On the Restriction of Conceptual Modeling – Outlining an Approach to Enable Business Driven SOA

Service-oriented architectures were introduced to create a technological basis for reacting to business requirements in a distributed application environment. Services encapsulate functionality to be reused in different processes and can be easily described in design models that should be the result of analyzing the business requirements described in conceptual models. However, this process is nontrivial, iterative, and can not be fully automated. This paper presents an approach to introduce artifacts to establish a consensus on language level which enhances the comparability of models and allows to semi-automate the transformation process by weakening the strict separation of language creation and language usage. In contrast to previous approaches, this approach enables a model based configuration of service-oriented architectures that allows an automation of activities of the SOA development process that are currently carried out manually. As a result, the technical knowledge relevant to cope with the task is reduced, which at the same time shortens the time and effort for solving the overall task. This promotes the goal-oriented configuration of SOA. As specific technical knowledge is no longer needed, the modeler can concentrate on the analysis of the business problem

Model-Supported Business Alignment of IT — Conceptual Foundations

Business Information Technology (IT) alignment focuses on the efficient support of business processes by IT. Therefore,existing software artifacts are addressed by business process models. When the processes change, however, there is a need toadjust the supporting software systems. Thus, already during the design phase of business process models, IT artifacts shouldto be considered. The instrument of conceptual modeling gains wide acceptance, especially in the health care sector todescribe and manage clinical processes, such as Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) and Clinical Pathways (CP). There are noholistic approaches so far that provide the alignment between these two concepts and ensure the quality of treatment and theconsistent adaptation of a Hospital Information System (HIS), in particular the hospital’s Workflow Management System(WfMS). To link business process models and the WfMS, the Description Kit Approach (DKA) is used to prepare conceptualmodels to make them automatically analyzable. It is suggested that at an early stage of the modeling process the use ofguidelines has an substantial benefit for avoiding integration conflicts in conceptual models. Furthermore, due to the way theapproach bridges the semantic gap, changes of business requirements as well as technical implementation restrictionsinfluence each other. This results in an ongoing system development process that can be interpreted as a permanentmanagement of application systems. Our results contribute to model-based management theories that have so far neglectedthe distributed construction of conceptual models

Access Control and Service-Oriented Architectures.

Access Control and Service-Oriented Architectures" investigates in which way logical access control can be achieved effectively, in particular in highly dynamic environments such as service-oriented architectures (SOA's). The author combines state-of-the-art best-practice and projects these onto the SOA. In doing so, he identifies strengths of current approaches, but also pinpoints weaknesses. These weaknesses are subsequently mitigated by introducing an innovative new framework called EFSOC. The framework is validated empirically and preliminary implementations are discussed.

Metodología dirigida por modelos para las pruebas de un sistema distribuido multiagente de fabricación

