SOA, SoBI & EDA - Paradigms for Integration Capabilities of BI Platform

A Business Intelligence (BI) provider may offer a basic solution, a packed application or a comprising BI platform which integrates components from individual technologies in a synergic system. The providers’ tendency is to standardize the instruments offered on a single server platform. The article analyzes the integration capabilities and problems of BI platforms, emphasizes the differences between emergent technologies and suggests integration solutions. The analysis is useful both to the providers of BI solutions - in order to develop some agile platforms, as well as to their users - representing an important factor in selecting the solution. In addition, the conclusions to be drawn will emphasize the tendencies from the BI market and will represent the support in creating some agile platforms.Business Intelligence, agile platform, integration, metadata management, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Event Driven Architecture (EDA)

MEdit4CEP: A model-driven solution for real-time decision making in SOA 2.0

Organizations all around the world need to manage huge amounts of data from heterogeneous sources every day in order to conduct decision making processes. This requires them to infer what the value of such data is for the business in question through data analysis as well as acting promptly for critical or relevant situations. Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a technology that helps tackle this issue by detecting event patterns in real time. However, this technology forces domain experts to define these patterns indicating such situations and the appropriate actions to be executed in their information systems, generally based on Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). In particular, these users face the incommodity of implementing these patterns manually or by using editors which are not user-friendly enough. To deal with this problem, a model-driven solution for real-time decision making in event-driven SOAs is proposed and conducted in this paper. This approach allows the integration of CEP with this architecture type as well as defining CEP domain and event pattern through a graphical and intuitive editor, which also permits automatic code generation. Moreover, the solution is evaluated and its benefits are discussed. As a result, we can assert this is a novel solution for bringing CEP technology closer to any user, positively impacting on business decision making processes

Towards a semantic event-based service-oriented architecture

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is commonly lauded as a silver bullet for Enterprise Application Integration, inter-organizational business processes implementation, and even as a general solution for the development of all complex Web-oriented applications. However, SOA without semantic descriptions of its data, processes and messaging models fails to achieve a truly flexible and dynamic infrastructure. In this paper we explain where semantics are necessary for SOA and present early work on a Semantic Execution Environment which couples the ServiceOriented and Event-Driven architecture styles with formal semantics

Software Solutions for Agile Business

Businesses, like people, are continuously evolving and as such face rapid and continual change. As markets and customer needs evolve, enterprises must respond with new ways to attract and retain customers and partners, increase operational efficiency, and achieve greater visibility into their business processes. IT staff see business processes through the lens of the low-level parts of the flow, rather than at the business level. As a result, they aren't capable of implementing the processes so that they will meet continuously changing business requirements, thus impeding business agility. Business users are increasingly demanding that they have control over their own business processes - and so, are requiring systems that put control of the flow and logic into their hands, not those of IT. An Enterprise Service Bus based on a Service Oriented Architecture could be a solution and tie together the notions of service oriented process, service oriented integration and event-driven, message based interaction into a single environment that enables users to combine their assets and information from multiple points of view.Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), loosely coupled events

IT-enabled Excess Capacity Markets for Services: Examining the Economic Potential in Cost-driven Service Supply Chains

Capacity planning is a major challenge for service providers facing volatile demand. Inefficiencies result from idle capacity or lost revenue caused by peak loads. Concerning IT-driven services, recent technological developments offering dynamic integration and information capabilities may help. They enable an on-demand exchange of excess capacity between business partners and create value through efficient capacity allocation within a supply chain. This paper aims at examining this economic potential of IT-enabled excess capacity markets. Therefore, we use the model setting of a three-stage IT-driven service supply chain and discuss different factors influencing the capacity optimization problem. With a discrete-event simulation we then evaluate a representative factor quantitatively. Thus, we provide deeper insights about the usefulness of excess capacity markets for capacity optimization in different settings and scenarios. The results serve as a guide for practitioners, build the basis for further quantitative evaluation and represent a starting point for empirical validation

Domänenübergreifende Simulation basierend auf BPMN und dem prozessgesteuerten Ansatz

Simulation tools are currently facing two significant challenges: On the one hand, common applications are often focussed on a specific domain, which leads to a high synchronisation and integration effort in the investigation of cross-domain issues. On the other hand, the transition from simulated models to operations monitoring and continuous improvement requires a high further development effort or even a completely new implementation with other technologies. This paper aims to present a novel one-size-fits-all approach based on the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard and the Process-Driven Approach (PDA) for creating and executing process models for discrete event simulation. It combines the BPMN’s potential to graphically represent any processes in arbitrary precision with those of PDA to sustainably integrate services, databases and tools via low-code. By means of two exemplary case studies, we would like to illustrate its practical implementation and potentials and challenge the scientific discourse

Oblikovanje programskih jezika za događajima poticanu kompoziciju usluga

To adapt to rapidly changing market conditions and increase the return of investment, today’s IT solutions usually combine service-oriented architecture (SOA) and event-driven architecture (EDA) that support reusability, flexibility, and responsiveness of business processes. Programming languages for development of event-driven service compositions face several main challenges. First, a language should be based on standard service composition languages to be compatible with SOA-enabling technologies. Second, a language should enable seamless integration of services into event-driven workflows. Third, to overcome a knowledge divide, language should enable seamless cooperation between application developers with different skills and knowledge. Since WS-BPEL is widely accepted as standard executable language in SOA, we extended WS-BPEL with support for event-driven workflow coordination. We designed event-handling mechanisms as special-purpose Coopetition services and augmented WS-BPEL with primitives for their invocation. Coopetition services augment SOA with fundamental EDA characteristics: decoupled interactions, many-to-many communication, publish/subscribe messaging, event triggering, and asynchronous operations. To make the application development familiar to wide community of developers, we designed an application-level end-user language on top of WS-BPEL whose primitives for invocation of regular Web services and Coopetition services resemble the constructs of typical scripting and coordination language.S ciljem prilagodbe promjenjivim tržišnim uvjetima i povećanja isplativosti ulaganja, današnji informacijski sustavi grade se spregom uslužno usmjerene i događajima poticane arhitekture koje omogućuju oblikovanje višestruko iskoristivih i prilagodljivih poslovnih procesa s mogućnošću odziva na pojavu događaja. Programski jezici za događajima poticanu kompoziciju usluga pokazuju nekoliko glavnih značajki. Prvo, jezik mora naslijediti svojstva standardnih jezika za kompoziciju usluga kako bi bio sukladan tehnologijama uslužno-usmjerene arhitekture. Drugo, jezik mora omogućiti prirodni način povezivanja usluga u događajima poticane poslovne procese. Treće, razvijateljima različitih znanja i vještina potrebno je osigurati mogućnost udruženog sudjelovanja u razvoju primjenskih programa. Budući da je WS-BPEL standardni jezik za kompoziciju usluga, izabran je kao osnovica za oblikovanje jezika za događajima poticanu kompoziciju usluga. Oblikovan je poseban skup usluga suradnje i natjecanja kojima je uslužno-usmjerena arhitektura proširena elementima događajima poticane arhitekture, kao što su međudjelovanje zasnovano na slaboj povezivosti, komunikacija u grupi, objava/pretplata, reakcija na pojavu događaja i asinkrone operacije. Jezik WS-BPEL proširen je programskim primitivama za pozivanje tih usluga. Kako bi se razvoj primjenskih programa približio širokoj zajednici graditelja programske potpore, povrh jezika WS-BPEL oblikovan je primjenski jezik za krajnjeg korisnika čije primitive za pozivanje primjenskih usluga te usluga suradnje i natjecanja nalikuju naredbama skriptnih i koordinacijskih jezika