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This guest editorial presents the papers contributing to the 15th IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference on the Practice of Enterprise Modelling (PoEM 2022). The best papers were selected for invitation for revision and significant expansion. Five papers were finally accepted in the special section. Collectively, these papers provide an excellent representation of the state of the art of Enterprise Modelling in both research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, enterprise modelling is still a highly manual task. There are exist some assistance techniques but they are mostly limited to pattern libraries and pre-defined rules, which limits their functionality and makes them non-flexible. In our previous work we proved the applicability of machine learning techniques to the enterprise modeler support. However, one of the main problems in this area today is the absence of model repositories that could be used for training what causes the necessity to train machine learning models on small data. In this paper we study which textual information from the model and how can be used to increase the efficiency of the edge prediction task, which is one of the key tasks in graph-structured problems like enterprise modelling. The comparative analysis shows that application of FastText method provides a better result for node names embedding, and consideration of node names and descriptions significantly increases the edge prediction quality. The built model is successfully validated on a test case scenario simulating the enterprise model building process.

Innovation in enterprises require an understanding of the inherent complexity and dependencies among an enterprise's processes, goals, resources, customers and several other aspects. The choice of a suitable Enterprise Modelling method and language is an essential part of creating this understanding. This paper presents an overview of students' perspectives on the Enterprise Modelling methods and languages 4EM and ArchiMate, and the patterns and criteria for selecting a specific method and modelling language for their assignments. The analysis is based on a post hoc analysis of students' assignments from a course in Enterprise Architecture and Innovation, over a period of four years. The main contributions of this work are a set of selection criteria and recommendations for educators and students in selecting Enterprise Modelling methods and languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last 30 years, enterprise modelling has been recognised as an efficient tool to externalise the knowledge of companies in order to understand their operations, to analyse their running and to design new systems from several points of view: functions, processes, decisions, resources and information technology. This paper aims at describing the long evolution of enterprise modelling techniques as well as one of the future challenges of these techniques: the transformation of enterprise models. So, in a first part, the paper describes the evolution of enterprise modelling techniques from the divergence era to the convergence period. In a second time, the paper focuses on the recent advances in the use of enterprise models through model-driven approaches, interoperability problem-solving and simulation, all these advances having the same characteristic to use the transformation of enterprise models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper first takes a look at the state of the art on the overlapping areas of: Enterprise Modelling, Enterprise Integration/Interoperability, Organisational Learning and Knowledge Management. We identify requirements, characterisation and recent contributions for the interoperable and knowledge-based enterprises in the area of production of goods or services. It is then advocated that Enterprise Modelling and Knowledge Representation should combine their efforts to develop reference and reusable core manufacturing enterprise ontologies to support Enterprise Integration and Interoperability on one hand and open the door to Organisational Learning and management of active knowledge for the ‘smart’ enterprises of tomorrow on the other hand. This is illustrated by case studies from projects carried out in industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasingly complex context of dynamic, high-tempo military air operations raise new needs for aircraft maintenance and logistic support systems to more rapidly respond to changes in operational needs and available resources, with retained support resource efficiency. The future maintenance and support system are thus envisioned with improved net-centric capabilities to facilitate matching of tactical needs with aircraft maintenance capabilities. The study addresses this challenge by creating abstract representations and definitions of relevant tactical structures and maintenance structures, processes, and resources using enterprise modelling. By addressing this in a holistic perspective, a better understanding of the matching problem is achieved, enabling efficient matching of operational needs with available resources. Based on these findings, graph models are created from a domain-centric view of two adjacent domain contexts, which includes command and control and aircraft maintenance contexts. The result has the ability to leverage interoperability and collaboration between air- and ground-based systems by facilitating interactions between tactical needs and aircraft maintenance resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interoperability among a variety of systems, in or across manufacturing enterprises, has been widely accepted as one of the important factors that affect the efficiency of production. Many research works, related to the interoperability at different levels, have been carried out to tackle the information exchange, transformation, discovery and reuse. One of the main challenges in these research works is to overcome the semantic heterogeneity in the exchanged information between enterprise applications along the life cycle of a product. As a possible solution to support the semantic interoperability issue, semantic annotations have gained more and more attention. This paper identifies several existing drawbacks and proposes a formal semantic annotation approach to support the semantic enrichment of models in a product lifecycle management context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The goal of this paper is to examine the current state of research on optimal approaches to making effective models that simulate the behaviour of the enterprise as a whole, for the risk assessment purposes with an emphasis on stress testing. Stress testing can potently aid in the development of highly uncertain policies like the shift to the circular economy, or other policies that have a high impact in the areas of sustainable development. The paper will examine this problem through the scope of system dynamics modelling, however, the goal of the paper is to examine the right heuristics where this kind of modelling can be done with different approaches. When proposing a novel concept like the shift to a more circular economy, a variety of economic and other benefits could be anticipated in the long run, but the potential for large losses in the short term should not be neglected. The paper explores novelty on two levels, in proposing the model for this use, as well as advocating for stress testing approach that has been neglected in use and research outside of the financial industry.

