EDOC: meeting the challenges of enterprise computing

An increasing demand for interoperable applications exists, sparking the real-time exchange of data across borders, applications, and IT platforms. To perform these tasks, enterprise computing now encompasses a new class of groundbreaking technologies such as Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA); business process integration and management; and middleware support, like that for utility, grid, peer-to-peer, and autonomic computing. Enterprise computing also influences the processes for business modeling, consulting, and service delivery; it affects the design, development, and deployment of software architecture, as well as the monitoring and management of such architecture. As enterprises demand increasing levels of networked information and services to carry out business processes, IT professionals need conferences like EDOC to discuss emerging technologies and issues in enterprise computing. For these reasons, what started out as the Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (EDOC) conference has come to encompass much more than just distributed objects. So this event now used the name International EDOC Enterprise Computing Conference, to recognize this broader scope yet also retain the initial conference's name recognition

Services for Business Processes in EA – Are They in Relation?

Business services arguably play a central role in service-based information systems as they would fill in the gap between the technicality of Service-Oriented Architecture and the business processes captured in Enterprise Architecture. Business services have distinctive features that are not typically observed in plain Web services. The representation of business services requires that we view human activity and human-mediated functionality through the lens of computing and systems engineering. We give insights into the modeling of business services and relationships between them. This work sheds light on the analysis, design and reusability of business-aware services that business owners, entrepreneurs and business architects alike would find useful when dealing with their service ecosystem

An MDA-Based Modeling and Design of Service Oriented Architecture

Abstract. Traditional approaches to software systems development such as using tools and modeling frameworks are appropriate for building individual object oriented or component based software. However they are not suitable for designing of flexible distributed enterprise systems and open environments. In recent years, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been proposed as a suitable architecture for development of such systems. Most current approaches in employing SOA are tailored to specific domains and hence are not general purpose. Therefore, in order to gain the full benefits of such technology, a more effective general approach to modeling and designing these complex distributed systems is required. In this paper, we present a model-driven approach to SOA modeling and designing complex distributed systems. In this approach, first the PIM of the business system is derived and expressed in standard UML modeling constructs and then this PIM is transformed to the SOA-based PIM by some transforming tool. After the SOA-based PIM is obtained, it can be used to generate PSM for a specific platform such as Web Services, Jini or other platforms. To make it clear how this PSM could be generated we will use Web Services as a target platform and the steps of this transformation will be shown.

A Model-driven Method to Design SoaML Services from BPMN Models: Principles, Proof-of-concept, and Validation

Today's business processes are increasingly complex as they cross organizational boundaries. To execute their business processes, organizations develop software applications called Process-Aware Information System (PAIS). PAIS designers must consider complex scenarios involving multiple partners. Consequently, the architectural design of high quality PAIS is complex and requires vast amounts of knowledge and skills both in software architecture and in the business domain. This paper proposes a model-driven method to design the architecture of PAIS using the service-oriented architecture (SOA) style. The proposed method generates SOA-based design models expressed in SoaML from the specifications of collaborative business processes expressed in BPMN. We developed a prototype tool using the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) ecosystem. We tested the method on a set of processes from the Enterprise Resource Planning literature to assess its effectiveness. Our results show that 80.95\% of the identified services were relevant and corresponded to what architecture specialists expected

On semantic annotation of decision models

The growth of service sector in recent years has led to renewed research interests in the design and management of service systems. Decision support systems (DSS) play an important role in supporting this endeavor, through management of organizational resources such as models and data, thus forming the “back stage” of service systems. In this article, we identify the requirements for semantically annotating decision models and propose a model representation scheme, termed Semantically Annotated Structure Modeling Markup Language (SA-SMML) that extends Structure Modeling Markup Language (SMML) by incorporating mechanisms for linking semantic models such as ontologies that represent problem domain knowledge concepts. This model representation format is also amenable to a scalable Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for managing models in distributed environments. The proposed model representation technique leverages recent advances in the areas of semantic web, and semantic web services. Along with design considerations, we demonstrate the utility of this representation format with an illustrative usage scenarios with a particular emphasis on model discovery and composition in a distributed environment

A service oriented virtual environment for complex system analysis: Preliminary report

Distributed virtual simulation is a capability that is increasing in demand within the automotive manufacturing industry. The distributed and networked approach to system level design and simulation stands to benefit from a unifying relational oriented modeling and simulation framework due to the large number of simulation technologies that must be integrated. This will also permit innovative use of existing independent simulations for increased concurrency in design and verification and validation. Through relational orientation, high level syntax and semantics for representing models and simulations have been developed for proof of concept analysis. This paper presents an approach to drive a process of analysis of the vehicle as a complex system through the combination of a relational trade-off analysis framework and a distributed simulation execution delivered through a service-oriented integration architecture. This promises to provide a rigorous, traceable and agile approach to early stage conceptual vehicle design and analysis

Non-functional properties in the model-driven development of service-oriented systems

Systems based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles have become an important cornerstone of the development of enterprise-scale software applications. They are characterized by separating functions into distinct software units, called services, which can be published, requested and dynamically combined in the production of business applications. Service-oriented systems (SOSs) promise high flexibility, improved maintainability, and simple re-use of functionality. Achieving these properties requires an understanding not only of the individual artifacts of the system but also their integration. In this context, non-functional aspects play an important role and should be analyzed and modeled as early as possible in the development cycle. In this paper, we discuss modeling of non-functional aspects of service-oriented systems, and the use of these models for analysis and deployment. Our contribution in this paper is threefold. First, we show how services and service compositions may be modeled in UML by using a profile for SOA (UML4SOA) and how non-functional properties of service-oriented systems can be represented using the non-functional extension of UML4SOA (UML4SOA-NFP) and the MARTE profile. This enables modeling of performance, security and reliable messaging. Second, we discuss formal analysis of models which respect this design, in particular we consider performance estimates and reliability analysis using the stochastically timed process algebra PEPA as the underlying analytical engine. Last but not least, our models are the source for the application of deployment mechanisms which comprise model-to-model and model-to-text transformations implemented in the framework VIATRA. All techniques presented in this work are illustrated by a running example from an eUniversity case study

UML-SOA-Sec and Saleem's MDS Services Composition Framework for Secure Business Process Modelling of Services Oriented Applications

In Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment, a software application is a composition of services, which are scattered across enterprises and architectures. Security plays a vital role during the design, development and operation of SOA applications. However, analysis of today's software development approaches reveals that the engineering of security into the system design is often neglected. Security is incorporated in an ad-hoc manner or integrated during the applications development phase or administration phase or out sourced. SOA security is cross-domain and all of the required information is not available at downstream phases. The post-hoc, low-level integration of security has a negative impact on the resulting SOA applications. General purpose modeling languages like Unified Modeling Language (UML) are used for designing the software system; however, these languages lack the knowledge of the specific domain and "security" is one of the essential domains. A Domain Specific Language (DSL), named the "UML-SOA-Sec" is proposed to facilitate the modeling of security objectives along the business process modeling of SOA applications. Furthermore, Saleem's MDS (Model Driven Security) services composition framework is proposed for the development of a secure web service composition