Towards Consistency Management for a Business-Driven Development of SOA

The usage of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) along with the Business Process Management has emerged as a valuable solution for the complex (business process driven) system engineering. With a Model Driven Engineering where the business process models drive the supporting service component architectures, less effort is gone into the Business/IT alignment during the initial development activities, and the IT developers can rapidly proceed with the SOA implementation. However, the difference between the design principles of the emerging domainspecific languages imposes serious challenges in the following re-design phases. Moreover, enabling evolutions on the business process models while keeping them synchronized with the underlying software architecture models is of high relevance to the key elements of any Business Driven Development (BDD). Given a business process update, this paper introduces an incremental model transformation approach that propagates this update to the related service component configurations. It, therefore, supports the change propagation among heterogenous domainspecific languages, e.g., the BPMN and the SCA. As a major contribution, our approach makes model transformation more tractable to reconfigure system architecture without disrupting its structural consistency. We propose a synchronizer that provides the BPMN-to-SCA model synchronization with the help of the conditional graph rewriting

Goal-oriented design of value and process models from patterns

This thesis defines a design framework and a method for modelling networked businesses. The intended application domain is electronic businesses that extensively use information and communication technology to coordinate work. The key property of the proposed approach is the reuse of design knowledge in the form of design patterns. Design patterns are extracted from models of existing electronic intermediaries considered successful. These businesses have been reverse-engineered to two types of models: economic value exchange models and business process models. The identified patterns comprise two libraries of value exchange and business process patterns, respectively. Patterns are catalogued with, among others, their context, solved problem, and proposed solution. Most importantly, they are annotated with a machine-readable\ud capability model used as a search key in the library. Capability models are part of the goal-modelling technique for business requirements proposed here. Our goal-modelling technique operationalizes each business goal with a variable and an evaluation function: the evaluation function determines when a measured variable value satisfies the goal. A goal model represents requirements if goals are assigned evaluation functions but the variable values are unknown. In such a case, the goal model specifies what is desired to happen. If, on the other hand, variable values are known, the goal model documents the capabilities of a pattern. The proposed design framework structures the development process into: (1) available design knowledge in libraries of value and process patterns, (2) business requirements captured in a goal model, and (3) economic value and business process perspectives to look at a business system. The design method prescribes steps to transform patterns and requirements into a system specification. These include: (i) identification of relevant pattern based on matching capability and requirements goal models; (ii) synthesis of value and process patterns into value and process models, respectively; and (iii) consistency check procedure for value and process model.\ud The usefulness of the approach is demonstrated in a real-life example, which shows that the framework and method exhibit a predefined set of desired properties

A Structural and Behavioral Analysis Approach for Process Model Evaluation.

Manufacturing of process driven business applications can be supported by process modeling efforts in order to link the gap between business requirements and system conditions. However, deviating purposes of business process modeling inventiveness have led to considerable problems of aligning related models at distinct abstract levels and distinct outlooks. Verifying the consistency of such related models is a big challenge for process modeling theory and practice. Our contribution is a concept called behavioral profile that sum up the fundamental behavioral limits of a process model. We show that these outlines can be calculated effectively, i.e., in cubic time for sound free-choice Petri nets w.r.t. their number of places and changeovers. In addition to the above Support Vector Machines (SVM) usage is helpful to improve consistency with greater confidence to evaluate behavioral and structural consistency

An extensible product structure model for product lifecycle management in the make-to-order environment

This paper presents a product structure model with a semantic representation technique that make the product structure extensible for developing product lifecycle management (PLM) systems that is flexible for make-to-order environment. In the make-to-order business context, each product could have a number of variants with slightly different constitutions to fulfill different customer requirements. All the variants of a family have common characteristics and each variant has its specific features. A master-variant pattern is proposed for building the product structure model to explicitly represent common characteristics and specific features of individual variants. The model is capable of enforcing the consistency of a family structure and its variant structure, supporting multiple product views, and facilitating the business processes. A semantic representation technique is developed that enables entity attributes to be defined and entities to be categorized in a neutral and semantic format. As a result, entity attributes and entity categorization can be redefined easily with its configurable capability for different requirements of the PLM systems. An XML-based language is developed for semantically representing entities and entity categories. A prototype as a proof-of-concept system is presented to illustrate the capability of the proposed extensible product structure model

Coherence between values and successor socialization: Facilitating family business continuity

The problem of CEO succession is critically important yet unique and distinct from that of turnover at other levels. Research in management agrees with the findings in family business research regarding the preference for an insider as successor, more specifically a family insider. Successful family business continuity requires raising potential successors who will add value to the firm by seeking new opportunities and fostering entrepreneurship. Parties external to the firm are likely to view succession as a signal about the institution's future; this makes CEO succession a critical event for virtually every organization. In this paper the authors outline a model that presents the different coherent options for value transmission and successor socialization that facilitate family business continuity from first to second generation. The findings are grounded in combined qualitative and quantitative techniques applied to an extensive research project involving in-depth cross-case analysis. Based on the results, the authors identify issues that families and practitioners should take into account to maintain consistency during the succession process. Professionals can assist families in preparing for continuity by: 1) identifying family value systems; 2) analyzing the variables at play in the family-business system, and 3) proposing a coherent option of continuity that both family and business can pursue. The model presented in this paper is intended to help families and practitioners follow this path by pointing out coherent combinations of values and family business characteristics and different successor socialization processes.family business; succession; values; successors; socialization;

