Towards a Security Engineering Process Model for Electronic Business Processes

Business process management (BPM) and accompanying systems aim at enabling enterprises to become adaptive. In spite of the dependency of enterprises on secure business processes, BPM languages and techniques provide only little support for security. Several complementary approaches have been proposed for security in the domain of BPM. Nevertheless, support for a systematic procedure for the development of secure electronic business processes is still missing. In this paper, we pinpoint the need for a security engineering process model in the domain of BPM and identify key requirements for such process model.Comment: Ninth European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC 2012

Exploring Knowledge Engineering Strategies in Designing and Modelling a Road Traffic Accident Management Domain

Formulating knowledge for use in AI Planning engines is currently something of an ad-hoc process, where the skills of knowledge engineers and the tools they use may significantly influence the quality of the resulting planning application. There is little in the way of guidelines or standard procedures, however, for knowledge engineers to use when formulating knowledge into planning domain languages such as PDDL. This paper seeks to investigate this process using as a case study a road traffic accident management domain. Managing road accidents requires systematic, sound planning and coordination of resources to improve outcomes for accident victims. We have derived a set of requirements in consultation with stakeholders for the resource coordination part of managing accidents. We evaluate two separate knowledge engineering strategies for encoding the resulting planning domain from the set of requirements: (a) the traditional method of PDDL experts and text editor, and (b) a leading planning GUI with built in UML modelling tools. These strategies are evaluated using process and product metrics, where the domain model (the product) was tested extensively with a range of planning engines. The results give insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches, highlight lessons learned regarding knowledge encoding, and point to important lines of research for knowledge engineering for planning

Towards automatic construction of domain ontologies: Application to ISA88 and assessment

Process Systems Engineering has shown a growing interest on ontologies to develop knowledge models, organize information, and produce software accordingly. Although software tools supporting the structure of ontologies exist, developing a PSE ontology is a creative procedure to be performed by human experts from each specific domain. This work explores the opportunities for automatic construction of domain ontologies. Specialised documentation can be selected and automatically parsed; next pattern recognition methods can be used to extract concepts and relations; finally, supervision is required to validate the automatic outcome, as well as to complete the task. The bulk of the development of an ontology is expected to result from the application of systematic procedures, thus the development time will be significantly reduced. Automatic methods were prepared and applied to the development of an ontology for batch processing based on the ISA88 standard. Methods are described and commented, and results are discussed from the comparison with a previous ontology for the same domain manually developed.Postprint (published version

Systematic development of courseware systems

Various difficulties have been reported in relation to the development of courseware systems. A central problem is to address the needs of not only the learner, but also instructor, developer, and other stakeholders, and to integrate these different needs. Another problem area is courseware architectures, to which much work has been dedicated recently. We present a systematic approach to courseware development – a methodology for courseware engineering – that addresses these problems. This methodology is rooted in the educational domain and is based on methods for software development in this context. We illustrate how this methodology can improve the quality of courseware systems and the development process

Domain-independent method for developing an integrated engineering design tool

Engineering design is a complex, cognitive process requiring extensive knowledge and experience to be done effectively. Successful design depends on appropriate use of available resources. Competitive design cycles mandate convenient and reliable access to engineering tools and information. An integrated engineering design tool (IEDT) has been developed in response to these demands. Further, the tool development efforts have been made systematic by utilizing the engineering design process, which is shown to be a cognitive activity based on Bloom\u27s taxonomy of cognition. The engineering design process consists of six tasks: establishment of objectives, development of requirements, function analysis, creation of design alternatives, evaluation, and improvements to the design. These tasks are shown to map to the six levels of Bloom\u27s cognitive taxonomy: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Once engineering design is shown to be a cognitive process it can be employed to make each of the activities required to develop and IEDT, domain investigation, knowledge acquisition, and IEDT design, systematic. Past research has considered these to be largely ad hoc tasks. Application of the engineering design process to each of the three IEDT development tasks is discussed in general terms;A prototype IEDT has been created for the preliminary design of jet transport aircraft wings based on the systematic engineering design approach is used to demonstrate the implementation of the method. The IEDT is embedded in Microsoft Excel 97 with links to other software and executable code. Examples of different implementation strategies are provided. Several wing weight prediction models are included. The incorporation of depth knowledge is done using fuzzy logic. The IEDT is linked to relevant files containing design documentation, parameter information, graphics, drawings, and historical data. The designer has access to trade-off study information and sensitivity analysis and can choose to perform structural analysis or design optimization. The engineer can also consider design issues such as cost analysis. The modular IEDT has been designed to be easily adaptable by design domain experts so that it may continue to be updated and expanded

Analysis of expert’s opinion on requirements patterns for software product families framework using GQM method

Software product line engineering (SPLE), provides an opportunity to improve reuse of software artifacts through domain engineering and application engineering processes. During the domain engineering process, reuse activities of the product line are well-planned and subsequently executed in the application engineering process. This paper presents an analysis of interview result with experts in requirements engineering (RE) and software development for validating requirements pattern for software product families (RP-SPF) framework. The interview was conducted using goal questions metrics (GQM) method to define a goal and formulate research questions for conducting the interview. During the interview, 6 experts compared RP-SPF approach (systematic) with ad hoc (conventional) approach of reuse and documentation of requirements in terms of suitability, efficiency, and effectiveness in SPLE. The experts also gave their feedback on the perception of the use of RP-SPF tool. The analysis of the interview result shows that RP-SPF approach is suitable in SPLE and more efficient and effective than ad hoc approach of reuse and documentation of requirements