The BWS Open Business Enterprise System Architecture

Business process management systems play a central role in supporting the business operations of medium and large organizations. This paper analyses the properties current business enterprise systems and proposes a new application type called Open Business Enterprise Sys-tem. A new open system architecture called Business Workflow System is proposed. This ar-chitecture combines the instruments for flexible data management, business process manage-ment and integration into a flexible system able to manage modern business operations. The architecture was validated by implementing it into the DocuMentor platform used by major companies in Romania and US. These implementations offered the necessary data to create and refine an enterprise integration methodology called DM-CPI. The final section of the paper presents the concepts, stages and techniques employed by the methodology.BWL, Workflow, BWS, Evaluation, Open Business Enterprise System, DM-CPI

Special Session on Industry 4.0

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Preserving the Quality of Architectural Tactics in Source Code

In any complex software system, strong interdependencies exist between requirements and software architecture. Requirements drive architectural choices while also being constrained by the existing architecture and by what is economically feasible. This makes it advisable to concurrently specify the requirements, to devise and compare alternative architectural design solutions, and ultimately to make a series of design decisions in order to satisfy each of the quality concerns. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence has shown that architectural knowledge tends to be tacit in nature, stored in the heads of people, and lost over time. Therefore, developers often lack comprehensive knowledge of underlying architectural design decisions and inadvertently degrade the quality of the architecture while performing maintenance activities. In practice, this problem can be addressed through preserving the relationships between the requirements, architectural design decisions and their implementations in the source code, and then using this information to keep developers aware of critical architectural aspects of the code. This dissertation presents a novel approach that utilizes machine learning techniques to recover and preserve the relationships between architecturally significant requirements, architectural decisions and their realizations in the implemented code. Our approach for recovering architectural decisions includes the two primary stages of training and classification. In the first stage, the classifier is trained using code snippets of different architectural decisions collected from various software systems. During this phase, the classifier learns the terms that developers typically use to implement each architectural decision. These ``indicator terms\u27\u27 represent method names, variable names, comments, or the development APIs that developers inevitably use to implement various architectural decisions. A probabilistic weight is then computed for each potential indicator term with respect to each type of architectural decision. The weight estimates how strongly an indicator term represents a specific architectural tactics/decisions. For example, a term such as \emph{pulse} is highly representative of the heartbeat tactic but occurs infrequently in the authentication. After learning the indicator terms, the classifier can compute the likelihood that any given source file implements a specific architectural decision. The classifier was evaluated through several different experiments including classical cross-validation over code snippets of 50 open source projects and on the entire source code of a large scale software system. Results showed that classifier can reliably recognize a wide range of architectural decisions. The technique introduced in this dissertation is used to develop the Archie tool suite. Archie is a plug-in for Eclipse and is designed to detect wide range of architectural design decisions in the code and to protect them from potential degradation during maintenance activities. It has several features for performing change impact analysis of architectural concerns at both the code and design level and proactively keep developers informed of underlying architectural decisions during maintenance activities. Archie is at the stage of technology transfer at the US Department of Homeland Security where it is purely used to detect and monitor security choices. Furthermore, this outcome is integrated into the Department of Homeland Security\u27s Software Assurance Market Place (SWAMP) to advance research and development of secure software systems

A comprehensive analysis of it/is indirect costs: Enhancing the evaluation of information systems investments

The level of Information Technology (IT) expenditure within organizations continues to increase over the years in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage in their respective industries. Nonetheless, IT projects still experience budget overruns taking into account the continual fall of hardware costs. This phenomenon presents a dilemma to managers who struggle to evaluate their investments in IT. Adding to the difficulty is the peculiar nature of such investments having Human and Organizational dimensions. Such dimensions are later translated into indirect costs that are both difficult to identify and quantify hence are ignored by managers which hinders the evaluation process. The lack of knowledge of managers about IT/IS indirect costs affect their ability to determine the true costs of deploying IT. It is closing the gap that this paper strives to explore a new method for identifying, managing and controlling IT indirect costs through a case study enquiry of a leading gold producing company. The research establishes a rational that goes beyond the traditional quantification appraisal of costs which is inadequate in the case of indirect costs. It proposes a solution that helps to thoroughly identify the indirect costs, mitigate their effect and achieve the desired control while enhancing the evaluation process through their inclusion

An Autonomous Engine for Services Configuration and Deployment.

The runtime management of the infrastructure providing service-based systems is a complex task, up to the point where manual operation struggles to be cost effective. As the functionality is provided by a set of dynamically composed distributed services, in order to achieve a management objective multiple operations have to be applied over the distributed elements of the managed infrastructure. Moreover, the manager must cope with the highly heterogeneous characteristics and management interfaces of the runtime resources. With this in mind, this paper proposes to support the configuration and deployment of services with an automated closed control loop. The automation is enabled by the definition of a generic information model, which captures all the information relevant to the management of the services with the same abstractions, describing the runtime elements, service dependencies, and business objectives. On top of that, a technique based on satisfiability is described which automatically diagnoses the state of the managed environment and obtains the required changes for correcting it (e.g., installation, service binding, update, or configuration). The results from a set of case studies extracted from the banking domain are provided to validate the feasibility of this propos

Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security