A goal-oriented requirements modelling language for enterprise architecture

Methods for enterprise architecture, such as TOGAF, acknowledge the importance of requirements engineering in the development of enterprise architectures. Modelling support is needed to specify, document, communicate and reason about goals and requirements. Current modelling techniques for enterprise architecture focus on the products, services, processes and applications of an enterprise. In addition, techniques may be provided to describe structured requirements lists and use cases. Little support is available however for modelling the underlying motivation of enterprise architectures in terms of stakeholder concerns and the high-level goals that address these concerns. This paper describes a language that supports the modelling of this motivation. The definition of the language is based on existing work on high-level goal and requirements modelling and is aligned with an existing standard for enterprise modelling: the ArchiMate language. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how enterprise architecture can benefit from analysis techniques in the requirements domain

Work domain analysis and intelligent transport systems: Implications for vehicle design

This article presents a Work Domain Analysis (WDA) of the road transport system in Victoria, Australia. A series of driver information requirements and tasks that could potentially be supported through the use of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are then extracted from the WDA. The potential use of ITS technologies to circumvent these information gaps and provide additional support to drivers is discussed. It is concluded that driver information requirements are currently not entirely satisfied by contemporary vehicle design and also that there are a number of driving tasks that could be further supported through the provision of supplementary systems within vehicles

Exploiting rules and processes for increasing flexibility in service composition

Recent trends in the use of service oriented architecture for designing, developing, managing, and using distributed applications have resulted in an increasing number of independently developed and physically distributed services. These services can be discovered, selected and composed to develop new applications and to meet emerging user requirements. Service composition is generally defined on the basis of business processes in which the underlying composition logic is guided by specifying control and data flows through Web service interfaces. User demands as well as the services themselves may change over time, which leads to replacing or adjusting the composition logic of previously defined processes. Coping with change is still one of the fundamental problems in current process based composition approaches. In this paper, we exploit declarative and imperative design styles to achieve better flexibility in service composition

Embedding Requirements within the Model Driven Architecture

The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) brings benefits to software development, among them the potential for connecting software models with the business domain. This paper focuses on the upstream or Computation Independent Model (CIM) phase of the MDA. Our contention is that, whilst there are many models and notations available within the CIM Phase, those that are currently popular and supported by the Object Management Group (OMG), may not be the most useful notations for business analysts nor sufficient to fully support software requirements and specification. Therefore, with specific emphasis on the value of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) for business analysts, this paper provides an example of a typical CIM approach before describing an approach which incorporates specific requirements techniques. A framework extension to the MDA is then introduced; which embeds requirements and specification within the CIM, thus further enhancing the utility of MDA by providing a more complete method for business analysis

Knowledge-Intensive Processes: Characteristics, Requirements and Analysis of Contemporary Approaches

Engineering of knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) is far from being mastered, since they are genuinely knowledge- and data-centric, and require substantial flexibility, at both design- and run-time. In this work, starting from a scientific literature analysis in the area of KiPs and from three real-world domains and application scenarios, we provide a precise characterization of KiPs. Furthermore, we devise some general requirements related to KiPs management and execution. Such requirements contribute to the definition of an evaluation framework to assess current system support for KiPs. To this end, we present a critical analysis on a number of existing process-oriented approaches by discussing their efficacy against the requirements

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Workshop on Automating Software Design. Theme: Domain Specific Software Design

The goal of this workshop is to identify different architectural approaches to building domain-specific software design systems and to explore issues unique to domain-specific (vs. general-purpose) software design. Some general issues that cut across the particular software design domain include: (1) knowledge representation, acquisition, and maintenance; (2) specialized software design techniques; and (3) user interaction and user interface

An Ontological Basis for Design Methods

This paper presents a view of design methods as process artefacts that can be represented using the function-behaviour-structure (FBS) ontology. This view allows identifying five fundamental approaches to methods: black-box, procedural, artefact-centric, formal and managerial approaches. They all describe method structure but emphasise different aspects of it. Capturing these differences addresses common terminological confusions relating to methods. The paper provides an overview of the use of the fundamental method approaches for different purposes in designing. In addition, the FBS ontology is used for developing a notion of prescriptiveness of design methods as an aggregate construct defined along four dimensions: certainty, granularity, flexibility and authority. The work presented in this paper provides an ontological basis for describing, understanding and managing design methods throughout their life cycle. Keywords: Design Methods; Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) Ontology; Prescriptive Design Knowledge</p