CIMOSA - A European Development for Enterprise Integration Part 1: An Overview

The paper reports on the concept of CIMOSA, its application in enterprise modelling for enterprise integration and the status of the ESPRIT project AMICE; a project supported by the European Community and carried out by 22 European CIM user, vendor, implementor and research organisations. The AMICE project develops an open system reference architecture for CIM (CIMOSA). This reference architecture is intended to guide and support advanced process modelling of manufacturing enterprise operations. CIMOSA supports model engineering and enables execution of such models for real time enterprise operation monitoring and control. Engineering and execution of models will be supported by an Integrating Infrastructure developed in the project as well. Model engineering is concerned more with model maintenance than with one-time model creation. This allows for flexibility in adapting the enterprise operation to changes in both internal and external environments. In addition to explicit process modelling CIMOSA enables coexistence with heritage systems through the concept of cooperating processes. Non-CIMOSA applications can be seen as independent processes sharing information objects with other CIMOSA or non-CIMOSA processes and exchanging object views and events according to process demands. Integration of non-CIMOSA applications can also be achieved through the use of the functional entity concept. This concept will employ non-CIMOSA application for the execution of a CIMOSA functional operation (lowest level of CIMOSA functionality).