A cloud-based integration platform for enterprise application integration: A Model-Driven Engineering approach

This article addresses major information systems integration problems, approaches, technologies, and tools within the context of Model-Driven Software Engineering. The Guaraná integration platform is introduced as an innovative platform amongst state-of-the-art technologies available for enterprises to design and implement integration solutions. In this article, we present its domain-specificmodeling language and its industrial cloud-based web development platform, which supports the design and implementation of integration solutions. A real-world case study is described and analyzed; then, we delve into its design and implementation, to finally disclose ten measures that empirically help estimating the amount of effort involved in the development of integration solutions

Managing Information System Integration Technologies--A Study of Text Mined Industry White Papers

Industry white papers are increasingly being used to explain the philosophy and operation of a product in marketplace or technology context. This explanation is used by senior managers for strategic planning in an organization. This research explores the effectiveness of white papers and strategies for managers to learn about technologies using white papers. The research is conducted by collecting industry white papers in the area of Information System Integration and gleaned relevant information through text-mining tool, Vantage Point. The text mined information is analyzed to provide solutions for practical problems in systems integration market. The indirect findings of the research are New System Integration Business Models, Methods for Calculating ROI of System Integration Project, and Managing Implementation Failures

Task scheduling for application integration: A strategy for large volumes of data

Enterprise Application Integration is the research field, which provides methodologies, techniques and tools for modelling and implementing integration processes. An integration process performs the orchestration of a set of applications to keep them synchronised or to allow the creation of new features. It can be represented by a workflow composed of tasks and communication channels. Integration platforms are tools for the design and execution of integration processes in which, the runtime system is the component responsible for execution time of the tasks and the allocation of computational resources that perform them. The processing of a large volume of data, corresponding to execution of millions of tasks, can cause situations of overload, characterised by the accumulation of tasks in internal queues awaiting computational resources in the runtime systems, resulting in unacceptable response time for the external applications and users. Our research hypothesis is that the runtime systems of the integration platforms use simplistic heuristics for scheduling tasks, which does not allow them to maintain acceptable levels of performance when there are overload situations. In this research work, we developed (i) a representation for integration processes, (ii) a characterisation for your task schedules, (iii) a heuristic to deal with situations of overload, (iv) a mathematical model for a performance metric of the execution of integration processes and (v) a simulation tool for task scheduling heuristics. Our research results indicate that, in situations of overload, our heuristic promotes a balanced workload distribution and an increase in the performance of the execution of the integration processes.Integração de Aplicações Empresariais é o campo de pesquisa, que fornece metodologias, técnicas e ferramentas para modelar e implementar processos de integração. Um processo de integração executa a orquestração de um conjunto de aplicações para mantê-las sincronizadas ou para permitir a criação de novas funcionalidades. Ele pode ser representado por um fluxo de trabalho composto por tarefas e canais de comunicação. Plataformas de integração são ferramentas para projetar e executar processos de integração, nas quais o motor de execução é o componente responsável pelo tempo de execução das tarefas e pela alocação de recursos computacionais que as executam. O processamento de um grande volume de dados, correspondendo a execução de milhões de tarefas, pode causar situações de sobrecarga, caracterizadas pelo acúmulo de tarefas em filas internas que aguardam recursos computacionais nos motores de execução, resultando em tempos de resposta inaceitáveis para aplicações e usuários externos. Nossa hipótese de pesquisa é que os motores de execução das plataformas de integração usam heurísticas simplistas para agendar tarefas, o que não lhes permitem manter níveis aceitáveis de desempenho em situações de sobrecarga. Neste trabalho de pesquisa, desenvolvemos (i) uma representação para processos de integração, (ii) uma caracterização para seus agendamentos de tarefas, (iii) uma heurística para lidar com situações de sobrecarga, (iv) um modelo matemático para uma métrica de desempenho da execução de processos de integração e (v) uma ferramenta de simulação para heurísticas de agendamento de tarefas. Nossos resultados de pesquisa indicam que, em situações de sobrecarga, nossa heurística promove uma distribuição equilibrada da carga de trabalho e um aumento no desempenho da execução dos processos de integração

In-memory business process management

In-memory databases have become a mainstay of enterprise computing offering significant performance and scalability boosts for online analytical and (to a lesser extent) transactional processing as well as improved prospects for integration across different applications through an efficient shared database layer.\ud Significant research and development has been undertaken over several years concerning data management considerations of in-memory databases. However, limited insights are available on the impacts of applications and their supportive middleware platforms and how they need to evolve to fully function through, and leverage, in-memory database capabilities. This paper provides a first, comprehensive exposition into how in-memory databases impact Business Pro-\ud cess Management, as a mission-critical and exemplary model-driven integration and orchestration middleware. Through it, we argue that in-memory databases will render some prevalent uses of legacy BPM middleware obsolete, but also open up exciting possibilities for tighter application integration, better process automation performance and some entirely new BPM capabilities such as process-based application customization. To validate the feasibility of an in-memory BPM, we develop a surprisingly simple BPM runtime embedded into SAP HANA and providing for BPMN-based process automation capabilities