Standardisation in ISO for enterprise engineering and integration

The new paradigm of enterprise organisation-extended and virtual enterprises-calls for easy collaboration between partners to exploit market opportunities with varying opportunity windows. Such collaborations can only be achieved if the partner contributions can be easily evaluated by means of process models which represent the relevant parts of the partner operations. However, these models have to be linked to represent the total enterprise of the new partnership and to allow performance evaluation by simulation. To provide the required model inter-operability, the models have to adhere to a common representation for both model enactment and human understandability. International standardisation is a means to provide the necessary model commonality. The paper presents the state of the art in the relevant standardisation and identifies future work in research, development and standardisation. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.