Bottom-up planning approaches in enterprise modelling—the need and the state of the art

Abstract

Increasing market demands for products in combination with technological progress led to the development of new manufacturing paradigms. Future enterprises will be composed of widely autonomous, self-organising and self-optimising work units which will be working together in flat hierarchies. In order to be agile, the work units will co-operate on a product-oriented basis. Thereby, work units of so-called virtual enterprises may belong to various companies and may be distributed world-wide. Enterprise models are used for documentation, (re-)design, analysis and the operation of a company. In order to be applicable in the future, they must be adaptable to the needs of future enterprises. For example, to speed up the (re-)formation and operation of a virtual enterprise, a methodology and tools based on suitable enterprise models are required to help to find the right partners and to determine the interfaces between those partners. This paper is organised as follows. Section 1 gives an overview of general trends in manufacturing and lists typical characteristics of future enterprises. Section 2 explains the authors' understanding of bottom-up design and why there is a need for a bottom-up design methodology. Following this motivation, existing enterprise models, also referred to as reference architectures, are reviewed. Next, the first research results of the methodology which were obtained are presented. Finally, we will give an overview of our Virtual Fa ctory Laboratory, Karlsruhe (VICTOR) which is an experimental platform for validating the approach taken.