Managing dependency relations in inter-organizational models

In various fields like software development, information systems development, and e-business development, model-based approaches allow specifying different models of which each emphasizes one specific aspect or part of the software system. In this thesis we consider particularly model-based approaches for defining inter-organizational cooperations. These cooperations are usually complex in terms of coordination, agreements, and value creation for involved partners.\ud \ud At design time one should ensure that the different models are consistent with each other, i.e., that they describe the same system. At runtime we additionally have to deal with the fact that behavior of the software system might be different from that agreed upon. Such deviant behavior can, for example, be caused by partners in the cooperation that do not behave according to the agreement. Therefore, the challenges are to ensure consistency at design time as well as to monitor the system at runtime in order to detect inconsistencies with the models it relies on.\ud \ud When managing complex cooperations, it is also vital to maintain the models describing them to keep an overview on the successfulness of the cooperation. Changing one model to regain consistency with the running system might result in new inconsistencies between the different models. As a consequence, this maintenance phase of the models is time consuming and grows in complexity with increasing number of models describing the system. \ud \ud This thesis proposes a method that supports ensuring and maintaining consistency between running system and underlying models for inter-organizational cooperations. We provide a structured and model-independent approach to check and maintain consistency. Thereby, we focus on identifying and maintaining these inter-model relations.\ud \ud We validate our method by conducting two case studies in two different fields of research. The first scenario deals with business and coordination models, while the second one addresses Web service compositions. Furthermore, we provide a prototypical implementation as proof-of-concept evaluation of both scenarios. We conclude with an empirical validation of the Web service composition scenario by an extensive and interactive survey conducted among 34 participants. This survey confirms the suitability of our proposed management solution provided for real life use

Consistency checking of UML business model

Unified modelling language (UML) is often used in practice for modelling business system (BS) by various aspects. UML model of business system consists of different aspect models and their usage for information system (IS) design is related with inconsistency problem. It arises because ambiguous or even contradictory information are provided in different aspect models. The paper presents approach in ensuring UML model consistency. Several examples of consistency rules are included to the paper to illustrate how approach is working. Developed prototype of suggested approach is applied in a domain of enterprise manufacturing windows and doors. Obtained results are discussed

Harmony: Towards automated self-adaptive consistency in cloud storage

In just a few years cloud computing has become a very popular paradigm and a business success story, with storage being one of the key features. To achieve high data availability, cloud storage services rely on replication. In this context, one major challenge is data consistency. In contrast to traditional approaches that are mostly based on strong consistency, many cloud storage services opt for weaker consistency models in order to achieve better availability and performance. This comes at the cost of a high probability of stale data being read, as the replicas involved in the reads may not always have the most recent write. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, named Harmony, which adaptively tunes the consistency level at run-time according to the application requirements. The key idea behind Harmony is an intelligent estimation model of stale reads, allowing to elastically scale up or down the number of replicas involved in read operations to maintain a low (possibly zero) tolerable fraction of stale reads. As a result, Harmony can meet the desired consistency of the applications while achieving good performance. We have implemented Harmony and performed extensive evaluations with the Cassandra cloud storage on Grid?5000 testbed and on Amazon EC2. The results show that Harmony can achieve good performance without exceeding the tolerated number of stale reads. For instance, in contrast to the static eventual consistency used in Cassandra, Harmony reduces the stale data being read by almost 80% while adding only minimal latency. Meanwhile, it improves the throughput of the system by 45% while maintaining the desired consistency requirements of the applications when compared to the strong consistency model in Cassandra

Modeling of Business Systems using Hybrid Simulation: A New Approach

Simulation models are important instruments for analysing business systems. They are classified into time-discrete and time-continuous simulation models, for example Discrete Event Systems (DEVS) or System Dynamics (SD) models. These special models are particularly suitable to analyse subsystems of a business system with either time-discrete or time-continuous behaviour. However, in general they are not appropriate to analyse a business system which shows time-discrete and time-continuous behaviour simultaneously. Analysing business systems with time-discrete and time-continuous behaviour with isolated submodels and consolidating the findings of these analyses afterwards may lead to redundancy and consistency problems. In this paper an approach for developing hybrid simulation models, which exhibit time-discrete and time-continuous behaviour, is presented. The hybrid simulation models contain DEVS and SD simulation submodels that are coupled. The approach introduces a structural model of business systems that consists of several control layers with timediscrete or time-continuous behaviour, as well as a modelling approach for integrating DEVS and SD submodels by coupling mechanisms. Finally, an investigation of a market case illustrates the use of the presented approach