Business Object Modeling, Validation, and Mediation for Integrating Heterogeneous Application Systems

When different business organizations come together to conduct a joint business in a virtual enterprise environment, their application systems need to have a convenient way to specify the services needed from other systems and to transfer data needed by these services. The transferred data needs to be validated and, in some cases, mediated to meet the constraints and data representation requirements of both the source and target application systems. Ideally, the validation and mediation tasks should be done outside of the legacy application systems so that these systems do not have to be modified. In this work, the Business Object Documents (BODs) introduced by the Open Applications Group (OAG) are used for specifying business operations and transferring data among application systems. We use an active object model to model BODs. The model captures not only the data attributes and methods associated with these business objects, but also events and rules for specifying and triggering the enforcement of attribute constraints and inter-attribute constraints and the activation of data mediation operations. The conceptual models of these BODs with their added semantics are used to generate entity classes, converters and skeletal programs needed for enforcing constraints and for converting data. These generated object classes and software components in Java constitute the platform-independent adapters through which heterogeneous application systems inter-operate over CORBA and RMI communication infrastructures. A distributed approach to data validation and mediation is used. It allows the generated code for validation and mediation to be distributed and processed at different sites, thus avoiding the potential network bottleneck of a centralized approach to the validation and mediation of business object documents.     

An industrial case study on variability handling in large enterprise software systems

ContextEnterprise software systems (e.g., enterprise resource planning software) are often deployed in different contexts (e.g., different organizations or different business units or branches of one organization). However, even though organizations, business units or branches have the same or similar business goals, they may differ in how they achieve these goals. Thus, many enterprise software systems are subject to variability and adapted depending on the context in which they are used.ObjectiveOur goal is to provide a snapshot of variability in large scale enterprise software systems. We aim at understanding the types of variability that occur in large industrial enterprise software systems. Furthermore, we aim at identifying how variability is handled in such systems.MethodWe performed an exploratory case study in two large software organizations, involving two large enterprise software systems. Data were collected through interviews and document analysis. Data were analyzed following a grounded theory approach.ResultsWe identified seven types of variability (e.g., functionality, infrastructure) and eight mechanisms to handle variability (e.g., add-ons, code switches).ConclusionsWe provide generic types for classifying variability in enterprise software systems, and reusable mechanisms for handling such variability. Some variability types and handling mechanisms for enterprise software systems found in the real world extend existing concepts and theories. Others confirm findings from previous research literature on variability in software in general and are therefore not specific to enterprise software systems. Our findings also offer a theoretical foundation for describing variability handling in practice. Future work needs to provide more evaluations of the theoretical foundations, and refine variability handling mechanisms into more detailed practices.     

Ontology-driven intelligent service for configuration support in networked organizations

Nowadays, organizations must continually adapt to market and organizational changes to achieve their most important goals. Migration to business services and service-oriented architectures provides a valuable opportunity to attain the organization objectives. This migration causes evolution both in organizational structure and in technology-enabling businesses to dynamically change vendors and services. One of the forms of organizational structures is the form of networked organization. Technologies of business intelligence and Web intelligence effectively support business processes within the networked organizations. While business intelligence focuses on development of services for consumer needs recognition, information search, and evaluation of alternatives; Web intelligence addresses advancement of Web-empowered systems, services, and environments. The paper proposes a technological ontology-driven framework for configuration support as applied to networked organization. The framework integrates concepts of business intelligence and Web intelligence into a collaboration environment of a networked organization on the base of attainment of knowledge logistics purposes. This framework referred to as KSNet is based on the integration of software agent technology and Web services. Knowledge logistics functions of KSNet are complemented by technological functions of knowledge-gathering agents. The services of these agents are implemented with CAPNET, a FIPA compliant agent platform. CAPNET allows consuming services of agents in a service-oriented way. Applicability of the approach is illustrated through a “Binni scenario”-based case study of a portable field hospital configuration. Alexander Smirnov received his M.E., Ph.D. and D.Sc. degrees from St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1979, 1984, and 1994, respectively. He is a Deputy Director for Research and a Head of Computer Aided Integrated Systems Laboratory at St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPIIRAS). He is a full professor at St. Petersburg State Electrical Engineering University. His current research interests include corporate knowledge management, Web-services, group decision support systems, virtual enterprises, and supply chain management. Nikolay Shilov received his M.E. from St. Petersburg State Technical University, Russia, in 1998 and his Ph.D. from SPIIRAS, in 2005. He is a senior researcher at the Computer Aided Integrated Systems Laboratory of SPIIRAS. His current research interests include virtual enterprise configuration, supply chain management, knowledge management, ontology engineering and Web-services. Tatiana Levashova received her M.E. degree from St. Petersburg State Electrical Engineering University, in 1986. She is a lead programmer at Computer Aided Integrated Systems Laboratory of SPIIRAS. Her current research is devoted to knowledge-related problems such as knowledge representation, knowledge management, and ontology management. She has published more than 96 papers in reviewed journals and proceedings of international conferences. Leonid Sheremetov received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1990 from St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences where he has worked as a research fellow and a senior research fellow from 1982. Now, he is a principal investigator of the Research Program on Applied Mathematics and Computing of the Mexican Petroleum Institute where he leads the Distributed Intelligent Systems Group, and is also a part-time professor of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Centre for Computing Research of the National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico. His current research interests include multiagent systems, semantic WEB, decision support systems, and enterprise information integration. His group developed CAPNET agent platform and has been involved in several projects for the energy industry ranging from petroleum exploration and production to knowledge management, with special focus on industrial exploitation of agent technology. He is also member of Editorial Boards of several journals. Miguel Contreras obtained his M.S. degree in Computer Science in 2002 from the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico. Now, he is a Ph.D. student of the Postgraduate Studies Program at the Mexican Petroleum Institute. He is one of the principal developers of the CAPNET agent platform. His current research interests include multiagent systems, service-oriented architectures, and enterprise information integration.     

