so-called networked enterprises interoperable through their information systems. This is also the major research topic of the research community related to the IFAC Technical Committee 5.3 “Enterprise Integration and Networking”. The papers in this special issue have been selected and extended from the sessions organized by the TC 5.3 at the last IFAC INCOM'2006 symposium and the IFAC World Congress'2008. It is commonly agreed that Enterprise Integration is an intrinsic capacity of multipart systems that must be carefully studied during design, and regularly monitored and adapted during exploitation, in order to get substantial benefits. Enterprise engineering deals with frameworks, architectures, methods, models and tools in order to help development of integration inside the organization, and with the entities located in the environment of the enterprise (supplier, customer, ecosystems, supply chain, virtual enterprises). In such a context, many types of models are used in the framework with different goals in mind during the engineering life cycle. For example, enterprise models, business process models, meta‐model of languages, domain ontology, and information system models are regularly recognised as necessary tools which help to support the size and complexity of problems. Currently, there is a tendency to concentrate on the technological mechanisms used by the various systems to interoperate. However, concentrating on mechanisms misses a larger problem: the semantics of those to‐be interoperable systems models. There are still difficulties considering changes at the technical level but few have considered interoperability at the organizational level. Although technical interoperability is essential, it is not sufficient to ensure effective operations. There must be a suitable focus on procedural and organizational elements, and decision makers at all levels must understand each other's capabilities and constraints. While many systems are currently able to interoperate with varying degrees of success, the manner in which this interoperation is achieved is, at best, piecemeal. In the worst case, interoperability is achieved by manually entering data, information, and models produced by one system into another–a time consuming and error prone process. This special issue addresses computer‐supported integration and interoperability of enterprise businesses, applications and software to improve their interaction and their cooperation. Interoperability within an enterprise and between enterprises is not limited to the only data dimension but it should consider additional levels like applications, business models, process models, enterprise models, and their supporting systems.