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

A goal-oriented requirements modelling language for enterprise architecture

Methods for enterprise architecture, such as TOGAF, acknowledge the importance of requirements engineering in the development of enterprise architectures. Modelling support is needed to specify, document, communicate and reason about goals and requirements. Current modelling techniques for enterprise architecture focus on the products, services, processes and applications of an enterprise. In addition, techniques may be provided to describe structured requirements lists and use cases. Little support is available however for modelling the underlying motivation of enterprise architectures in terms of stakeholder concerns and the high-level goals that address these concerns. This paper describes a language that supports the modelling of this motivation. The definition of the language is based on existing work on high-level goal and requirements modelling and is aligned with an existing standard for enterprise modelling: the ArchiMate language. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how enterprise architecture can benefit from analysis techniques in the requirements domain

FutureFarm vision

This paper defines the first version of a vision of Future Farming project and also a knowledge management system used by European farms which will be designed and developed by the Future Farm project. An important part of the vision is a definition of external drivers and their influence on farm business in future. Paper is looking on a situation in three periods: short (2013), middle (2020) and long-term (2030). Our vision expects that the farming system will continuously converge to the situation of two types of farm: an industrial farm, which will guarantee both the food safety and the food security for European citizens, and multifunctional farms focused on environment protection. The recommendation proposes an architecture based on communication of interoperable services, so called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), for easy integration of different levels and components of farm management.Farming, external drivers, future vision, knowledge management, SOA, Farm Management,

Service architecture design for E-Businesses: A pattern-based approach

E-business involves the implementation of business processes over the Web. At a technical level, this imposes an application integration problem. In a wider sense, the integration of software and business levels across organisations becomes a significant challenge. Service architectures are an increasingly adopted architectural approach for solving Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI). The adoption of this new architectural paradigm requires adaptation or creation of novel methodologies and techniques to solve the integration problem. In this paper we present the pattern-based techniques supporting a methodological framework to design service architectures for EAI. The techniques are used for services identification, for transformation from business models to service architectures and for architecture modifications

Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences

To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices

An Evolution Process For Service-Oriented Systems

Evolution of service-oriented systems is quite a new research area, which becomesmore and more important as engineering challenges move from enablingservice-orientation onto the maintenance and evolution of already developedservice-oriented systems. However, the development of suitable evolution processesand methodologies is still an open research problem. The evolution processpresented in this paper has been designed to address the evolution of serviceorientedsystems, which are technically built out of a set of service compositions.The presented process comprises phases and tasks compliant with ISO 20000.The underlying model of service-oriented system consisting of business processesand corresponding service composition models has also been presented. A traceabilitymodel and tools supporting change impact analysis have also beenprovisioned for. Preliminary industrial validation indicates that the evolutionprocess should be easy to adapt by the industry

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

Integrated lifecycle requirements information management in construction

Effective management of information about client requirements in construction projects lifecycle can contribute to high construction productivity; within budget and schedule, and improve the quality of built facilities and service delivery. Traditionally, requirements management has been focused at the early stages of the construction lifecycle process where elicited client requirements information is used as the basis for design. Management of client requirements does not extend to the later phases. Client requirements often evolve and change dramatically over a facility’s life. Changing client requirements is one of the principal factors that contribute to delays and budget overruns of construction projects. This results in claims, disputes and client dissatisfaction. The problems of current requirements management process also include: lack of integrated and collaborative working with requirements; lack of integrated requirements information flow between the various heterogeneous systems used in the lifecycle processes, and between the multiple stakeholders; inefficient and ineffective coordination of changes within the lifecycle processes; manual checking of dependencies between changing requirements to facilitate assessment of cost and time impact of changes. The aim of the research is to specify a better approach to requirements information management to help construction organisations reduce operational cost and time in product development and service delivery; whilst increasing performance and productivity, and realising high quality of built facilities. In order to achieve the aim and the formulated objectives, firstly, a detailed review of literature on related work was conducted. Secondly, the research designed, developed and conducted three case studies to investigate the state-of-the-art of managing client requirements information. A combination of multiple data collection methods was applied which included observations, interviews, focus group and questionnaires. Following this, the data was analysed and problems were identified; the necessity for a lifecycle approach to managing the requirements information emerged. (Continues...)

The GOALS approach: business and software modeling traceability by means of human-computer interaction: enterprise modeling language and method

The management of an enterprise relies on the continuous organization and development of its business and software systems. A process that requires merging the ideas of the enterprise’ systems managers, targeting the specification of business requirements and the conception and implementation of a supporting information system. This process finds obstacles in the identification and communication of requirements, and also in their transformation in software artefacts, leading to difficulties or loss of traceability between business and software models. Existing methods, languages and techniques are still not sufficiently standardized to ensure that when a business improvement is introduced, the supportive software solution will be implemented within budget and time. Methods are still too closed to the concepts of their original scientific domains, conceiving solutions which are not representative of the business and software conceptual relation and of the complexity concealed in an improvement effort, namely concerning usability and user experience. Moreover, the lack of a common modeling language and method for the conception of holistic and traceable software solutions, also refrains the performance of the enterprise development process. The GOALS Approach presents a solution to surpass these barriers by means of the specification of an enterprise modeling language that relates the business and software conceptual structures using a shared set of concepts, a notation, process, method and techniques, that allow the design of the software as a result of the business organization, ensuring traceability by means of the permanent representation of the business structure in the software structure