Interoperability concerns in Systems Engineering
Résumé
Recent advances in information and communication technologies have allowed manufacturing enterprise to move from highly data-driven environments to a more cooperative information/knowledge-driven environment. Enterprise knowledge sharing (know-how), common best practices use, and open source/web based applications are enabling to achieve the concept of integrated enterprise and hence the implementation and interoperability of networked enterprises. Enterprise Integration and Interoperability in Manufacturing Systems is a key concept to face the challenges of these new environments. Integration in Manufacturing (IiM) is the first systemic paradigm to organise humans and machines as a whole system, not only at the field level, but also, at the management and corporate levels, to produce an integrated and interoperable enterprise system. Business process software and Manufacturing Execution Systems are now available to meet the requirements of this fully computerised and automated integration. Major problems remain with respect to the interface between the enterprise corporate level and the manufacturing shop floor level, so that management and operation decisions within a closed loop are facilitated to pace the production according to the life-cycle dynamics of the products, processes and humans inside and outside the enterprise. Today, networked business encounters recurrent difficulties due to the lack of interoperability between enterprise systems. The role of research in the field is to create upstream conditions of technological breakthrough to avoid that enterprise investment be simply pulled by the incremental evolution of IT offer. However, the future relies on collaboration networks that can be created among companies, people and societies in order to generate shared knowledge and wealth. System Engineering paradigm, from an architecture point of view, is an enabler to better specify systems requirements with a focus on systems interoperability. The keynote presents challenges, trends and issues that must be addressed in order to support the generation of new technological solutions and modelling paradigms for systems interoperability with a system engineering perspective.