Model Driven Interoperability for System Engineering

Abstract

To keep up to date, manufacturing enterprises need to use the latest results from the ICT sector, especially when collaborating with external partners in a supply chain and exchanging products and data. This has led to dealing with an increasing amount of heterogeneous information exchanged between partners including machines (physical means), humans and IT in the Supply Chain of ICT Systems (SC-ICTS). In this context, interoperability management is becoming more and more critical, but paradoxically, it is not yet fully efficiently anticipated, controlled and accompanied to recover from incompatibilities issues or failures. This paper intends to present how enterprise modeling, enterprise interoperability and model driven approaches can lead, together with system engineering architecture, to contribute to developing and improving the interoperability in the SC-ICTs. Model Driven System Engineering Architecture (MDSEA) is based on Enterprise Modeling using GRAI Model and its extensions. It gives enterprise internal developments guidelines, but originally, MDSEA is not the considering interoperability that is required between partners when setting a collaboration in the frame of SC-ICTS. As a result, the MDSEA, extended with interoperability concerns, led to the design of the MDISE (Model Driven Interoperability System Engineering) framework, which capitalizes on the research on enterprise interoperability. To finish, some proposals are made to extend the Model System Tool Box (MSTB) and the use of MDISE for Cyber Physical System (CPS) that are relevant components of SC-ICTS.