Multi-perspective enterprise modeling: foundational concepts,prospects and future research challenges

The paper presents a method for multi- perspective enterprise modeling (MEMO) and a corresponding (meta-) modeling environment. An extensive analysis of requirements for enterprise modeling serves to motivate and assess the method. The method is based on an elaborate conception of multi-perspective enterprise models and on an extensible language architecture. The language architecture is comprised of a meta modeling language and an extensible set of integrated domain-specific modeling languages (DSML). The DSML are supplemented with process models and with guidelines for their reflective use. The corresponding modeling environment integrates editors for various DSML into multi-language model editors. It includes a meta model editor which enables the convenient use, development and extension of the set of supported DSML and supports the generation of respective graphical model editors. Thus, it also serves as a foundation for method engineering. MEMO covers both software engineering as well as social, managerial and economic aspects of the firm. The presentation of MEMO is supplemented with a comparative overview of other approaches to enterprise modeling. The paper concludes bys summarizing fundamental technical, epistemological and political challenges for enterprise modeling research and discusses potential paths for future research.     

基于Pi演算的跨组织工作流建模研究

传统的工作流建模方法主要用于描述组织内部流程,因而难以描述跨组织工作流面向流程、组合、抽象、涉及多个自治系统通信合作的新特点.针对此问题,提出了一种基于Pi演算的跨组织工作流建模方法,利用Pi演算的并发计算操作符,将跨组织业务流程建模为一组自治且并发执行的组织内子流程的组合,子流程建模为组织内本地流程定义和组织间控制约束的组合.基于Pi演算的弱互相似理论,验证了两个跨组织子流程外部行为的相等性,用于帮助组织内私有流程的外部抽象.基于该方法建立的跨组织工作流模型在子流程间建立了一种松耦合的关系,适用于动态的跨组织环境,同时基于严格的形式化方法,便于分析和验证.     

Conceptual modeling for the design of intelligent and emergent information systems

A key requirement to today's fast changing economic environment is the ability of organizations to adapt dynamically in an effective and efficient manner. Information and Communication Technologies play a crucially important role in addressing such adaptation requirements. The notion of `intelligent software' has emerged as a means by which enterprises can respond to changes in a reactive manner but also to explore, in a pro-active manner, possibilities for new business models. The development of such software systems demands analysis, design and implementation paradigms that recognize the need for `co-development' of these systems with enterprise goals, processes and capabilities. The work presented in this paper is motivated by this need and to this end it proposes a paradigm that recognizes co-development as a knowledge-based activity. The proposed solution is based on a multi-perspective modeling approach that involves (i) modeling key aspects of the enterprise, (ii) reasoning about design choices and (iii) supporting strategic decision-making through simulations. The utility of the approach is demonstrated though a case study in the field of marketing for a start-up company.     

CIMOSA modelling processes

Engineering, integrating and managing complex enterprises requires the understanding, and the ability to partition and simplify their operational complexity. Enterprise modelling supports these requirements by providing means for describing process oriented systems and decomposing those into manageable pieces. However, enterprise modelling requires both a common modelling language and a sufficient modelling methodology. The language provides for common understanding on enterprise models across the industrial community. Modelling methodologies will guide users through the rather complex enterprise modelling tasks. Depending on the skills and the tasks of the modelling person, different methodologies will be implemented in the supporting modelling tool. The paper presents both a methodology for the modelling expert and one for the business user. Whereas the modelling expert will be involved in creating new models, structuring the model contents and developing new modelling components, the business user will use process models for decision support. The latter therefore has a need to modify and adapt enterprise models to represent operational alternatives. A methodology for this type of work has to be based on menus. Menus which are created and maintained by the modelling expert. The business user will mostly work with existing process models. He will evaluate process alternatives and will implement the best solution as the new model of his tasks. This mode of operation will thereby provide for automatic update of the models and will keep the models in sync with the changing reality.     

