لطفا منتظر باشید ...
A.2 History and Current Status
The PIF project began in October 1993 as an outgrowth of the Process Handbook project (Malone et al. 1993) at MIT and the desire to share process descriptions among a few groups at MIT, Stanford, the University of Toronto, and Digital Equipment Corporation. The Process Handbook project at the MIT Center for Coordination Science aims to create an electronic handbook of process models, their relations, and their trade-offs. This handbook is designed to help process designers analyze a given process and discover innovative alternatives. The Spark project at Digital Equipment Corporation aims to create a tool for creating, browsing, and searching libraries of business process models. The Virtual Design Team (VDT) project at Stanford University aims to model, simulate, and evaluate process and organization alternatives. The Enterprise Modeling project at the University of Toronto aims to articulate well-defined representations for processes, time, resources, products, quality, and organization. These representations support software tools for modeling various aspects of enterprises in business process re-engineering and enterprise integration.In one way or another, these groups were all concerned with process modeling and design. Furthermore they stood to benefit from sharing process descriptions across the different representations they used. For example, the Enterprise Modeling group might model an existing enterprise, use the Process Handbook to analyze its trade-offs and explore its alternatives, evaluate the different alternatives via VDT simulation, and then finally translate the chosen alternative back into its own representation for implementation.Over the past years, through a number of face-to-face, e-mail, and telephone meetings, members from each of the groups have:
Articulated the requirements for PIF
Specified the core PIF process description classes
Specified the PIF syntax
Elaborated the Partially Shared View mechanism for supporting multiple, partially overlapping class hierarchies
Created and maintained a database of the issues that arose concerning PIF's design and the rationales for their resolutions
Implemented several translators, each of which translated example process descriptions (such as a portion of the ISPW-6 Software Change Process) between PIF and a group's own process representation
Based on this work, the PIF Document 1.0 was released in December 1994. Since then, we have received a number of questions and comments on topics that range from individual PIF constructs to how certain process descriptions can be represented in PIF. We have been also assessing the adequacy of the PIF 1.0 by testing it against more complex process descriptions than before. AIAI at the University of Edinburgh also joined the PIF Working Group at this time bringing along their interests in planning, work flow, and enterprise process modeling. The Edinburgh group is also providing a valuable service as a liaison between the PIF group and the Workflow Management Coalition as well as the AI planning community (in particular, the DARPA/ROME Laboratory Planning Initiative) which has been concerned with the activity representation issues for a while.The revised structure of PIF reflects the lessons extracted from these external and internal input. In particular, two points emerged clearly. One is that the PIF-CORE has to be reduced to the bare minimum to enable translation among those who cannot agree on anything else. The other point is the importance of structuring PIF as a set of modules that build on one another. This way groups with different expressive needs can share a subset of the modules, rather than the whole monolithic set of constructs. As a result the PIF-CORE has been reduced to the minimum that is necessary to translate the simplest process descriptions and yet has built-in constructs for ''hanging-off''modules that extend the core in various ways.
