An enterprise model as we have already defined it contains many submodels of many different types, probably stored in several different ways. These models need to be managed in several ways, during creation, implementation and maintenance. A field which covers all of these is "model management'', a term which was coined about 20 years ago within the larger field of decision theory. A recent survey of model management, which includes 75 references, is [7]. Much of this research is reported in Operations Research journals.
Models, it is recognised, play a key role in the decision making process. Most models in this field are mathematical, usually linear programming ones. However, the issues addressed and the modelling life cycle are general.
It is important for a user to be able to locate and access relevant models at appropriate times, without having the overhead of actually knowing where models are stored and what their forms are. Much work is currently going on in the field of object management (e.g. [8] to shield the user of heterogeneous applications from such effort. O-Plan [5] includes the concept of a Knowledge Source Framework language. This gives a wrapper for each knowledge source (or processing asset) which allows an understanding of what it can do, what platform it needs to run on, what parts of the plan (enterprise model in our case) it can access in read and write modes, etc.