CEO FRAMEWORK ENTERPRISE MODELS CONFORMANCE

WITH ISO14258

Patrícia Macedo

Centro de Engenharia Organizacional, INESC Inovação, R Alves Redol, 9, 1000-029 Lisboa, Portugal

Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal, Instituto Politecnico de Setúbal, Setúbal, Portugal

Carla Ferreira

Centro de Engenharia Organizacional, INESC Inovação, R Alves Redol, 9, 1000-029 Lisboa, Portugal

Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Instituto Superior Técnico, UTL, Lisboa, Portugal

José Tribolet

Centro de Engenharia Organizacional, INESC Inovação, R Alves Redol, 9, 1000-029 Lisboa, Portugal

Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Instituto Superior Técnico, UTL, Lisboa, Portugal

Keywords: Enterprise Modelling, Enterprise Engineering, UML, ISO14258, Business Processes.

Abstract: Several international standards for Enterprise Engineering were developed in order to: promote the quality

and reliability of the communication between the partners involved in business processes; upgrade the

compatibility and alignment between the systems which support business processes. In this area an

international standard was develop – ISO 14258 – which specifies rules and concepts for enterprise

modelling. CEO Framework is an analysis framework that provides a formal way of describing enterprises.

This article describes the how to verify that an enterprise modelling frameworks generates models in

conformance with ISO14248. This sequence of steps is applied to verify CEO framework.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Center for Organizational Engineering (CEO)

has developed research work on enterprise

modelling (Vasconcelos, 2003) (Bringuel,2004)

(Mendes,2003), in partnership with several

Portuguese organisations. CEO project development

in industrial environment, where international

standards on instrumentation and electrical areas

must be used, created the need for the study of the

regulation standards of organisational engineering

and their applications.

As a rule, standards are developed by joint work

between scientific and industrial communities to

establish a common terminology and a set of

common rules and principles that apply to a specific

domain. In Integration Engineering and Enterprise

Engineering (Liles, 1995) the standards have the

following purposes:

• To increase the quality and accuracy of

communication between the intervenient

(clients, vendors, consultants, managers, and

software developers).

• To develop compatibility between the

applications that supports the Enterprise

Architecture specification.

• To promote the compatibility and alignment

between the systems that supports the enterprise.

In this area an international standard was develop

that specifies rules and concepts for enterprise

modelling – the ISO 14258 – Concepts and rules for

Enterprise Models (ISO,1998) (NIST, 2004)

(Cimosa,2003) (Deno, 2001). This standard does not

define an enterprise model or its representation,

instead it aims to define a set of common concepts

and properties that all models should satisfy. The

concepts and rules for enterprise modelling are

559

Macedo P., Ferreira C. and Tribolet J. (2006).

CEO FRAMEWORK ENTERPRISE MODELS CONFORMANCE WITH ISO14258.

In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ISAS, pages 559-564

DOI: 10.5220/0002463105590564

 SciTePress

based on Systems Theory, where the enterprise,

processes, and products are considered as a system.

The CEO Framework (FCEO) was developed in

CEO with purpose of providing a formal way to

describe enterprises, goals, business processes,

information systems, and the dependencies between

them (Eriksson, 2000).

The aims of this article are:

• to describe the set of points that should

be checked in order to conclude if an

enterprise framework generates models

in conformance with ISO14248

• to apply those procedure to analyse

FCEO .

The next section presents an overview of the

main principles and rules of ISO14258. Section 3

summarises the FCEO. Section 4 shows that CEO

enterprise models comply to standard ISO14248.

Section 5 presents a case study on a Pulp and Paper

Portuguese Mill. Conclusions and future work are

presented in Section 6.

Figure 1: System Theory applied to enterprise.

2 PROCEDURE TO VERIFY

ISO14258 COMPILANCE

ISO14258 (ISO,1998) specifies rules and concepts

necessary to create enterprise models. It is not the

purpose of the standard to define an Enterprise

Model, a language to represent it or a framework. It

aims is to define a set of common concepts and

proprieties that all models should satisfy.

The normative concepts and rules presented this

international standard are based on relevant elements

of system theory. This concepts and proprieties

defined in System Theory are applied to enterprise

model, where elements are the objects of the

enterprise. The connection between two elements is

mapped to an activity (see Figure 1)

2.1 Structural, Hierarchical, and

Behavioural Aspects

Each system can be analyzing through three aspects:

Structural – Defines the structure of the enterprise

and the interdependencies between its elements

(activities and resources)

Hierarchical – There are two types of hierarchies:

part-of hierarchies and kind-of hierarchies. Part-of

hierarchies describe the composition of elements or

decomposition of systems and are used to construct

detailed models, or to link models with different

purposes. Kind-of hierarchies

describe different

levels of abstraction ordered by generalization and

specialization and is used to classify the entities

building blocks.

