Books and Journals:

Process Modelling, B. Scholz-Reiter, H.-D. Stahlmann, A. Nethe (Eds.)

The intention of the editors is to establish an interdisciplinary common sense and methodology for process modelling. The book is a collection of 36 contributions from European and Japanese authors with a large German participation. They cover a rather wide range of process model applications from business processes, logistics and production processes to processes in water systems.

The general proposition is: process model are general tools for analysing and optimising system processes. They are also applicable for system design and management. Process models have the advantage to be adaptive in terms of modelling precision that means process parameter boundaries have to be defined according to the problem to be analysed. This is in contrary to general systems theory were the required knowledge about the system has to be as complete as possible.

The 36 contributions have been structured into a section on Common Approaches and 5 application area sections: Business Process Modelling, Logistic Processes, Engineering Processes, Production Processes and Modelling and Simulation of Water Systems. Starting with a survey of a general theory of process modelling even the section on common approaches covers a very wide range of themes from automatic model generation, to Petri Nets, mathematical models in biology and neural network modelling of the processes in sporting events.

Many of the different contributionsdescribe rather interesting applications and concepts. It is beyond the scope of this short review to address these in details. However the stated intention of the book has not yet been met. Efforts have still to be made to summarise and identify the commonalities and differences in the different contributions.

Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg, 1999, ISBN 3-540-65610-3

 
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