From business to software: a B2B survey

In recent years business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce has been subject to major rethinking. A paradigm shift can be observed from document centric file-based interchange of business information to process-centric and, finally to service-based information exchange. On a business level, a lot of work has been done to capture business models and collaborative business processes of an enterprise; further initiatives address the identification of customer services and the formalization of business service level agreements (SLA). On a lower, i.e., technical level, the focus is on moving towards service-oriented architectures (SOA). These developments promise more flexibility, a market entry at lower costs and an easier IT-alignment to changing market conditions. This explains the overwhelming quantity of specifications and approaches targeting the area of B2B—these approaches are partly competing and overlapping. In this paper we provide a survey of the most promising approaches at both levels and classify them using the Open-edi reference model standardized by ISO. Whereas on the technical level, service-oriented architecture is becoming the predominant approach, on the business level the landscape is more heterogeneous. In this context, we propose—in line with the services science approach—to integrate business modeling with process modeling in order to make the transformation from business services to Web services more transparent.     

A requirements monitoring framework for enterprise systems

Requirements compliant software is becoming a necessity. Fewer and fewer organizations will run their critical transactions on software that has no visible relationship to its requirements. Businesses wish to see their software being consistent with their policies. Moreover, partnership agreements are pressuring less mature organizations to improve their systems. Businesses that rely on web services, for example, are vulnerable to the problems of their web service providers. While electronic commerce has increased the speed of on-line transactions, the technology for monitoring requirements compliance—especially for transactions—has lagged behind. To address the requirements monitoring problem for enterprise information systems, we integrate techniques for requirements analysis and software execution monitoring. Our framework assists analysts in the development of requirements monitors for enterprise services. The deployed system raises alerts when services succeed or fail to satisfy their specified requirements, thereby making software requirements visible. The framework usage is demonstrated with an analysis of ebXML marketplace specifications. An analyst applies goal analysis to discover potential service obstacles, and then derives requirements monitors and a distributed monitoring system. Once deployed, the monitoring system provides alerts when obstacles occur. A summary of the framework implementation is presented, along with analysis of two monitor component implementations. We conclude that the approach implemented in the framework, called ReqMon, provides real-time feedback on requirements satisfaction, and thereby provides visibility into requirements compliance of enterprise information systems.

Virtuelle Entkopplung von fachlichen und IT-Strukturen für das IT/Business Alignment – Grundlagen,Architekturgestaltung und Umsetzung am Beispiel der Domänenbildung

IT/business alignment is one of the main topics of information systems research. If IT artifacts and business-related artifacts are coupled point-to-point, however, complex architectures become unmanageable over time. In computer science, concepts like the ANSI/SPARC three-level database architecture propose an architecture layer which decouples external views on data and the implementation view of data. In this paper, a similar approach for IT/business alignment is proposed. The proposed alignment architecture is populated by enterprise services as elementary artifacts. Enterprise services link software components and process activities. They are aggregated into applications and subsequently into domains for planning/design and communication purposes. Most design approaches for the construction of enterprise services, applications and domains are top-down, i. e. stepwise decompose complex artifacts. As an alternative which takes into account coupling semantics, we propose a bottom-up approach which is demonstrated for the identification of domains. Our approach is evaluated using a telecommunications equipment case study.     

