A formalization and extension of the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture and the Purdue Methodology
Abstract
The Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology (PERA) (1, 2, 3) was initially developed in December 1990 for the Industry-Purdue University Consortium for CIM to complete its development of a methodology for use by industry to more easily plan and pursue computer integrated manufacturing or enterprise integration program. It has since been widely investigated by international groups studying this field. It is also now being widely accepted by industry and as a potential International Standard in this area. However, PERA has also been labelled in some circles as an informal description of the enterprise integration process which badly needs an established formalism attached to it. This work was therefore initiated to help establish such a formalism for PERA. The Design Axioms of Suh (4) have been used to show that PERA satisfies these requirements for the efficient design of an enterprise integration architecture. PERA's development phases and minimum information transfer between them prove to be the definition of the ideal interfaces for the system in question. Each of the phases comprises a set of related tasks. Many of them can be carried out by computer-based tools either alone or with the aid of humans. A standardizable glossary provides a needed basis for a common understanding of important concepts and definitions involved in enterprise integration. Therefore, a hierarchy of generic, standardizable formalism methods is presented, including architectural, interface, design tool and semantic formalisms. In addition, this work has also developed and illustrated an important recursiveness of the PERA framework of architecture. A comparative study serves further to amplify the conclusions above that PERA is currently the overall simplest, yet most complete, representation possible for such an architecture and methodology which can also be considered to epitomize the ancient paradigm of "Divide et impera (Divide and rule)" which has been known since ancient times to master complexity (5, p. 3). Thus this study has demonstrated that the structure of PERA which was originally developed purely from logical reasoning can be shown to be the correct one through the establishment of a formal theoretical base.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Whilliams, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Engineering|Industrial engineering
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