Combining goal-oriented and model-driven approaches to solve the Payment Problem Scenario

Motivated by the objective to provide an improved participation of business domain experts in the design of service-oriented integration solutions, we extend our previous work on using the COSMO methodology for service mediation by introducing a goal-oriented approach to requirements engineering. With this approach, business requirements including the motivations behind the mediation solution are better understood, specified, and aligned with their technical implementations. We use the Payment Problem Scenario of the SWS Challenge to illustrate the extension

Towards a flexible service integration through separation of business rules

Driven by dynamic market demands, enterprises are continuously exploring collaborations with others to add value to their services and seize new market opportunities. Achieving enterprise collaboration is facilitated by Enterprise Application Integration and Business-to-Business approaches that employ architectural paradigms like Service Oriented Architecture and incorporate technological advancements in networking and computing. However, flexibility remains a major challenge related to enterprise collaboration. How can changes in demands and opportunities be reflected in collaboration solutions with minimum time and effort and with maximum reuse of existing applications? This paper proposes an approach towards a more flexible integration of enterprise applications in the context of service mediation. We achieve this by combining goal-based, model-driven and serviceoriented approaches. In particular, we pay special attention to the separation of business rules from the business process of the integration solution. Specifying the requirements as goal models, we separate those parts which are more likely to evolve over time in terms of business rules. These business rules are then made executable by exposing them as Web services and incorporating them into the design of the business process.\ud Thus, should the business rules change, the business process remains unaffected. Finally, this paper also provides an evaluation of the flexibility of our solution in relation to the current work in business process flexibility research

OpenUP/MDRE: A Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Approach for Health-Care Systems

The domains and problems for which it would be desirable to introduce information systems are currently very complex and the software development process is thus of the same complexity. One of these domains is health-care. Model-Driven Development (MDD) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are software development approaches that raise to deal with complexity, to reduce time and cost of development, augmenting flexibility and interoperability. However, many techniques and approaches that have been introduced are of little use when not provided under a formalized and well-documented methodological umbrella. A methodology gives the process a well-defined structure that helps in fast and efficient analysis and design, trouble-free implementation, and finally results in the software product improved quality. While MDD and SOA are gaining their momentum toward the adoption in the software industry, there is one critical issue yet to be addressed before its power is fully realized. It is beyond dispute that requirements engineering (RE) has become a critical task within the software development process. Errors made during this process may have negative effects on subsequent development steps, and on the quality of the resulting software. For this reason, the MDD and SOA development approaches should not only be taken into consideration during design and implementation as usually occurs, but also during the RE process. The contribution of this dissertation aims at improving the development process of health-care applications by proposing OpenUP/MDRE methodology. The main goal of this methodology is to enrich the development process of SOA-based health-care systems by focusing on the requirements engineering processes in the model-driven context. I believe that the integration of those two highly important areas of software engineering, gathered in one consistent process, will provide practitioners with many benets. It is noteworthy that the approach presented here was designed for SOA-based health-care applications, however, it also provides means to adapt it to other architectural paradigms or domains. The OpenUP/MDRE approach is an extension of the lightweight OpenUP methodology for iterative, architecture-oriented and model-driven software development. The motivation for this research comes from the experience I gained as a computer science professional working on the health-care systems. This thesis also presents a comprehensive study about: i) the requirements engineering methods and techniques that are being used in the context of the model-driven development, ii) known generic but flexible and extensible methodologies, as well as approaches for service-oriented systems development, iii) requirements engineering techniques used in the health-care industry. Finally, OpenUP/MDRE was applied to a concrete industrial health-care project in order to show the feasibility and accuracy of this methodological approach.Loniewski, G. (2010). OpenUP/MDRE: A Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Approach for Health-Care Systems. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/11652Archivo delegad

GAMES: a General-purpose Architectural model for Multi-Energy System engineering applications

The growing interest in Multi-Energy Systems (MES) leads the scientific community to implement innovative technologies to analyse and simulate these complex systems. Two main research trends are identified in such analysis: i) improve the usability and capability of preexisting reference architectures in the energy field to cope with high-level use case descriptions, and ii) study the interoperability of such reference architectures in order to increase systematic and functional analysis of MES use cases. GAMES is a a general-purpose architectural model for MES engineering application. The aim is twofold: i) GAMES implements an extension of Smart Grid Architecture Model (SGAM) to cope with MES use case descriptions, and ii) it offers a methodology to deal with a systemic description of the use case through a combination of UML and SysML integrated in the proposed architectural model. Furthermore, GAMES will allow the implementation of Domain Specific Language (DSL) and hardware configuration for the specific components described by UML/SysML diagrams. Compared to other solutions, GAMES allows to assess both research trends in a single hierarchical ICT infrastructure

AGENT-BASED NEGOTIATION PLATFORM IN COLLABORATIVE NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT

This paper proposes an agent-based platform to model and support parallel and concurrent negotiations among organizations acting in the same industrial market. The underlying complexity is to model the dynamic environment where multi-attribute and multi-participant negotiations are racing over a set of heterogeneous resources. The metaphor Interaction Abstract Machines (IAMs) is used to model the parallelism and the non-deterministic aspects of the negotiation processes that occur in Collaborative Networked Environment

Coping with evolution in information systems: a database perspective

Business organisations today are faced with the complex problem of dealing with evolution in their software information systems. This effectively concerns the accommodation and facilitation of change, in terms of both changing user requirements and changing technological requirements. An approach that uses the software development life-cycle as a vehicle to study the problem of evolution is adopted. This involves the stages of requirements analysis, system specification, design, implementation, and finally operation and maintenance. The problem of evolution is one requiring proactive as well as reactive solutions for any given application domain. Measuring evolvability in conceptual models and the specification of changing requirements are considered. However, even "best designs" are limited in dealing with unanticipated evolution, and require implementation phase paradigms that can facilitate an evolution correctly (semantic integrity), efficiently (minimal disruption of services) and consistently (all affected parts are consistent following the change). These are also discussedComputingM. Sc. (Information Systems

Metamodels of information technology best practices frameworks

This article deals with the generation and application of ontological metamodels of frameworks of best practices in IT. The ontological metamodels represent the logical structures and fundamental semantics of framework models and constitute adequate tools for the analysis, adaptation, comparison and integration of the frameworks of best practices in IT. The MetaFrame methodology for the construction of the metamodels, founded on the discipline of the conceptual metamodelling and on the extended Entity/Relationship methodology is described herein, as well as the metamodels of the best practices for the outsourcing of IT, the eSCM-SP v2.01 (eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers) and the eSCM-CL v1.1 (eSourcing Capability Model for Client Organizations), constructed according to the MetaFrame methodology