This study demonstrates that integrated management and direct control systems may be organised as integrated enterprise process control (EntPC) systems, which are composed of self-controlling enterprise business processes. A business process has been defined as a control system for business activities, which are considered to be business processes of the lower level, or as base processes that are control systems for control plants in the form of infrastructure operations. An enterprise process also influences its delivery. This definition has been generally compared with definitions used in approaches of BPMN, YAWL, ARIS, DEMO and MERODE. Each enterprise process has its own controlling unit that contains one information unit and one decision unit, as well as memory places of the information-decision state variables that are processed by the business transitions that belong to these units. The i-d state variables are attributes of business objects, i.e. business units, business roles, business activities, business accounts and business products. Their values are transferred between business transitions that belong to the same or different controlling units. Relationships between business objects, business transitions and i-d state variables, as well as the other most important concepts of the EntPC system framework (EntPCF), are presented in this paper as the class diagrams of the enterprise process control language (EntPCL).

Production networks have been established in many industrial domains with globalized supply structures, sourcing strategies or cooperation environments. Knowledge management in such networks requires a context-oriented approach in order to accommodate for individual and organizational needs when providing relevant knowledge for complex tasks, such as value creation. The focus of this paper is on the procedure by which to determine what actually has to be taken into account as part of the ‘context’ for establishing context-oriented knowledge management, how to capture this context, and how to use it. The variability of organisational and individual tasks both at design time and at runtime is essential for understanding context in production networks. The main contribution of the present study is a context modelling method, including variability identification. The application of this method is demonstrated by using an example of a production network from automotive industries.

The survival of a company nowadays depends on answering to a customer-driven economy, and therefore relies on the performance of its entire network of partners. Competition is no longer among companies nor among supply chains, but rather between networks of companies which form a value network. Thus, the need has arisen to analyse the performance of a network of companies, and include the customer-perceived value in the strategic decision-making process. This paper proposes a framework and a tool to model, simulate and analyse a value network as a decision support system. The method extends the SimulValor approach and language. The discrete event simulation tool relies on a developed value network simulation library. This paper presents a case study in the shoemaking industry to validate the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nowadays, many companies designing and manufacturing products have to develop collaborations with various partners. This situation involves increasing information exchanges between industrial partners and generates many related problems of data transfers, transformations or misunderstanding due to interoperability. This paper deals with enterprise modelling for studying interoperability in product design. This paper presents a research work carried out within the framework of ISTA3 (3rd generation interoperability for aeronautical sub-contractors) project and concerning interoperability between collaborating aeronautical subcontractors. We initially describe the generic ISTA3 methodology used for studying interoperability. Then we focus on design companies and develop their interoperability specificities, especially with PLM (product lifecycle management) systems. An adapted methodology based on multi-level modelling is proposed then illustrated through an industrial case study within two collaborative companies, involved into a subcontracting relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The traditional static/statistic management would not be necessarily useful under flexible/agile speed and changeable market in this century. There is the stochastic/intelligent enterprise problem toward real-time (RT) and big-data (BD) environment. Our problems are then sketched as follows: The needs to RT management would be more promoted and the look-ahead balancing problem with delay (lead time) would become more important to enterprises. This problem would include longer delay (gain) and feed-forward treatment as the larger ship control, and would be a newer and forthcoming subject beyond the traditional control theory on feedback focus. Thus, the problem would probably view and discuss a world of post-Cybernetics in the future. This paper presents a sandwich theory and develops a RT theory and look-ahead logic with delay for the enterprise-organisational behaviour under BD. The sandwich theory for the enterprise is first proposed, and would be occurred by the matching problem of the respective ellipse shape in the lower level and upper level. This correspondence would be considered as a dual problem in Matsui’s form (W = ZL), and its solution would be Nash’s point in the equilibrium at a pair a game. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]