Las presiones del mercado han empujado a las empresas de fabricación a reducir costes a la vez que mejoran sus productos, especializándose en las actividades sobre las que pueden añadir valor y colaborando con especialistas de las otras áreas para el resto. Estos sistemas distribuidos de fabricación conllevan nuevos retos, dado que es difícil integrar los distintos sistemas de información y organizarlos de forma coherente. Esto ha llevado a los investigadores a proponer una variedad de abstracciones, arquitecturas y especificaciones que tratan de atacar esta complejidad. Entre ellas, los sistemas de fabricación holónicos han recibido una atención especial: ven las empresas como redes de holones, entidades que a la vez están formados y forman parte de varios otros holones. Hasta ahora, los holones se han implementado para control de fabricación como agentes inteligentes autoconscientes, pero su curva de aprendizaje y las dificultades a la hora de integrarlos con sistemas tradicionales han dificultado su adopción en la industria. Por otro lado, su comportamiento emergente puede que no sea deseable si se necesita que las tareas cumplan ciertas garantías, como ocurren en las relaciones de negocio a negocio o de negocio a cliente y en las operaciones de alto nivel de gestión de planta. Esta tesis propone una visión más flexible del concepto de holón, permitiendo que se sitúe en un espectro más amplio de niveles de inteligencia, y defiende que sea mejor implementar los holones de negocio como servicios, componentes software que pueden ser reutilizados a través de tecnologías estándar desde cualquier parte de la organización. Estos servicios suelen organizarse como catálogos coherentes, conocidos como Arquitecturas Orientadas a Servicios (‘Service Oriented Architectures’ o SOA). Una iniciativa SOA exitosa puede reportar importantes beneficios, pero no es una tarea trivial. Por este motivo, se han propuesto muchas metodologías SOA en la literatura, pero ninguna de ellas cubre explícitamente la necesidad de probar los servicios. Considerando que la meta de las SOA es incrementar la reutilización del software en la organización, es una carencia importante: tener servicios de alta calidad es crucial para una SOA exitosa. Por este motivo, el objetivo principal de la presente Tesis es definir una metodología extendida que ayude a los usuarios a probar los servicios que implementan a sus holones de negocio. Tras considerar las opciones disponibles, se tomó la metodología dirigida por modelos SODM como punto de partida y se reescribió en su mayor parte con el framework Epsilon de código abierto, permitiendo a los usuarios que modelen su conocimiento parcial sobre el rendimiento esperado de los servicios. Este conocimiento parcial es aprovechado por varios nuevos algoritmos de inferencia de requisitos de rendimiento, que extraen los requisitos específicos de cada servicio. Aunque el algoritmo de inferencia de peticiones por segundo es sencillo, el algoritmo de inferencia de tiempos límite pasó por numerosas revisiones hasta obtener el nivel deseado de funcionalidad y rendimiento. Tras una primera formulación basada en programación lineal, se reemplazó con un algoritmo sencillo ad-hoc que recorría el grafo y después con un algoritmo incremental mucho más rápido y avanzado. El algoritmo incremental produce resultados equivalentes y tarda mucho menos, incluso con modelos grandes. Para sacar más partidos de los modelos, esta Tesis también propone un enfoque general para generar artefactos de prueba para múltiples tecnologías a partir de los modelos anotados por los algoritmos. Para evaluar la viabilidad de este enfoque, se implementó para dos posibles usos: reutilizar pruebas unitarias escritas en Java como pruebas de rendimiento, y generar proyectos completos de prueba de rendimiento usando el framework The Grinder para cualquier Servicio Web que esté descrito usando el estándar Web Services Description Language. La metodología completa es finalmente aplicada con éxito a un caso de estudio basado en un área de fabricación de losas cerámicas rectificadas de un grupo de empresas español. En este caso de estudio se parte de una descripción de alto nivel del negocio y se termina con la implementación de parte de uno de los holones y la generación de pruebas de rendimiento para uno de sus Servicios Web. Con su soporte para tanto diseñar como implementar pruebas de rendimiento de los servicios, se puede concluir que SODM+T ayuda a que los usuarios tengan una mayor confianza en sus implementaciones de los holones de negocio observados en sus empresas

Access control and service-oriented architectures

Access Control and Service-Oriented Architectures" investigates in which way logical access control can be achieved effectively, in particular in highly dynamic environments such as service-oriented architectures (SOA's). The author combines state-of-the-art best-practice and projects these onto the SOA. In doing so, he identifies strengths of current approaches, but also pinpoints weaknesses. These weaknesses are subsequently mitigated by introducing an innovative new framework called EFSOC. The framework is validated empirically and preliminary implementations are discussed.

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Agent-based Extensions for the UML Profile for Service-Oriented Architectures (UPMS-A)

Service-Oriented Architectures are today’s favorite answer to solve interoperability issues. As various kinds of systems can be used to implement Service-Oriented Architectures, the recent trend is to apply principles of Model-Driven Development by (i) modeling the Service-Oriented Architecture in an abstract manner and (ii) providing model transformations between this abstract specification and the underlying platform specific systems. As such, Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) became very popular as both, Service-Oriented Architectures and Multi-Agent Systems, share several commonalities. In this thesis, we compare the core building blocks of Multi-Agent Systems and a proposal for a standardized UML Profile and Metamodel for Services (UPMS) requested by the Object Management Group. The major objective of this investigation is to identify if SOA-Pro–the current submission under review–offers functionalities to allow modeling of Multi-Agent Systems adequately and if not to identify what kind of functionality is missing and how this functionality can be achieved. Interaction aspect in MASs describes how the interaction between autonomous entities or organizations take place. In our comparison we found that the ability to multicast messages is one feature that is lacking in UML Sequence Diagrams. This is an important feature or characteristic of agent interaction protocols. Here we show that SOA-Pro can easily be extended to support these kinds of functionalities