Presentation and exchange of business models with CIMOSA-XML

In the modern competitive business world there is a frequent need for enterprises to modify their structure of business processes to become more effective in the market place. The solution to this management demand is an improved business integration which is only successful when it is supported by effective IT systems. The Esprit project PRIMA aims to create a competitive advantage for European companies in the process sector by providing a route to ‘smarter' IT investments that are effective across the whole enterprise. A process repository which will store business process models in suitable formats would provide users with appropriate views of the models, focusing only on their information needs. However, the existence of many incompatible modelling methodologies and tools makes it impossible to unify the modelling approach. Therefore it would be desirable to have a high level common modelling language. The PRIMA project has identified CIMOSA as the basis for common semantics of the business model language and the XML format, as a suitable format for the transfer of the model structure and content. The PRIMA working group, in an effort to elaborate these concepts, has developed the Document Type Definition concept (DTD) of the CIMOSA-XML meta-model, which can be used to build the partial enterprise models related to the Business Functional Requirements (BFR) of the PRIMA Process Methodology.     

E-MEMO: a method to support the development of customized electronic commerce systems

In many industries structural change through E-Commerce is challenging firms to re-align their strategies as well as re-engineer their business processes with new competitive environments while taking advantage of technological opportunities. This article presents E-MEMO, a method for multi-perspective enterprise modelling with special emphasis on processes and technologies for E-Commerce. It serves to analyse and design corporate information systems that are balanced with a company’s E-Commerce strategy and its organisation. E-MEMO offers specific languages for modelling strategies, business processes, and related resources. In addition to that, it provides a library of reference models including strategy networks to guide strategic planning and models of business processes. In order to further support the implementation of information systems a transformation has been defined that allows for generating workflow schemata from business process models. Since design-oriented research is not predominant in the Information Systems field, the epistemological challenges of the chosen research approach are discussed, too.     

Security modeling for service-oriented systems using security pattern refinement approach

Security is one of the critical aspects of current systems, which are based on loosely coupled and technology-agnostic service-oriented architectures (SOA). Though SOA is the driving force for enterprises to open their ends for global business collaborations, nevertheless it evolves many challenges for modeling and enforcing security. One of the main problems for designing secure systems is the lack of consistent frameworks and methodologies for modeling security concerns. Traditional approaches consider security at the end of system development, which evolves inflexible and un-configurable systems, which are too difficult to maintain and manage. The other major problem with current approaches is that they assume pre-defined and hard-coded security patterns and mechanisms for secure system design. Whereas, the evolving SOA systems require configurable security to realize different security patterns and security policies in a variety of business scenarios. To solve these problems, it is necessary to model security concerns from the beginning of system modeling in a platform-independent way. This paper proposes a pattern refinement approach for security modeling to achieve configurable and declarative security, based on the principles of abstraction, refinement, separation-of-concerns and maintainability to achieve flexible configurations of SOA security. In the proposed approach, a Domain Expert defines abstract policies using common security vocabulary and a Security Expert models security with patterns and refines them for a target architecture in successive systematic refinements. Furthermore, it facilitates the transformation of abstract security models into executable security policies for the target platforms.     

An integral system‐ergonomic approach for IT‐based process management in complex work environments by example of manufacturing and health care

Recent trends in manufacturing and health care move these two work systems closer together from a system ergonomics point of view. Individual treatment of products, especially patients, by specialists in a distributed environment demand information technology (IT)‐based support suitable for complex systems. IT‐based support of processes in complex systems is difficult due to the lack of standard processes. IT support also means to rethink processes to use efficiency potentials. Close cooperation of users and software developers is needed to increase the ergonomic quality of the system. Therefore, suitable tools are needed: UML is available as the standard industry modeling language, Zope/Plone as the quasi‐standard for content management systems, SimPy as an object‐oriented simulation tool for event‐triggered processes, and ACT‐R as a powerful cognitive architecture for simulation of human information processes. The integration of these tools enables system‐ergonomic support of processes in the complex work system as well as of the development and deployment process. It is the base of an integral system‐ergonomic approach for IT‐based process management. Knowledge gained during process analysis either enters models or leads to the extension and adaptation of the tool chain. The models serve as basis for discussion among system ergonomists, programmers, and specialists from the work system. Further, they are understood by simulation and process support tools. Transcoding efforts between humans with different professional backgrounds and machines are reduced, and the flexibility demanded by complex systems is met. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

