Modeling the enterprise engineering environment

The notion of computerized enterprises is perhaps one of the most exciting and far reaching visions that has emerged over the past decade for the role of information technology in modern organizations. Specific approaches such as computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) and concurrent engineering (CE) have helped in the upwards shift of the entire production function of an organization. In this paper, the authors show how the modeling of CIM enterprises with the computer integrated manufacturing open system architecture (CIMOSA) approach can be made operational using existing object-oriented techniques and tools, such as Protob and Quid. The tools help in a graphical representation of functional and informational aspects, the simulation and graphical animation of the model, the automatic generation of prototypes as well as of distributed applications