Monitoring Morphisms to Support Sustainable Interoperability of Enterprise Systems

Abstract

Nowadays, organizations are required to be part of a global collaborative world. Sometimes this is the only way they can access new and wider markets, reaching new opportunities, skills and sharing assets, e.g. tools, lessons learnt. However, due to the different sources of enterprise models and semantics, organizations are experiencing difficulties in exchanging information electronically and seamlessly. To solve this issue, most of them try to attain interoperability by establishing peer-to-peer mapping morphisms with different business partners, or in optimized networks use neutral data standards to regulate communications. Moreover, more and more enterprise systems are dynamic, looking forward to meet further requirements, causing new interoperability problems and efficiency reduction. This paper proposes a multi-agent framework to monitor existing enterprise system networks, being capable of detecting morphism changes. An example from systems engineering is presented, where network harmonization breakings are timely detected, and possible solutions are suggested to regain the interoperable status, thus enhancing robustness for reaching sustainability of business networks.