Market globalization and economic crisis have made more than clear the need to increase the competitiveness of the European and Greek industry and enterprise. An important factor towards this goal is to increase the level of enterprise interoperability, both inside the enterprise (intra-enterprise interoperability) as well as among enterprises (inter-enterprise interoperability). Focused research in this field is both a national and a European priority.
Intra-enterprise interoperability is relevant to the seamless integration both from the point of view of communication as well as from the point of view of the semantic representation of data among the different systems and applications inside an enterprise, whatever layer of the enterprise environment architecture that they may reside in. A result of this can be the support of advanced business models such as those of mass customization as well as total life cycle management. Main goals are:
- Model driven interoperability at the shop floor layer, aiming at facilitating decision support and autonomy, so that it is possible to guarantee robustness at the shop floor level.
- Unified Modeling approach of products / processes and resources of an enterprise that makes possible the optimization of workflows inside the enterprise and their support from the order placement until the order execution.
- Integration of Future Internet technologies at all layers inside an enterprise aiming at increasing the enterprise flexibility
Inter-enterprise interoperability is relevant to the seamless integration among enterprises and the application of advanced inter-enterprise collaboration business models. It relates both with collaborative enterprise frameworks and technologies for the support of inter-enterprise collaboration in real time. Main goals are:
- Collaborative Business / Collaborative Manufacturing
- Clustering Support
- Integrated Supply Chain Management Support, Extended Enterprises
- Virtual Enterprise Support
The main scientific issues with reference to the area of Enterprise Interoperability are:
- Enterprise Modeling for Enterprise Interoperability comprising requirement engineering for interoperable enterprises, service modeling for businesses, distributing modeling, meta-modeling, synchronization of models
- Semantics for Enterprise Interoperability comprising enterprise application analysis and semantic elicitation, reasoning, methods and tools for model transformation and data reconciliation, semantic mediation and enrichment of enterprise models, semantic Web-based approaches
- Architectures and frameworks for interoperability comprising agent-based approaches, enterprise application integration, model driven architectures, service oriented enterprise architectures, ubiquity, mobility and large scale interoperability
The main technological pillars for the support of the area of Enterprise Interoperability are:
- Future Internet and its application in enterprise systems and enterprise interoperability, in enterprise collaboration and virtual organizations, in digital ecosystems
- Platforms for Enterprise Interoperability comprising intelligent infrastructures and automated methods for business system integration, operational system interoperability, support for collaborative businesses
- Services for Enterprise Interoperability comprising cloud computing, everything as a servive (XaaS) model, negotiation and federated interoperability, service oriented environment for enterprise interoperability
- Standards for Enterprise Interoperability comprising standardization work and policies, open standards and standardization challenges