Composing Enterprise Models:The Extended and The Virtual Enterprise

This paper is a contribution to the semantics of the emerging discipline of enterprise engineering. We study the composition of models of individual enterprises into the model which represents the behaviour of an extended or a virtual enterprise. The former corresponds intuitively to the union of models: all activities taking place within and between individual enterprises. The latter to intersection: coordinated and shared activities which utilise the resources of all participating enterprises. Modelling adopts a unifying business perspective upon a firm (a discrete parts manufacturer), its structure (available resources) and behaviour (activities which utilise resources). Model composition is based on formal semantics. The result is a precise technical meaning for an extended and a virtual enterprise, suitable for symbolic execution, reasoning and foremost for understanding the difference between both concepts.