The EXTERNAL intelligent infrastructure

Infrastructures play an increasingly important role in the formation and operation of extended enterprises, virtual organizations and collaborative business networks: integrating architectures and solutions. The main purpose of an intelligent infrastructure is to provide an interoperable architectural platform for bridging the gaps between methodologies, delivery approaches, and continuous business solutions in such enterprises and organizations. This paper discusses what is meant by an intelligent infrastructure, and the state-of-the-art results as delivered by the EXTERNAL project IST-1999-10091. The EXTERNAL intelligent infrastructure is a first platform for distributed, model-generated workplaces, concurrent development and management of model and metamodel structures, views and data, methodologies and customer solutions. The focus will be on the services provided by the infrastructure, the layers of enterprise architectures supporting it, and the role of active knowledge models driving the operational solutions.