Development Support Tools for Enterprise Resource Planning

Implementing an enterprise system involves capturing all information necessary to make business processes work in an integrated fashion, and reflecting this integration in source code. Enterprise resource planning implementations should also exploit reuse of existing system elements. ERP tools typically work on top of a framework, using prefabricated modules to create customized variants of the system. Among the free and open source ERP systems, only ERP5 offers a comprehensive set of tools tailored to its framework that, together with other off-the-shelf tools, provide support for creating new modules and entire new systems.     

Knowledge framework for intelligent manufacturing systems

Nowadays, competition is experienced not only among companies but among global supply chains and business networks. There is a demand for intelligent world-class solutions capable of reinforcing partnerships and collaborations with an improved cross-cultural understanding. However due to the proliferation of terminology, organizations from similar business environments have trouble cooperating, and are experiencing difficulties exchanging electronically vital information, such as product and manufacturing data, even when using international standards. To address similar interoperability problems, the Intelligent manufacturing systems program () is providing an opportunity to develop industry-led R&D initiatives, building common semantics and integrated solutions. The SMART-fm project was one of those initiatives. It led to the development of the international standard for product data representation and exchange in the furniture sector (ISO 10303-236) and identified the challenge of semantic interoperability which is today a major challenge in modern enterprise integration. This paper presents a knowledge framework to address that challenge and make interoperable intelligent manufacturing systems a reality. It proposes to use semantically enriched international product data standards, and knowledge representation elements as a basis for achieving seamless enterprise interoperability.     

A requirements engineering framework for cross-organizational ERP systems

The development of cross-organizational enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions is becoming increasingly critical to the business strategy of many networked companies. The major function of cross-organizational ERP solutions is to coordinate work in two or more organizations. However, how to align ERP application components and business requirements for coordination and cooperation is hardly known. This paper reports on the outcomes of applying a coordination theory perspective to an analysis of the ERP misalignment problem. We present a conceptual framework for analyzing coordination and cooperation requirements in inter-organizational ERP projects. The framework makes explicit the undocumented built-in assumptions for coordination and cooperation that may have significant implications for the ERP adopters and incorporates a library of existing coordination mechanisms supported by modern ERP systems. We use it to develop a proposal for how to achieve a better alignment between ERP implementations and supported business coordination processes in inter-organizational settings. We report on some early assessments of the implications of our framework for practicing requirements engineers. Both our framework and library rest on a literature survey and the first author’s experience with ERP implementation. In future empirical research, we will further validate and refine our framework.     

A visual language and environment for enterprise system modelling and automation

ObjectiveWe want to support enterprise service modelling and generation using a more end user-friendly metaphor than current approaches, which fail to scale to large organisations with key issues of “cobweb” and “labyrinth” problems and large numbers of hidden dependencies.MethodWe present and evaluate an integrated visual approach for business process modelling using a novel tree-based overlay structure that effectively mitigate complexity problems. A tree-overlay based visual notation (EML) and its integrated support environment (MaramaEML) supplement and integrate with existing solutions. Complex business architectures are represented as service trees and business processes are modelled as process overlay sequences on the service trees.ResultsMaramaEML integrates EML and BPMN to provide complementary, high-level business service modelling and supports automatic BPEL code generation from the graphical representations to realise web services implementing the specified processes. It facilitates generated service validation using an integrated LTSA checker and provides a distortion-based fisheye and zooming function to enhance complex diagram navigation. Evaluations of EML show its effectiveness.ConclusionsWe have successfully developed and evaluated a novel tree-based metaphor for business process modelling and enterprise service generation. Practice implications: a more user-friendly modelling approach and support tool for business end users.     

A framework for the deployment of adaptable web service compositions

The basic paradigm of service-oriented architectures—publication, discovery, and use—can be interpreted in different ways. Current technologies assume a static and rigid approach: UDDI was conceived with the idea of a centralized repository for service publication and BPEL only supports design–time bindings between the orchestrated workflow and the external services. The trend, however, is towards more flexibility and dynamism. The single centralized repository is being substituted by dedicated repositories that cooperate and exchange information about stored services on demand. Design–time compositions are complemented by mechanisms to allow for the selection and binding of services at runtime. This paper presents the research results of our group in delivering a framework for the deployment of adaptable Web service compositions. The publication infrastructure integrates existing heterogeneous repositories and makes them cooperate for service discovery. The deployment infrastructure supports BPEL-like compositions that can select services dynamically, and also adjust their behavior in response to detected changes and unforeseen events. The framework also provides a monitoring-based validation of running compositions: we provide suitable probes to oversee the execution of deployed compositions. The various parts of the framework are exemplified on a common case study taken from the automotive domain. This research is partially supported by the European IST project SeCSE (Service Centric System Engineering) and the Italian FIRB project ARTDECO (Adaptive infRasTructures for DECentralized Organizations).     

