A Unified Enterprise Modelling Language for Enhanced Interoperability of Enterprise Models

Abstract

There is a serious backwardness in awareness, acceptance and wide use of the Enterprise Modelling (EM) technology in industry because enterprises cannot capitalise from previous modelling efforts. This situation hinders true enterprise integration, interoperability, and enterprise knowledge sharing. A Unified Enterprise Modelling Language, based on meta-modelling of existing EM Languages, would serve as an Interlingua between EM tools providing the business community with a common visual, template based language to be used on top of most commercial enterprise modelling and workflow software tools.

The Unified Enterprise Modelling Language—Overview and further work

“…A major motivation was the "Tower of Babel" situation that hindered proliferation of enterprise modelling in industry (Vernadat 2002). The first development version of a unified enterprise modelling language was delivered by the UEML Thematic Network (UEML-TN 2002, funded by the EU's FP5 (Jochem 2002, Panetto, Berio, Benali, Boudjlida & Petit 2004, Mertins, Knothe & Zelm 2004, Berio, Anaya & Ortiz 2004. UEML development has since continued within the Interop-NoE (2003-2007 Network of Excellence, funded by EU's FP6, which produced two further development versions of UEML, 2.0 and 2.1 (Berio, Opdahl, Anaya & Dassisti 2005a, 2005b.…”

Enterprise Integration and Networking: Issues, Trends and Vision

“…• There was a standard vision on what enterprise modeling really is and there was an international consensus on the underlying concepts for the benefit of business users (Goranson et al, 2002) • There was a standard, user-oriented, interface in the form of a unified enterprise modeling language (UEML) based on the previous consensus to be available on all commercial modeling tools (Chen et al, 2002b;Panetto et al, 2004) • There were real enterprise modeling and simulation tools commercially available taking into account function, information, resource, organization, and financial aspects of an enterprise including human aspects, exception handling, and process coordination. Simulation tools need to be configurable, distributed, agent-based simulation tools (Vemadat and Zeigler, 2000) • There were design patterns and model-based components available as (commercial) building blocks to design, build, and reengineer large scale systems (Molina and Medina, 2003) • There were commercially available integration platforms and integrating infrastructures (in the form of packages of computer services) for plug-and-play solutions (Chen and Doumeingts, 2003) Future trends in enterprise integration and enterprise modeling would be toward loosely-coupled interoperable systems rather than high-cost monolithic solutions and low-success holistic integration projects.…”

“…All levels, to varying degrees, influence and are influenced by integrated product realization, integrated business systems, and tools enabling integration. While the objective is to support creation and operation of extremely efficient, flexible, and responsive extended manufacturing enterprises, the path to reach this will require capturing the wisdom achieved at each of the enterprise integration levels (Panetto et a!., 2004). …”

“…The proliferation of fancy and non inter-operable EM tools on the marketplace has created a prejudicial Tower of Babel situation. Unified languages are therefore proposed as consensus such as PSL (Process Specification Language) for manufacturing processes, supported by NIST in the US, or UEML (Unified Enterprise Modeling Language) for business processes, supported by EU (Panetto, 2002;Panetto, 2004;. Also, while EM is widely used for well-structured processes, few EM tools deal with semi-structured or non-structured processes.…”

A PRODUCT ORIENTED MODELLING CONCEPT - Holons for Systems Synchronisation and Interoperability

“…UEML (Berio, et al, 2003;Panetto, et al, 2004) is the Unified Enterprise Modelling Language, it is used at the organisational level of the enterprise. B2MML (2003) is an implementation of the part 1 of the IEC FDIS 62264 standard (IEC 62264, 2002) developed for interfacing the manufacturing control and execution systems with higher level systems.…”