Semantic Model Alignment for Business Process Integration

Business process models describe an enterprise’s way of conducting business and in this form the basis for shaping the organization and engineering the appropriate supporting or even enabling IT. Thereby, a major task in working with models is their analysis and comparison for the purpose of aligning them. As models can differ semantically not only concerning the modeling languages used, but even more so in the way in which the natural language for labeling the model elements has been applied, the correct identification of the intended meaning of a legacy model is a non-trivial task that thus far has only been solved by humans. In particular at the time of reorganizations, the set-up of B2B-collaborations or mergers and acquisitions the semantic analysis of models of different origin that need to be consolidated is a manual effort that is not only tedious and error-prone but also time consuming and costly and often even repetitive. For facilitating automation of this task by means of IT, in this thesis the new method of Semantic Model Alignment is presented. Its application enables to extract and formalize the semantics of models for relating them based on the modeling language used and determining similarities based on the natural language used in model element labels. The resulting alignment supports model-based semantic business process integration. The research conducted is based on a design-science oriented approach and the method developed has been created together with all its enabling artifacts. These results have been published as the research progressed and are presented here in this thesis based on a selection of peer reviewed publications comprehensively describing the various aspects

Using Simulation Systems for Decision Support

This chapter describes the use of simulation systems for decision support in support of real operations, which is the most challenging application domain in the discipline of modeling and simulation. To this end, the systems must be integrated as services into the operational infrastructure. To support discovery, selection, and composition of services, they need to be annotated regarding technical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, dynamic, and conceptual categories. The systems themselves must be complete and validated. The data must be obtainable, preferably via common protocols shared with the operational infrastructure. Agents and automated forces must produce situation adequate behavior. If these requirements for simulation systems and their annotations are fulfilled, decision support simulation can contribute significantly to the situational awareness up to cognitive levels of the decision maker

Conceptual modeling for the design of intelligent and emergent information systems

A key requirement to today's fast changing economic environment is the ability of organizations to adapt dynamically in an effective and efficient manner. Information and Communication Technologies play a crucially important role in addressing such adaptation requirements. The notion of `intelligent software' has emerged as a means by which enterprises can respond to changes in a reactive manner but also to explore, in a pro-active manner, possibilities for new business models. The development of such software systems demands analysis, design and implementation paradigms that recognize the need for ‘co-development’ of these systems with enterprise goals, processes and capabilities. The work presented in this paper is motivated by this need and to this end it proposes a paradigm that recognizes co-development as a knowledge-based activity. The proposed solution is based on a multi-perspective modeling approach that involves (i) modeling key aspects of the enterprise, (ii) reasoning about design choices and (iii) supporting strategic decision-making through simulations. The utility of the approach is demonstrated though a case study in the field of marketing for a start-up company

An ontology for interoperability assessment: a systemic approach

International audienceEnterprise Interoperability is a requirement for ensuring an effective collaboration within a network of enterprises. Therefore, interoperability should be continuously assessed and improved for avoiding collaboration issues. To do so, an interoperability assessment can be performed by the concerned enterprises. Such an assessment provides an overview of the enterprise systems' strengths and weaknesses regarding interoperability. A plethora of assessment approaches are proposed in the literature. The majority of them focus on one single aspect of interoperability. In general, to have a holistic view of the assessed systems, i.e. consider different aspects, enterprises have to apply different approaches. However, the application of multiple approaches may cause redundancy and confusion when assessing the same system using different metrics and viewpoints. Therefore, this article is to propose an ontology for interoperability assessment. The main objective of such an ontology is to provide a sound description of all relevant concepts and relationships regarding an interoperability assessment. Inference rules are also provided for reasoning on interoperability problems. A case study based on a real enterprise in presented to evaluate the proposed ontology

Composability model in a distributed simulation environment for supply chain

Distributed simulation becomes popular through the use of HLA standard and the necessity of sharing resources. Nevertheless, composability of model is still a problem to overcome. Many solutions propose the use of ontology and SOA architectures in the context of distributed simulation. This work presents a solution to compose simulation models in the context of supply chain simulation. The proposal presents a network ontology that conceptualizes different aspect to taking into account when a federation for supply chain is developed.Fil: Gutierrez, Maria del Milagro. Universidad Tecnologica Nacional. Facultad Regional Santa Fe. Centro de Investigacion y Desarrollo de Ingenieria en Sistemas de Informacion; ArgentinaFil: Leone, Horacio Pascual. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño (i); Argentin

Monitoring and Information Alignment in Pursuit of an IoT-Enabled Self-Sustainable Interoperability

To remain competitive with big corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often need to be more dynamic, adapt to new business situations, react faster, and thereby survive in today‘s global economy. To do so, SMEs normally seek to create consortiums, thus gaining access to new and more opportunities. However, this strategy may also lead to complications. Due to the different sources of enterprise models and semantics, organizations are experiencing difficulties in seamlessly exchanging vital information via electronic means. In their attempt to address this issue, most seek to achieve interoperability by establishing peer-to-peer mappings with different business partners, or by using neutral data standards to regulate communications in optimized networks. Moreover, systems are more and more dynamic, frequently changing to answer new customer‘s requirements, causing new interoperability problems and a reduction of efficiency. Another situation that is constantly changing is the devices used in the enterprises, as the Enterprise Information Systems, devices are used to register internal data, and to be used to monitor several aspects. These devices are constantly changing, following the evolution and growth of the market. So, it is important to monitor these devices and doing a model representation of them. This dissertation proposes a self-sustainable interoperable framework to monitor existing enterprise information systems and their devices, monitor the device/enterprise network for changes and automatically detecting model changes. With this, network harmonization disruptions are detected in a timely way, and possible solutions are suggested to regain the interoperable status, thus enhancing robustness for reaching sustainability of business networks along time

Composability model in a distributed simulation environment for supply chain

Distributed simulation become popular through the use of HLA standard and the necessity of sharing resources. Nevertheless composability of model is still a problem to overcome. Many solutions propose the use of ontology and SOA architectures in the context of distributed simulation. This work presents a solution to compose simulation models in the context of supply chain simulation. The proposal presents a network ontology that conceptualizes different aspect to taking into account when a federation for supply chain is developed.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

Composability model in a distributed simulation environment for supply chain

Distributed simulation become popular through the use of HLA standard and the necessity of sharing resources. Nevertheless composability of model is still a problem to overcome. Many solutions propose the use of ontology and SOA architectures in the context of distributed simulation. This work presents a solution to compose simulation models in the context of supply chain simulation. The proposal presents a network ontology that conceptualizes different aspect to taking into account when a federation for supply chain is developed.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