interoperability

In many cases, digital engineering is the only realistic answer to important trends in industry. This includes increasingly customized products, decentralized value chains, increasing complexity and functionality of products as well as the need to reduce the time to market. Digital Engineering has already resulted in many technology-driven changes of the product development process. Probably the most important change is the ability to execute some of the iteration loops of development and test completely in the virtual environment. Further improvements can only be achieved by simultaneously combining development and simulation tools from many different domains, such as mechanical engineering, physics simulation, and software engineering. This article identifies current research issues in the field of distributed interoperable testing environments. Moreover, two examples of current applications are given to illustrate what functionalities can already be utilized today.

The development of new complex products is increasingly conducted cooperatively in distributed, heterogeneous organisations in a dynamic environment. To successfully accomplish a project, the coordination of project controlling is of vital importance. Each participant of the development network has individual controlling systems, which cover his information and management needs. For cross-project controlling however, the creation of interoperability between distributed systems is a precondition for the coordination of processes. The article describes a cross-project controlling approach, which fosters integration by semantic modelling.

The management of inter-organisational business processes is a crucial and necessary factor towards the economic success of an enterprise. Flexibility and manageability of processes are core requirements to interoperability. In the article, we discuss the two complementary paradigms of the service-oriented approach and of the process-oriented approach. We demonstrate how the combination of these two concepts can be used to realize flexible and manageable processes even in a cross-enterprise scenario. The main advantage of this approach is the ability to compose business processes in a flexible way without losing the instruments of an effective business process management.

Interoperability between ICT systems is becoming an increasingly important success factor in the cooperation of enterprises. Organisations have to exchange business information and must have the same understanding of the meaning of the exchanged information. Only then can they rely on both the transaction of the information and the validity of its contents. This paper reports on the European INTEROP Network of Excellence concerned with interoperability research for networked enterprises applications and software, its goals, rationale and early results. In addition, an application of interoperability in a supply chain network of SMEs is presented and discussed.

An approach to the creation of interoperability in dynamically changing supply chains is presented applying the example of transnational hazardous waste logistics. By an integral consideration of business models the integration and adaptation of the IT infrastructure is advanced.