Behavioural –Enterprise models must have the

capability to describe behaviour; that is, to represent

sequentially events, actions, conditions, states, and

to describe transformation functions. Dynamic

and

static

behaviour should be supported.

2.2 Views

The standard says also that each model should

provide more than one view, where each view

illustrates a different aspect of the enterprise.

According the ISO14258 Information view and

Function view are required for all models. The

Information view represents the information

requirements to operate the system. The function

view shows the enterprise processes.

2.3 Life Cycle

Each system (enterprise project or product) has a life

cycle that is partitioned in phases: plan/build,

use/operate and recycle/dispose. Each phase of the

life cycle can be represented by different models.

2.4 Activity Classification

Activities can be classified in the following 3 types:

• Activity W – define what to do

• Activity H – define how to do

• Activity D – define the execution (do)

Each type of activity can be represented by

different models. Activities are recursive,

decomposable, and iterative.

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3 CEO FRAMEWORK

The FCEO is an enterprise modelling framework.

This framework comprises three interdependent

levels. The first level describes the current set of

goals of the enterprise. The business processes and

the business resources are described in the second

level. In level three, the aim is to describe the

Information System supporting the business

processes.

Figure 2: UML Metamodel for CEO framework.

The modelling language used to implement

FCEO is UML. In order to improve the description

of business concepts, an UML extension was

proposed (Eriksson, 2000). This extension is

represented by the meta-model shown in

This meta-model was created through the

definition of stereotypes, properties, constrains, and

tagged values provided by UML.

The work presented on this paper is concerned

with layer 2 of the FCEO. Layer 2 defines processes,

resources and their relationships:

The process stereotype represents a unit of work.

Its execution may be connected to the execution of

other process(es) by resource flow(s).

Resources are objects within the business that are

manipulated through processes. Resources can be

arranged in structures and have relations with each

other. Resources can be produced, consumed, used

or refined in processes.

4 FCEO CONFORMANCE WITH

ISO14258

This section discusses the conformance of FCEO

enterprise models and ISO14258. FCEO defines a

meta-model of UML, so all principles, rules and

proprieties of UML can be applied to the FCEO

models.

4.1 Structure, Hierarchy and

Behaviour

Structure – The enterprise structure is defined

according to its business processes (Eriksson, 1998).

Business resources represent system elements and

processes represent the relationship between

elements. On FCEO, business resources are

represented by the <<resource>> stereotype, and

business processes by <<process>> stereotype.

Processes can use, or transform recourses as

specified on FCEO model (see

Figure 2)

Hierarchy – Product tree, mill hierarchy, and

organization hierarchy are examples of part-of

hierarchies that should be represented on Enterprise

modelling. Usually the aggregation and composition

features of UML are used to represent part-of

hierarchies .When a product has a recursive structure

(as for example, recycled products) a simple

association has to be used to represent the

relationship between product components. Process

and resource classification are examples of kind-of

hierarchies. To represent classification of processes

and resources the generalization feature of UML is

applied (see Figure 3).

Behaviour – UML activity diagrams (

Figure 9) are used to model static behaviour

representing how activities are organized and how

resources flow inside the enterprise. To model

dynamic behaviour time has to be modelled.

Depending on the characteristics of the processes

(Macedo, 2004), time could be considered as

discrete or continuous. Sequence diagrams and Time

diagrams (available in UML 2.0) can be used to

represent how resources or processes change

through out time. To model the dynamic behaviour

of a continuous process (for example, pulp

manufacturing process and papermaking

manufacturing), UML features are not enough

(Macedo,2004.1)

«goal»

Goal

Resource

«resource»

«process»

Process

«block»

Block

supports

controls,

executes

produces,

consumes,

uses, ref ines

«contradictory »

achiev es

sends

receiv es

CEO FRAMEWORK ENTERPRISE MODELS CONFORMANCE WITH ISO14258

561

Figure 3: Manufacturing Process Hierarchy.

4.2 Life Cycle

According to ISO14258 each phase of the enterprise

life cycle has to be represented. FCEO does not

support the concept of life cycle; however it

provides models with a good descriptive capability

(Macedo,2004.1), thus making it possible to model

each phase of the life-cycle.

