An object oriented framework for distributed, interoperable process engineering environments

The intent of this work is to contribute to the field of distributed process engineering involving a large network of heterogeneous, autonomous and distributed models and process engines. Distributed process engineering is becoming increasingly popular. Such an environment consists of heterogeneous, autonomous, locally managed and distributed process systems that cooperate to provide complex services. These process systems may be business or software engineering environments. These systems have provided a model for process engineering and a foundation on which to build solutions supporting the automation of process execution and support, involving human and machine based activities. Cooperation between such environments is needed because sites have limited resources to perform activities. Interoperability is becoming a major issue of cooperative work environments. The goal of this work is to provide a framework for process systems interoperability. We provide system interoperability favoring the use of an object oriented framework. Object oriented technology has proved to achieve interoperability at a semantic level and can lead to a canonical model with homogeneous views of local process environments. In this way global process engineering is specified uniformly on top of local systems. We present the architecture of the environment and then focus on the object oriented framework for interoperability