The aim of EFIS 2001, the fourth workshop in the sequence of the international workshops on engineering federated information systems is to intensify the exchange of ideas and experiences between academia and industrial practice. EFIS 2001 was embedded as one part into the major event, Information Federation Week Berlin 2001, including scientific and industrial workshops, demos and discussions for the academic audience as well as for a broader of young and senior practitioners in industry and public services.

This work covers issues in the development of federated information systems. As examples of information systems in application areas such as business, finance, environmental science and medicine show, there is a need to make information available through some form of Federated Information System.

Information systems belong to the most complex artifacts built in today's society. Developing, maintaining, and using an information system raises a large number of difficult problems, ranging from purely technical to organizational and social. Information Systems Engineering: From Data Analysis to Process Networks presents the most current research on existing and emergent trends on conceptual modeling and information systems engineering, bridging the gap between research and practice by providing a much-needed reference point on the design of software systems that evolve seamlessly to adapt to rapidly changing business and organizational practices.

This paper specifies a systems engineering process for the development of federated simulation models in order to support systems-of-systems analysis. The specification borrows ideas from the systems engineering domain, the simulation interoperability domain, and the software engineering domain. It has activities on the operational level to define how the real system operates, the system level to define the overall architecture of the federation, and the technical level to fully specify requirement to model developers. Use of this process allow the developers of federated simulations to separate these concerns and dialog more effectively with all of these groups.