Challenges and current developments for Sensing, Smart and Sustainable Enterprise Systems

•The concept of the Sensing, Smart and Sustainable (S^3) Enterprise System is introduced to highlight medium and long-term trends for next generation enterprise information systems (EIS) in the domain of enterprise modelling, integration and networking.•The S^3 Enterprise System is not static but evolves over time, and EIS need to support complexity, learning of smart agents and the overall evolution in the S^3-Enterprise.•From an architectures and languages point of view the concept of “services” needs to be integrated, supporting model-driven engineering and model-based operation.•For better decision making, existing architectures have to be extended towards an enterprise operating system. To support interoperability between different models a common core ontology is needed.•For education and management of modelling processes new methods are needed. These methods need to cover collaboration, management of enterprise architectures to improve the use of architectures and models.

As technology advances and thus Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) evolve, a new enterprise model must be devised to face future digital enterprise needs. This paper discusses issues and emerging trends that must be addressed if a true sensing and smart enterprise is to be achieved to meet sustainability requirements. Methods are required to capture enterprise reality and to provide a seamless interoperable digital enterprise model. The paper summarises several challenges to be addressed by future research in enterprise modelling. Challenges are discussed from the Enterprise, Information, Computational, Engineering and Technological points of view, according to the ODP-RM (Open Distributed Processing—Reference Model). To some extent, progress on some challenges has already been made and solutions are expected to materialise in the near future. Other challenges have only recently been identified and potential solutions cannot yet be predicted. The paper offers a discussion of these challenges for the future enterprise along with the required enterprise model; it also introduces the concept of the Sensing, Smart and Sustainable (S^3) Enterprise System. The position paper expresses opinions derived from the existing general research priorities and directions identified by the International Federation for Automatic Control–Technical Committee on Enterprise Integration and Networking (IFAC–TC 5.3).