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.

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.

Since the late 1980s, the CAiSE conferences have provided a forum for the p- sentation and exchange of research results and practical experiences within the ?eld of Information Systems Engineering. CAiSE 2001 was the 13th conference in this series and was held from 4th to 8th June 2001 in the resort of Int- laken located near the three famous Swiss mountains – the Eiger, M ̈ onch, and Jungfrau. The ?rst two days consisted of pre-conference workshops and tutorials. The workshop themes included requirements engineering, evaluation of modeling methods, data integration over the Web, agent-oriented information systems, and the design and management of data warehouses. Continuing the tradition of recent CAiSE conferences, there was also a doctoral consortium. The p- conference tutorials were on the themes of e-business models and XML appli- tion development. The main conference program included three invited speakers, two tuto- als, and a panel discussion in addition to presentations of the papers in these proceedings. We also included a special ‘practice and experience’ session to give presentersanopportunitytoreportonanddiscussexperiencesandinvestigations on the use of methods and technologies in practice. Weextendourthankstothemembersoftheprogramcommitteeandallother referees without whom such conferences would not be possible. The program committee, whose members came from 20 di?erent countries, selected 27 hi- quality research papers and 3 experience reports from a total of 97 submissions. The topics of these papers span the wide-range of topics relevant to information systems engineering – from requirements and design through to implementation and operation of complex and dynamic systems.