From Distributed Supervisory Control to Enterprise Integration: Coordination Support for Operational Environments

Enterprise integration research focuses on the development and integration of models with the goal of analysis and improvement of an enterprise. Cognitive engineering research focuses on the problem solving requirements of humans in complex systems with the goal of designing more effective systems. This paper presents a particular approach to cognitive engineering - model-based intelligent support - and draws implications to the design and development of enterprise models and tools. Specifically, we discuss the realm of distributed supervisory control, propose a knowledge architecture and theory of human-machine interaction to support cooperative problem solving, and link this to current enterprise integration research. Examples are drawn from the spacecraft operations domain.