IT Outsourcing Impacts on Enterprise Architecture

Enterprises outsource IT for many reasons, such as reducing costs, shedding of overhead functions that divert management attention away from the core business, and obtaining services from industry leaders specializing in the associated competencies. IT sourcing profoundly impacts the client organization's enterprise architecture. In an outstanding scenario, IT services come from an external services provider. Moreover, the client and vendor interact through an interorganizational interface containing operational, technical, and business components. This interface involves two major modes of interaction: delivery of the IT services and the service-management framework. The interface describes all of the processes, procedures, and protocols that the client and provider use to interact. Because enterprise architectures are unique to organizations, designing this interface might involve customization. For a large, complex client enterprise, bringing the business, operational, and technical components of the interface into alignment is often a nontrivial challenge     

Evaluation of inter-organizational business process solutions: A conceptual model-based approach

Collaboration and coordination between organizations are necessary in today’s business environment, and are enabled by inter-organizational processes. Many approaches for the construction of such processes have been proposed in recent years. However, due to the lack of standard terminology it is hard to evaluate and select a solution that fits a specific business scenario. The paper proposes a conceptual model which depicts the nature of interaction between organizations through business processes under specific business requirements that emphasize the privacy and autonomy of the participating organizations. The model is generic, and relies on the generic process model (GPM) framework and on Bunge’s ontology. Being generic and theory-based, we propose to use the model as a basis for comparing and evaluating design and implementation-level approaches for inter-organizational processes. We demonstrate the evaluation procedure by applying it to three existing approaches.

Domain-specific language for event-based compliance monitoring in process-driven SOAs

Organizations today are required to adhere to a number of compliance concerns from laws, regulations and policies. Compliance is achieved through defining and implementing so-called controls in the organizations’ business processes. Organizations that build their systems based on the process-driven SOA paradigm realize business processes through orchestration of services to handle the process’ business activities. These business activities or groups of business activities in some cases realize the compliance controls. We propose an approach for implementing event-based compliance monitoring infrastructure that observes such business processes to verify that compliance is indeed adhered to. Our approach is essentially a model-driven technique for realizing this infrastructure. We implement a domain-specific language for specification of compliance directives, and we include code generation templates to generate compliance monitoring code, which is leveraged by complex event processing components to monitor for compliance. We evaluate the impact of our approach on the effort and productivity of a developer who is specifying compliance directives.     

A method for transforming knowledge discovery metamodel to ArchiMate models

Enterprise architecture has become an important driver to facilitate digital transformation in companies, since it allows to manage IT and business in a holistic and integrated manner by establishing connections among technology concerns and strategical/motivational ones. Enterprise architecture modelling is critical to accurately represent business and their IT assets in combination. This modelling is important when companies start to manage their enterprise architecture, but also when it is remodelled so that the enterprise architecture is realigned in a changing world. Enterprise architecture is commonly modelled by few experts in a manual way, which is error-prone and time-consuming and makes continuous realignment difficult. In contrast, other enterprise architecture modelling proposal automatically analyses some artefacts like source code, databases, services, etc. Previous automated modelling proposals focus on the analysis of individual artefacts with isolated transformations toward ArchiMate or other enterprise architecture notations and/or frameworks. We propose the usage of Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) to represent all the intermediate information retrieved from information systems’ artefacts, which is then transformed into ArchiMate models. Thus, the core contribution of this paper is the model transformation between KDM and ArchiMate metamodels. The main implication of this proposal is that ArchiMate models are automatically generated from a common knowledge repository. Thereby, the relationships between different-nature artefacts can be exploited to get more complete and accurate enterprise architecture representations.

     

An active-architecture approach to COTS integration

COTS software products are increasingly becoming standard components for building integrated information systems. At the same time, the growth of electronic trading, turbulent market conditions, and a project-style approach to business have created a demand for information systems that can be rapidly adapted to changing business process demands. However, the ongoing development of COTS products is unpredictable as their developers and source code are rarely available. Flexible information systems use COTS components because they cost-effectively supply required component functionality. A software architecture can capture a system design as a set of interacting components and capture the role of COTS software in "implementing" certain components.     

SOA的架构功能需求分析

面向服务的架构（SOA）作为一种架构方法,将企业应用中分散的功能组织成为基于标准、松耦合、可互操作的业务服务。SOA让IT变得更有弹性,能够更快地响应业务需求,从而实现更好的业务灵活性。本文对SOA架构的优势进行了简要分析,同时对其功能需求也提出了4个基本要求。