Abstract
Virtual/extended enterprise concepts have gained considerable relevance in the last years, giving rise to several interesting studies and industrial applications. While significant effort has been spent to demonstrate the benefits of the new production paradigm on large companies, small-medium enterprises (SMEs) are still missing a proper approach to co-operative manufacturing. The ESPRIT 4 project 20723 PLENT ( PLanning small-medium Enterprise Ne Tworks) intends to fill this gap, focusing on virtual enterprise networks formed by aggregation of independent SMEs, rather than by decomposition of a single, large firm. The project started on January 1996 for duration of 30 months, involving 12 independent partners, including several users, in three EU countries (Italy, Spain and Greece) and one Eastern Europe country (Hungary) [1]. The PLENT objective is developing a set of innovative software tools to support coordinated production planning and control in a distributed organisation formed by autonomous manufacturing SMEs. In this paper we introduce the process modelling approach adopted in PLENT, along with the prototype software developed for validation on the target SME networks. We introduce a detailed representation of the network process in terms of modelling primitives and data items required for the basic NOS (network operational schema) instantiation. We also describe the prototype software implementation with the IPSYS ToolBuilder meta-CASE tool.
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