Topic: Industrial information integration engineering and related research topics
Speaker: Prof. XU Lida
Time: 3:00pm, 8 Jan. 2012
Place: Room 801, School of Management

Abstract:
Rapid advances in industrial information integration methods have spurred tremendous growth in the use of enterprise systems. Consequently, a variety of techniques have been used for probing enterprise systems. These techniques include business process management, workflow management, EAI, SOA, grid computing, and others. Many applications require a combination of these techniques, which is giving rise to the emergence of enterprise systems. Development of the techniques has originated from different disciplines and has the potential to significantly improve the performance of enterprise systems. However, the lack of powerful tools still poses a major hindrance to exploiting the full potential of enterprise systems. In particular, formal methods and systems methods are crucial for modeling complex enterprise systems, which poses unique challenges. In this presentation, we briefly survey the state of the art in the area of enterprise systems as well as Industrial Information Integration Engineering (IIIE) proposed by the author.
In addition, emerging e-business, e-commerce, and virtual enterprises are leading to the trend of managing workflows across organizational boundaries. A cross-organizational workflow is generally comprised of intra-organizational workflows and inter-organization workflows. The modeling techniques for the intra-organizational workflows are relatively matured. In this presentation, they are briefly reviewed and contrasted to show their strong points and weaknesses. The inter-organizational workflow emphasizes more on combining the workflows of different partners together and reconciling the relationships between them. The modeling approaches are presented in two directions by their functions: routing languages introduced to combine individual workflows and interaction patterns proposed for collaborative partners to interact with each other. In this presentation, some techniques are summarized, and some interesting research issues in the area are discussed in both technical and managerial perspectives.

Brief Introduction to Speaker:
Li Da Xu is a Changjiang Chair Professor designated by the Ministry of Education of China. He is the Founding Chair of the Enterprise Information Systems Technical Committee ofIEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society and Founding Chair of IFIP TC 8 WG8.9. He is also a research professor at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, a visiting professor of MIT, USA, a visiting professor of the University of Science and Technology of China, and an eminent professor of information technology at the Old Dominion University (a former branch campus of the College of William and Mary and Virginia Polytechnic Institute), USA. Dr. Xu is the Editor-in-Chief of multiple major publications on enterprise systems launched by the world’s premier publishers. These publications include: Enterprise Information Systems journal (Taylor & Francis), Advances in Enterprise Information Systems Series (Taylor & Francis), and Advances in Systems Science and Engineering Series (Taylor & Francis).