The CIMOSA business modelling process

Abstract

Integrating and managing complex enterprises requires understanding, partitioning and simplification of the complexity. Enterprise modelling supports these requirements by providing means for describing process oriented systems and decomposing them into manageable parts. However, enterprise modelling requires both a common modelling language and a methodology. The language provides common understanding on enterprise models across the industrial community. User guidance through these rather complex enterprise modelling tasks is provided by a modelling methodology. The presented methodology, the CIMOSA Business Modelling Process, follows the enterprise system life cycle starting with requirements definition, followed by design specification and ending with the description of the implemented operational system. However, in addition to this top-down approach, bottom-up and iterative modelling are both supported as well. This paper describes the CIMOSA Business Modelling Process as defined by the ESPRIT Consortium AMICE. Additionally, a graphical representation of the process flow is provided and the process is illustrated using examples from a pilot implementation at the FIAT Auto Division. CIMOSA has been developed by the ESPRIT Consortium AMICE as a pre-normative modelling language for enterprise modelling. Enterprise models may be used not only in decision support for evaluation of alternative solutions in enterprise operations, but also for directly driving operation control and monitoring. Therefore, enterprise modelling is complemented by an Integrated Infrastructure which supports the execution of enterprise models.