Enterprise modelling | EPFL Graph Search

Enterprise modelling is the abstract representation, description and definition of the structure, processes, information and resources of an identifiable business, government body, or other large organization. It deals with the process of understanding an organization and improving its performance through creation and analysis of enterprise models. This includes the modelling of the relevant business domain (usually relatively stable), business processes (usually more volatile), and uses of information technology within the business domain and its processes. Overview Enterprise modelling is the process of building models of whole or part of an enterprise with process models, data models, resource models and/or new ontologies etc. It is based on knowledge about the enterprise, previous models and/or reference models as well as domain ontologies using model representation languages. An enterprise in general is a unit of economic organization or activity. These activities a

Modelling and monitoring industrial automation systems

Rodrigo Garcia Garcia

The modelling of a manufacturing enterprise is not an easy task. A manufacturing enterprise is a complex system where technical knowledge is as important as management abilities. For taking more accurate management decisions and for these decisions to have a quick impact on manufacturing activities, the communication between the higher and lower levels of an enterprise must be fluent. The fluent communication of the different levels of an enterprise is called integration. When this integration is achieved thanks to the use of computers, it is called Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM). In the first part of this work, we study the methodologies that have been developed for enterprise modelling and integration and we propose a new functional analysis technique based on the combination of certain elements of the studied methodologies. The second part of this work deals with low level communication aspects of distributed control systems and shows how to use SFCs for determining the state of graphical components and for composite event detection.

EPFL2006

Modélisation des entreprises sur la base des compétences

Grégoire Pepiot

Today enterprises operate in a constantly changing market, characterized by shorter and shorter product life cycles, an increased demand for flexibility and changing techniques and technologies. In order to control these factors of complexity, enterprise modeling has become a paramount topic, as attests the amount of work undertaken in this field since the middle 20th century. Although there have been efforts to handle automation, planning, optimization, a significant method is still lacking for addressing the human potential, its cognitive abilities and competences. The goal of this work is to present a new approach for enterprise modeling based on the competences falling under a philosophy of perenniality of the organization where the human is placed at the center of the processes. The suggested methodology is articulated around three principal elements: The development of a formalism for representing competence in order to integrate it in the entreprises competence based model; The development of a methodology for competence valorization which takes into account the suggested formalism; The taking into account of the challenges relating to the dynamic aspects of the model in particular for the creation of adequate teams and the problem of assigning actors to activities according to their competences. The proposed formalism is built, independently of any model, with the aim of making it operational at different levels of abstraction in order to be extended to an enterprise modeling approach based on the competences. An identification of the competences can thus be approached via this formalism by targeting one of the levels without necessarily taking into account the others, according to the desired degree of detail. The purpose of the methodology of competence valorization is to help the decision makers to understand, in term of competences, the stakes which have a deep impact on the strategic objectives of the company. These stakes are the identification of the true advantages and risks, following various points of view, in term of competences and resources mobilized in the processes of the enterprise. A step, which consists in identifying competences, is thus essential to allow an enterprise to ensure management in agreement with its strategic choices. The methodology used to evaluate the critical competences is based on techniques of fuzzy logic taking into account several criteria aggregated in indicators. Finally a methodology of management and competence assignment was developed in order to increase the ability of a company to quickly constitute the most adequate teams for an optimal management of day-to-day operations; as well as to identify assignment configurations of actors to activities according to their competences. Various studies were carried out in manufacturing companies to evaluate certain key points of this study. In an encouraging way, they confirm the coherence and the relevance of the proposed approach. These studies made it possible to test the suggested models and approaches but also to make recommendations for the development of a tool supporting the enterprise modeling approach based on the competences, in particular the module related to valorization. However additional studies on the scale of the whole company need to be carried out to guarantee the best impact of the presented work.

EPFL2005

SeamCAD: a hierarchy-oriented modeling language and a computer-aided tool for entreprise architecture

Lam Son Lê

Modeling Enterprise Architecture requires representing multiple diagrams of an enterprise, which typically shows the multiples business entities, IT systems, even software components and the services they offer. This could be done by a team of stakeholders having different backgrounds. One way to do this is to structure the model into hierarchical levels each of which can be of interest of just some, not all, stakeholders. Due to the differences in their background, stakeholders – the modelers may not want to use a single modeling approach, even a widely-recognized one, to build the enterprise model, which can be shared by the whole team. Developing a modeling framework that can be applied uniformly throughout the entire enterprise model and that can be used by all stakeholders is challenging. First, the framework should have a uniform approach to specifying the services offered by business entities, IT systems and software components and to describing their implementation across hierarchical levels. Second, the framework should allow the stakeholders to represent the service specification and the service implementation of multiple business entities and IT systems, even within the same hierarchical level. Third, the services offered by those entities and systems should be represented at different levels of granularity. Last but not least, the modeling framework should maintain the well-formedness of the enterprise model and the consistency between different diagrams opened by different stakeholders of the team. Today, there exist a few modeling methods or development processes in the field of Enterprise Architecture, as well as in software and system modeling that can address these issues to some extent. Among them, Adora, KobrA and OPM best meet the aforementioned four criteria, although they were not initially developed for modeling Enterprise Architecture. As a study on the state of the art, we analyzed these methods with respect to the four aforementioned modeling challenges. In this thesis, we define a modeling language and present a computer-aided tool for modeling Enterprise Architecture hierarchically. This modeling language allows the modeler to structure an enterprise into hierarchical levels, in terms of both organization and services. The computer-aided modeling tool helps the modeler visually build her model across levels and brings all levels together to make a coherent, well-formed model. Enterprise models can be visually built and represented in a notation that is based on the Unified Modeling Language using this tool. The modeling language is formally defined in Alloy – a lightweight declarative language based on first order logic and set theory. The data manipulated in the tool is verified against the Alloy code that formalizes the language. The modeling language and the computer-aided modeling tool constitute a hierarchy-oriented framework called SeamCAD that specifically address the four aforementioned issues. This framework has been applied several projects, both in industry and academic settings. We evaluated it by inviting external practitioners, researchers and master's students in our university to use it and to give their feedback.

EPFL2008