Enterprise businesses are more than ever challenged by competitors that frequently refine and tailor their offers to clients. In this context, enterprise information systems (EIS) are especially important because: (1) they remain one of the last levers to increase the performance and competitiveness of the enterprise, (2) we operate in a business world where the product itself has reached a limit of performance and quality due to uniform capacity of industrial tools in a globalized economy and (3) the EIS can increase the product value thanks to additional digital services (built on data associated to the product) in order to meet and fit better client's needs. However, the use of EISs reaches a limit in collaborative environments because enterprises management methods diverge and EISs are mainly inflexible resource packages that are not built with an interoperability objective. Consequently, we need to make EISs interoperable in order to achieve the needed gains competitiveness and performance. This paper contribution can be summarized as follows: (1) it relates existing work and it examines barriers that, at the moment, are preventing further improvements due to current methodological and technological limits, and (2) it proposes a conceptual framework and five challenges that model based approaches must overcome to achieve interoperability between EIS in the near and long term.
Market competition is pushing companies to differentiate themselves from competitors by developing customized services in addition to their original production (either physical or digital). It drives the emergence of service process modelling to describe more precisely the composition of services. Nevertheless, business initiatives modelling can be very complex to set, laying at the heart of many business decisions and demanding a lot of time and effort to handle and operate unambiguously. A well-designed and well-built business model can lower the risk of operating a service process and in consequence making enterprises more successful in their objectives. To this end, the paper recalls the MDSEA methodology and presents the key concept of the transformation of EA* and BPMN concepts into simulation Workflows. Then it introduces the implementation done with the SLMToolBox that is an Eclipse RCP service graphical modeler, model transformer, and simulation engine. In more details, it runs transformation from service processes models designed by business users to BPMN models. Then the BPMN models can be transformed to DEVS models to simulate the behavior of the entire process model. In addition, enterprises are facing situations where future (undeveloped yet) enterprise services need to be integrated with existing ones. To go further and for a better integration and deployment of service models in the enterprise, we propose to combine service process M&S with service calls execution Workflow. To achieve that goal, we are mashing up simulation of services modelled with existing enterprise web services calls. The interoperability between real and simulated services is handled by the tool Taverna Workflow and HLA RTI. This step is pushing one step further the expertise in the MDSEA methodology, attempting to pave the way from service design to IT development.
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