Resource-focused process engineering for the distributed enterprise

The rapid evolution of tho Internet and its supporting technologies and sta ndards has resulted in new opportunities and challenges for the electronic enterprise. In particular, business and operations models for the engineeri ng enterprise are being rapidly reshaped by these changes. The potential fo r ubiquitous interconnectivity among globally distributed engineering desig n centres, for example, creates opportunities and challenges that are unpre cedented. The primary objective of this research is the development of a pr ocess engineering formalism that supports the development and maintenance o f distributed. process systems, The task system model, a process engineerin g formalism introduced previously, has been extended to address issues of t ask system determinacy and concurrency. Specifically, abstract resources an d resource states are introduced as extensions to the task system model tha t can ensure determinacy and also impose constraints that ensure that the t ransformation of key resources progresses through the desired sequence of s tates as the task system executes. It is also demonstrated that these exten sions provides a means potentially to improve process system efficiency by maximizing parallelism to the extent that reliability is not compromised. T his work is viewed as particularly relevant in the context of the deploymen t and management of multimedia resources to support distributed, concurrent engineering.