«process»

Operations

Figure 4: Specialization of class Operations.

4.3 Views

FCEO supports the definition of different views of

an organisational system, where each view may

define different abstraction details. The functional

view can be obtained by using a process diagram of

FCEO (Vasconcelos,2001)) where the structure of a

process and its dependencies are shown. The

information view shows how information resources

are structured and which information resources are

used, spent, or produced by each activity.

Information view can be obtained throw a Process-

Resource diagram where only the information

resources are represented.

4.3.1 Activity Classification

FCEO approach does not classify activities in W, H,

and D; instead it classifies activities according to

Porter chain value (Porter, 1986). However, FCEO

UML meta-model it is flexible enough to define a

structure of activities classes. So, it is possible to

define activity of type W, H, and D as specialization

of process class Operations (see Figure 4).

Activities can be decomposed in sub-activities.

Also, activities can either be recursive or iterative.

Recursive activities can be supported by UML class

composition mechanism where a recursive class can

be defined through reflexive aggregation. Iterative

activities can be supported by UML activity

diagrams, where iterative execution of either a single

activity or a set of activities can be defined. Note

that activity diagrams refer to class instances, not

classes.

5 CASE STUDY: PAPER MILL

ENTERPRISE MODELLING

The case study presented here is the result of the

work done in enterprise modelling on a Pulp and

Paper Portuguese Mill during the years of 2003 and

2004. This work focused on applying the FCEO to

the manufacturing process.

Figure 5: Class Process Diagram – Papermaking.

Next, a summary of the above case study is

presented.

Structural Aspects

All core business processes were identified.

Paper production and Pulp production were

modelled with detail. Human resources, information

resources and material resources were identified for

each process.

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Figure 6: Mill Hierarchy.

Hierarchies Aspects

Processes were classified in Management or

Manufacturing Processes. Manufacturing Processes

were classified in Batch, Discrete, or Continuous

Processes in order to represent the singularities of

production (Macedo, 2004.1). The Figure 3 shows

how generalization feature of UML is applied to

classify Manufacturing Processes.

Figure 7: Eucalyptus Pulp – Product Tree.

Product Tree, Mill Hierarchy, and Organization

Hierarchy were modelled to represent how resources

are aggregated. Figure 5 represents how the

Papermaking process is decomposed in sub-

processes, while Figure 6 shows which production

units compose the Paper Mill infrastructure.

Figure 7

represents the Eucalyptus Pulp product tree, showing

which material resources are necessary for the

production of Eucalyptus Pulp.

Behavioural Aspects

Activity Diagrams were used to represent

static behaviour.

Figure 9 shows the sequencing of activities and

which resources are spent, produced, or used to

produce starch in a batch process.

Figure 8: Packing Manufacturing Process.

Views

Informational view is obtained by extracting the

information resources from the Process-Resources

diagram. The grey rectangle in

Figure 8 shows the

information needed to execute the manufacturing

process packing.

Figure 5 is an example of a functional view,

where only the functions of the enterprise are shown.

Figure 9: Starch Batch Production.

6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

Enterprise models defined using FCEO meta-model

are ISO14258 conformant. FCEO does not provide

directly the principles of activity classification and

of life-cycle, but as explained in Section 4, UML

meta-model is flexible enough to support enterprise

modelling according to this principles.

This article presents a sequence of steps

necessary to check that CEO Framework generates

enterprise models in conformance with ISO14248.

The work presented here is not restricted to FCEO,

as this sequence of steps can easily be applied to

verify ISO14248 conformance of other enterprise

modelling frameworks.

«resource»

Paper Mill

:Production Unit

«resource»

Power

Mill:Production Unit

«resource»

Pulp Line:

Production Unit

«resource»

Boiller 1: Equipment

«resource»

Boiller 2: Equipment

«resource»

Steam Turbine:

Equipment

«resource»

Finishing Line :

Production Unit

«resource»

Bleaching Line:

Production Unit

«resource»

Drying Machine:

Equipment

«resource»

Packers

Machine:Equipment

«resource»

Cutters Machine:

Equipment

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ISO 14258 is used as reference for other

standards in Enterprise Engineering domain as is the

case of ISO 15704 - Requirement for Enterprise

Reference Architecture and Methodologies. The

study of the conformance of FCEO with ISO15704

is also relevant to identify which aspects the FCEO

are in conformance with the standard ISO15704.

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