Component-based modeling of enterprise architectures for collaborative manufacturing

Agility and collaboration are key factors in collaborative manufacturing. An enterprise architecture (EA) framework for collaborative manufacturing has to support agility and have the ability to increase opportunities for collaboration. In this paper, an architecture-unit-based enterprise architecture (AUEA) framework is introduced for collaborative manufacturing. It supports the agility and collaboration ability of the EA using architecture units (AUs) and semantics of the metamodel. Each AU is a business-driven minimum EA component which consists of the components in predefined reference models of specific domains and the associations between domains and domain drivers. Because AUs enable the easy composition of a business-driven EA, the AUEA framework is agile. The semantics of the metamodel in AUEA frameworks are modeled using object-oriented and fact-oriented methods. The semantics and AUs enhance opportunities for collaboration. As an example of an AUEA in collaborative manufacturing, an EA for a supply chain on the basis of the supply-chain operations reference (SCOR) model is implemented in this paper.