Abstract
The sooner disruptive emergent behaviors are detected, the sooner preventive measures can be taken to ensure the resilience of business processes execution. Therefore, organizations need to prepare for emergent behaviors by embedding corrective control mechanisms, which help coordinate organization-wide behavior (and goals) with the behavior of local autonomous entities. Ongoing technological advances, brought by the Industry 4.0 and cyber-physical systems of systems paradigms, can support integration within complex enterprises, such as supply chains. In this paper, we propose a reference enterprise architecture for the detection and monitoring of emergent behaviors in enterprises. We focus on addressing the need for an adequate reaction to disruptions. Based on a systematic review of the literature on the topic of current architectural designs for understanding emergent behaviors, we distill architectural requirements. Our architecture is a hybrid as it combines distributed autonomous business logic (expressed in terms of simple business rules) and some central control mechanisms. We exemplify the instantiation and use of this architecture by means of a proof-of-concept implementation, using a multimodal logistics case study. The obtained results provide a basis for achieving supply chain resilience “by design”, i.e., through the design of coordination mechanisms that are well equipped to absorb and compensate for the effects of emergent disruptive behaviors.
Highlights
Though today’s enterprises are becoming increasingly resilient against unprecedented and unpredictable forms of disruption, the changing and uncertain nature of the real world continues to severely affect society
We focus on Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems (CPSoSs) (Section 3 elaborates more on CPSoSs) for the detecting and monitoring of emergence in enterprises
The goal we had in mind when proposing this architectural design was the realization of a symbiotic relationship between the autonomy of distributed business logic on the one hand, and a central control on the other hand
Summary
Though today’s enterprises are becoming increasingly resilient against unprecedented and unpredictable forms of disruption, the changing and uncertain nature of the real world continues to severely affect society. Enterprises, which are susceptible to disruptive events, need resilience. They are confronted with ever-present sources of risk, various dynamics, harsh environments, and malfunctioning system components. These circumstances are managed with enterprise-wide goals in-mind. We use the terms organization and enterprise interchangeably and in the broadest sense. This means, Sensors 2020, 20, 6672; doi:10.3390/s20226672 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors. Classic examples can be found in nature, such as bird flocks, fish school, and insect swarms, which frequently exhibit complex and coordinated collective behaviors [29]
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