Model-based Planning and Control of Distributed Business Processes in Manufacturing Networks

On the international market, the use of potentials for rationalization has gained increasing significance for many enterprises. In the past, the focus for activities had been on the manufacturing area and internal value adding processes. By now, efficient concepts and instruments are available on a national and international level. Therefore, recent activities concerning process improvement are aimed at the interactions between value adding processes of networked enterprises. The success of such efforts is strongly related with the use of models for planning and control of internal and external business processes. This article illustrates recent approaches to model-based problem-solving, as well as fields of application of such models.