A model framework-based domain-specific composable modeling method for combat system effectiveness simulation

Combat system effectiveness simulation (CoSES) plays an irreplaceable role in the effectiveness measurement of combat systems. According to decades of research and practice, composable modeling and multi-domain modeling are recognized as two major modeling requirements in CoSES. Current effectiveness simulation researches attempt to cope with the structural and behavioral complexity of CoSES based on a unified technological space, and they are limited to their existing modeling paradigms and fail to meet these two requirements. In this work, we propose a model framework-based domain-specific composable modeling method to solve this problem. This method builds a common model framework using application invariant knowledge for CoSES, and designs domain-specific modeling infrastructures for subdomains as corresponding extension points of the framework to support the modeling of application variant knowledge. Therefore, this method supports domain-specific modeling in multiple subdomains and the composition of subsystem models across different subdomains based on the model framework. The case study shows that this method raises the modeling abstraction level, supports generative modeling, and promotes model reuse and composability.     

Strategic business modeling: representation and reasoning

Business intelligence (BI) offers tremendous potential for business organizations to gain insights into their day-to-day operations, as well as longer term opportunities and threats. However, most of today’s BI tools are based on models that are too much data-oriented from the point of view of business decision makers. We propose an enterprise modeling approach to bridge the business-level understanding of the enterprise with its representations in databases and data warehouses. The business intelligence model (BIM) offers concepts familiar to business decision making—such as goals, strategies, processes, situations, influences, and indicators. Unlike many enterprise models which are meant to be used to derive, manage, or align with IT system implementations, BIM aims to help business users organize and make sense of the vast amounts of data about the enterprise and its external environment. In this paper, we present core BIM concepts, focusing especially on reasoning about situations, influences, and indicators. Such reasoning supports strategic analysis of business objectives in light of current enterprise data, allowing analysts to explore scenarios and find alternative strategies. We describe how goal reasoning techniques from conceptual modeling and requirements engineering have been applied to BIM. Techniques are also provided to support reasoning with indicators linked to business metrics, including cases where specifications of indicators are incomplete. Evaluation of the proposed modeling and reasoning framework includes an on-going prototype implementation, as well as case studies.     

简述单位车辆管理系统的设计与实现

文章所提出的单位车辆管理系统的开发是一项中小型系统。通过需求分析、相关技术分析,结合目前企事业单位车辆管理工作的实际需要,对车辆管理信息系统的业务流程、功能建模、数据库系统等进行了设计,并对系统的编码、安全体系的一系列关键技术进行了研究。     

E-MEMO: Referenzmodelle zur ökonomischen Realisierung leistungsfähiger Infrastrukturen für Electronic Commerce

For many companies, the development of a competitive E-Commerce strategy and even more so its implementation is a huge challenge. This paper presents a method that is aimed at reducing substantially cost and risk of such an endeavour. The method has been adapted from an existing method for multi-perspective enterprise modelling. It supports strategy analysis and design as well as the corresponding organisational design. It also fosters the configuration of supporting information systems. Besides specialized process models, the method offers reference models for strategy design and a library of business process models. The process models can be transformed automatically into workflow schemata.     

