Scalable Enterprise Systems Phase II: Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) as a Formal Modeling and Simulation Framework for Scaleable Enterprise Design

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This Scalable Enterprise Systems Phase II project will develop the Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) Formal Framework for Scalable Enterprise Design and extend earlier-developed DEVS-based modeling and simulation environments to support several real world test cases. As the Internet expands toward 1 billion nodes forming a highly interconnected and computationally powerful medium, and companies increase specialization and horizontal layered organization, new complexity and dynamics are emerging. Scalability, the ability to avoid performance degradation and system breakdown as the scale of activity greatly increases, is one of the urgent global problems that needs to be addressed. This research will seek to enhance scalability at three inter-related levels of abstraction: the Enterprise Architecture level, the Information Technology Infrastructure level, and the Modeling and Simulation level. Earlier research developed a theoretical foundation for architecting a major responsibility of enterprise systems -- to ensure that the right information about the enterprise is available to decision makers at the right time. Having extended the DEVS formalism to express time-critical behaviors in enterprise data management, the researcher proposes to implement the extended DEVS functionality by suitably extending the distributed real-time execution environment previously developed in NSF-sponsored research. This environment will be tested by two diverse applications: a small scale but complete and real factory automation test bed and a large-scale web-hosting service for e-business. The Integrated Manufacturing Technology Initiative (IMTI) sponsored by the primary governmental funding agencies (NIST, DOE, NSF, and DARPA) states that modeling and simulation are emerging as key technologies to support manufacturing in the 21st century. This research will attempt to fill in some of the gap between the current state of the art and the IMTI vision of the future. In this vision enterprise processes, equipment and systems are linked via a robust communications infrastructure that delivers the right information at the right time; and integrated enterprise management systems that ensure that decisions to be made in real-time and on the basis of enterprise-wide impact. Achieving scalability in M&S and IT infrastructure will enable a wide array of M&S studies and implementations, as well as supporting the scalability of the future M&S-based networked, extended and distributed enterprise systems envisioned by IMTI.