BPMN4SOA : A service oriented process modelling language

Service oriented architectures have become very popular the last few years. The abstraction of computer systems into a service paradigm bring many new solutions, both for cross business processes to aid interoperability and the reuse of existing legacy systems in a new network centric world. In the wake of this, service modelling has become a part of OMGs Model Driven Architecture and new modelling languages that are based on past experience for the new paradigm are emerging. BPMN 2.0 and SoaML are the newest modelling standards from OMG that focus on service modelling. They provide different approaches to the service domain where BPMN 2.0 emphasise process modelling and SoaML emphasise service architecture modelling. BPMN4SOA is a language that extends the use of BPMN 2.0, and bring more emphasis on the service modelling capability of BPMN 2.0. It does this by means of role modelling to abstract the participants and service choreographies into reusable objects. BPMN4SOA also provide modelling capability for information data for messages through implementation of UML at L0 compliance. Because BPMN4SOA is an extension of BPMN 2.0 through it’s Extension and External Relationship constructions, BPMN4SOA should be implementable in all systems fully compliant with BPMN 2.0 specification

Integrating semantic business process management and viewbased modeling

Mit dem zunehmenden Interesse an Service Orientierten Architekturen und den damit verbundenen Technologien, wie zum Beispiel Web Services und der Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), hat Geschäftsprozessmanagement in den letzten Jahren an Bedeutung gewonnen. Dennoch besteht eine Kluft zwischen der Gestaltung von Geschäftsprozessen, wie sie von ExpertInnen der Geschäftswelt durchgeführt wird, und deren Ausführung, die von IT-ExpertInnen umgesetzt und gewartet wird. Derzeit gibt es intensive Forschungsansätze im Bereich semantischer Technologien, die hohe Automatisierbarkeit versprechen, sodass diese Kluft weitgehend oder sogar vollständig überwunden werden soll. Erreicht werden soll dies durch eine wohldefinierte Wissensrepräsentation, die logisches Schließen erlaubt, auf der einen Seite sowie Generation von ausführbarem Code auf der anderen Seite. In dieser Magisterarbeit analyisieren wir die Möglichkeiten, ontologisiertes Wissen in ausführbaren Code zu übersetzen und präsentieren einen allgemeinen Entwicklungsprozess, der die Möglichkeiten von Modellgetriebener Softwareentwicklung (Model Driven Software Development, MDSD) nützt, um dieses Ziel zu erreichen. Dieser allgemeine Prozess wird dann an Hand einer konkreten Implementierung im Rahmen des SemBiz Projekts evaluiert. Im Rahmen des Projektes gibt es eine Semantische Schicht, basierend auf der Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO), die Abfrage und Schließen über die Prozesse der Wissensbasis ermöglicht, und eine Modellgetriebene Schicht basierend auf dem Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), die für Prozessabstraktion und Codegenerierung verwendet wird.With the increasing interest in Service Oriented Architectures and related technologies, such as Web Services and the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Business Process Management (BPM) has become more and more important in recent years. However, there still exists a gap between Business Process Modeling, as it is done by business experts, and Business Process Deployment and Execution, as it is maintained by IT Experts. Currently, a lot of research is going on in the field of semantic technologies, which promise to enable a high level of automation to narrow or even close this gap. This should be achieved through a well-defined knowledge representation which allows reasoning on the one hand and generation of executable code on the other hand. In this thesis, we analyze the options to transfer ontologized knowledge representations into executable code and suggest a generic engineering process model using the facilities of Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) to fulfill this goal. This generic process is evaluated by introducing a concrete implementation done for the SemBiz project, where a semantic layer based on the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) is used for querying and reasoning over the process space, and a MDSD layer based on Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) is used for process abstraction and code generation