面向服务的企业架构*

定义了面向服务的企业架构、业务过程和活动类型,分析了企业架构内涵的演化、概念框架和服务视角,并在传统企业建模、IT规划和企业架构的基础上提出了面向服务企业架构及其规划过程,为分析面向服务环境下企业的业务、IT及其一致性提供了公共的理解和交流基础,有助于企业实时监控IT架构运营状况,进而预测、评估和优化企业业务过程性能,实现企业间的业务过程协作建模与执行.     

A declarative framework for stateful analysis of execution traces

With newer complex multi-core systems, it is important to understand an application’s runtime behavior to be able to debug its execution, detect possible problems and bottlenecks and finally identify potential root causes. Execution traces usually contain precise data about an application execution. Their analysis and abstraction at multiple levels can provide valuable information and insights about an application’s runtime behavior. However, with multiple abstraction levels, it becomes increasingly difficult to find the exact location of detected performance or security problems. Tracing tools provide various analysis views to help users to understand their application problems. However, these pre-defined views are often not sufficient to reveal all analysis aspects of the underlying application. A declarative approach that enables users to specify and build their own custom analysis and views based on their knowledge, requirements and problems can be more useful and effective. In this paper, we propose a generic declarative trace analysis framework to analyze, comprehend and visualize execution traces. This enhanced framework builds custom analyses based on a specified modeled state, extracted from a system execution trace and stored in a special purpose database. The proposed solution enables users to first define their different analysis models based on their application and requirements, then visualize these models in many alternate representations (Gantt chart, XY chart, etc.), and finally filter the data to get some highlights or detect some potential patterns. Several sample applications with different operating systems are shown, using trace events gathered from Linux and Windows, at the kernel and user-space levels.     

Modeling and execution of event stream processing in business processes

The Internet of Things and Cyber-physical Systems provide enormous amounts of real-time data in the form of streams of events. Businesses can benefit from the integration of these real-world data; new services can be provided to customers, or existing business processes can be improved. Events are a well-known concept in business processes. However, there is no appropriate abstraction mechanism to encapsulate event stream processing in units that represent business functions in a coherent manner across the process modeling, process execution, and IT infrastructure layer. In this paper we present Event Stream Processing Units (SPUs) as such an abstraction mechanism. SPUs encapsulate application logic for event stream processing and enable a seamless transition between process models, executable process representations, and components at the IT layer. We derive requirements for SPUs and introduce EPC and BPMN extensions to model SPUs at the abstract and at the technical process layer. We introduce a transformation from SPUs in EPCs to SPUs in BPMN and implement our modeling notation extensions in Software AG ARIS. We present a runtime infrastructure that executes SPUs and supports implicit invocation and completion semantics. We illustrate our approach using a logistics process as running example.     

On the predictive performance of queueing network models for large-scale distributed transaction processing systems

Automated business processes running on distributed transaction processing (DTP) systems characterize the IT backbone of services industries. New web services standards such as BPEL have increased the importance of DTP systems in business practice. IT departments are forced to meet pre-defined quality-of-service metrics, therefore performance prediction is essential. Unfortunately, the complexity of multiple interacting services running on multiple hardware resources as well as the volatility in the demand for these services can make performance analysis extremely difficult. While business process automation has been a dominant topic in the recent years, surprisingly little has been published on performance modelling of large-scale DTP systems. In this paper, we will describe these systems with respect to the workloads and technical features, and compare the predictive accuracy of different types of queueing models and discrete event simulations experimentally. The experiments are based on two real-world DTP systems and respective data sets of a telecom company. Overall, we found that while the results for average utilization scenarios are quite similar, the effort to implement and run analytic solutions is much lower. As long as standard distributional assumptions of analytical models hold, they provide a reliable and fast methodology to explore different demand mix scenarios even for large-scale systems. The difficulty to estimate service and arrival time parameters and demand mix for the respective queueing network models can largely be reduced with appropriate tooling. Often, this information is missing in IT departments. Also, complex event conditions and error handling in DTP systems can make the analysis difficult. For many DTP applications, however, performance modelling could provide valuable decision support for service level management.