Resource-focused process engineering for the distributed enterprise

The rapid evolution of tho Internet and its supporting technologies and standards has resulted in new opportunities and challenges for the electronic enterprise. In particular, business and operations models for the engineering enterprise are being rapidly reshaped by these changes. The potential for ubiquitous interconnectivity among globally distributed engineering design centres, for example, creates opportunities and challenges that are unprecedented. The primary objective of this research is the development of a process engineering formalism that supports the development and maintenance of distributed. process systems, The task system model, a process engineering formalism introduced previously, has been extended to address issues of task system determinacy and concurrency. Specifically, abstract resources and resource states are introduced as extensions to the task system model that can ensure determinacy and also impose constraints that ensure that the transformation of key resources progresses through the desired sequence of states as the task system executes. It is also demonstrated that these extensions provides a means potentially to improve process system efficiency by maximizing parallelism to the extent that reliability is not compromised. This work is viewed as particularly relevant in the context of the deployment and management of multimedia resources to support distributed, concurrent engineering.