Ontology-based patterns for the integration of business processes and enterprise application architectures

Increasingly, enterprises are using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an approach to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). SOA has the potential to bridge the gap between business and technology and to improve the reuse of existing applications and the interoperability with new ones. In addition to service architecture descriptions, architecture abstractions like patterns and styles capture design knowledge and allow the reuse of successfully applied designs, thus improving the quality of software. Knowledge gained from integration projects can be captured to build a repository of semantically enriched, experience-based solutions. Business patterns identify the interaction and structure between users, business processes, and data. Specific integration and composition patterns at a more technical level address enterprise application integration and capture reliable architecture solutions. We use an ontology-based approach to capture architecture and process patterns. Ontology techniques for pattern definition, extension and composition are developed and their applicability in business process-driven application integration is demonstrated

Exploiting rules and processes for increasing flexibility in service composition

Recent trends in the use of service oriented architecture for designing, developing, managing, and using distributed applications have resulted in an increasing number of independently developed and physically distributed services. These services can be discovered, selected and composed to develop new applications and to meet emerging user requirements. Service composition is generally defined on the basis of business processes in which the underlying composition logic is guided by specifying control and data flows through Web service interfaces. User demands as well as the services themselves may change over time, which leads to replacing or adjusting the composition logic of previously defined processes. Coping with change is still one of the fundamental problems in current process based composition approaches. In this paper, we exploit declarative and imperative design styles to achieve better flexibility in service composition

Quality-aware model-driven service engineering

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Quality aspects ranging from interoperability to maintainability to performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Architecture models can substantially influence quality attributes of the implemented software systems. Besides the benefits of explicit architectures on maintainability and reuse, architectural constraints such as styles, reference architectures and architectural patterns can influence observable software properties such as performance. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and evaluating the performance of implemented software. We present an approach for addressing the quality of services and service-based systems at the model-level in the context of model-driven service engineering. The focus on architecture-level models is a consequence of the black-box character of services

Can Component/Service-Based Systems Be Proved Correct?

Component-oriented and service-oriented approaches have gained a strong enthusiasm in industries and academia with a particular interest for service-oriented approaches. A component is a software entity with given functionalities, made available by a provider, and used to build other application within which it is integrated. The service concept and its use in web-based application development have a huge impact on reuse practices. Accordingly a considerable part of software architectures is influenced; these architectures are moving towards service-oriented architectures. Therefore applications (re)use services that are available elsewhere and many applications interact, without knowing each other, using services available via service servers and their published interfaces and functionalities. Industries propose, through various consortium, languages, technologies and standards. More academic works are also undertaken concerning semantics and formalisation of components and service-based systems. We consider here both streams of works in order to raise research concerns that will help in building quality software. Are there new challenging problems with respect to service-based software construction? Besides, what are the links and the advances compared to distributed systems?Comment: 16 page

Multi-perspective requirements engineering for networked business systems: a framework for pattern composition

How business and software analysts explore, document, and negotiate requirements for enterprise systems is critical to the benefits their organizations will eventually derive. In this paper, we present a framework for analysis and redesign of networked business systems. It is based on libraries of patterns which are derived from existing Internet businesses. The framework includes three perspectives: Economic value, Business processes, and Application communication, each of which applies a goal-oriented method to compose patterns. By means of consistency relationships between perspectives, we demonstrate the usefulness of the patterns as a light-weight approach to exploration of business ideas

Planning and Design Soa Architecture Blueprint

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a framework for integrating business processes and supporting IT infrastructure as secure, standardized components-services-that can be reused and combined to address changing business priorities. Services are the building blocks of SOA and new applications can be constructed through consuming these services and orchestrating services within a business process. In SOA, services map to the business functions that are identified during business process analysis. Upon a successful implementation of SOA, the enterprise gain benefit by reducing development time, utilizing flexible and responsive application structure, and following dynamic connectivity of application logics between business partners. This paper presents SOA reference architecture blueprint as the building blocks of SOA which is services, service components and flows that together support enterprise business processes and the business goals

Semantic web service architecture for simulation model reuse

COTS simulation packages (CSPs) have proved popular in an industrial setting with a number of software vendors. In contrast, options for re-using existing models seem more limited. Re-use of simulation component models by collaborating organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues however that restrict the inter-organization use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontology to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture in order to understand how such ontology are created, maintained and subsequently used for simulation model reuse. The ontology is extracted from health service simulation - comprising hospitals and the National Blood Service. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter- organization simulation, uncovering domain semantics and adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community

Integration of end-of-life options as a design criterion in methods and tools for ecodesign

Ecodesigning a product consists (amongst other things) in assessing what its environmental impacts will be throughout its life (that is to say from its design phase to its end of life), in order to limit them. Some tools and methods exist to (eco)design a product, just like methods that assess its environmental impacts (more often, a posteriori). But it is now well accepted that these are the early design decisions that will initiate the greatest consequences on the product’s end-of-life options and their impacts. Thus, the present work aims at analysing traditional design tools, so as to integrate end-of-life possibilities in the form of recommendations for the design step. This proposal will be illustrated by means of a wind turbine design.EcoSD networ