Requirements-driven design and configuration management of business processes

The success of a business process (BP) depends on whether it meets its business goal as well as non-functional requirements associated with it. BP specifications frequently need to accommodate changing business priorities, varying client preferences, etc. However, since business process goals and preferences are rarely captured explicitly in the dominant BP modeling approaches, adapting business processes proves difficult. We propose a systematic requirements-driven approach for BP design and configuration management that uses requirements goal models to capture alternative process configurations and provides the ability to tailor deployed processes to changing business priorities or customer preferences (i.e., non-functional constraints) by configuring their corresponding goal models at the goal level. A set of design time and runtime tools for configuring business processes implemented using WS-BPEL is provided, allowing to easily change the behaviour of deployed BP instances at a high level, based on business priorities and stakeholder preferences

Towards a Unified Meta-Model for Goal Oriented Modelling

Goal oriented modelling (GOM) is one of the most prominent and widely accepted techniques in information systems research. Since the early 1990’s, a large number of GOM approaches have been proposed aiming to a better alignment between business strategy and the behaviour of supporting systems. Different GOM approaches focus on different activities in the early stages of system development and propose a variety of strategies for reasoning about goals. A number of researchers have stressed the advantages of integrating different GOM techniques, especially in the context of modern global business environments. This is evidenced in the increasing number of publications in this area. However as each GOM language (even versions of the same language) comes with its own syntactic and semantic singularities, such integration requires a number of complicated transformations which is a major obstacle to model and tool interoperability, and prevent wider adoption by practitioners. In order to provide a unified view of GOM, one needs a common understanding of GOM concepts, their semantics and deployment. To this end, this paper proposes a language independent meta-model based on the analysis of eight GOM languages. Generic concepts were identified and a robust semantic definition among these concepts was built in a unified meta-model. We claim that the unified GOM meta-model could help in a) analysing existing goal models in order to provide insights regarding different goal modelling perspectives b) identify semantic similarities / overlaps between existing GOM techniques c) provide the basis for a reference model for GOM

A Guidance Based Approach for Enhancing the e-Government Interoperability

Developing e-Government interoperability in the government context is a complex task. As interoperability in government context is associated and hindered by many challenges and barriers connected to government nature of complexity. Interoperability is generally defined as the ability for two (or more) systems to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged. In this paper, we focus on computing systems interoperability across government ministries to achieve interoperable e-Government IT based solutions. In order to achieve e-Government interoperability in an organised and efficient way, this paper establishes a guidance-based approach for enhancing the e-Government Interoperability. This contribution is motivated by the limitations of the traditional software engineering methodologies in terms of analysis, design and development frameworks to a point that they can hardly cope with the growing issues of e-Government services interoperability

Modeling Mental States in Agent-Oriented Requirements Engineering

Abstract. This paper describes an agent-oriented requirements engineering approach that combines informal i * models with formal specifications in the multiagent system specification formalism CASL. This allows the requirements engineer to exploit the complementary features of the frameworks. i * can be used to model social dependencies between agents and how process design choices affect the agents ’ goals. CASL can be used to model complex processes formally. We introduce an intermediate notation to support the mapping between i * models and CASL specifications. In the combined i*-CASL framework, agents ’ goals and knowledge are represented as their mental states, which allows for the formal analysis and verification of, among other things, complex agent interactions and incomplete knowledge. Our models can also serve as high-level specifications for multiagent systems.