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Advances in Enterprise Engineering I

4th International Workshop CIAO! and 4th International Workshop EOMAS, held at CAiSE 2008, Montpellier, France, June 16-17, 2008. Proceedings

herausgegeben von: Jan L. G. Dietz, Antonia Albani, Joseph Barjis

Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Buchreihe : Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

The expectation for the future of the 21st century enterprise is complexity and agility. In this digital age, business processes are scattered not only throu- out the labyrinth of their own enterprises, but also across di?erent enterprises, and even beyond the national boundaries. An evidence of this is the gr- ing phenomenon of business process outsourcing. Increasing competition, higher customer demands, and emerging technologies require swift adaptation to the changes. To understand, design, and engineer a modern enterprise (or an enterprise network) and its interwoven business processes, an engineering and systematic approach based on sound and rigorous theories and methodologies is necessary. Along with that, a paradigmshift seems to be needed for addressing these issues adequately. An appealing candidate is to look at an enterprise and its business processes as a social system. In its social setting, an enterprise and its bu- ness processes represent actors with certain authorities and assigned roles, who assume certain responsibilities in order to provide a service to its environment. The need for this paradigm shift along with the complexity and agility of modern enterprises, gives inspiration for the emerging discipline of Enterprise Engineering. For the study of this socio-technical phenomenon, the prominent tools ofModeling andSimulation play a signi?cant role.Both (conceptual) m- eling and simulationare widely used for understanding,analyzing,andengine- ing an enterprise (its organization and business processes).

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Process Modeling

On the Nature of Business Rules

Abstract

Business rules are in the center of attention, both in the ‘business world’ and in the ‘ICT applications world’. Recently, the OMG has completed a major study in defining the notion of business rule and its associated notions. On closer look, however, the definitions provided appear to be not as rigid and precise as one would hope and as deemed necessary. Based on the consistent and coherent theoretical framework of Enterprise Ontology, several clarifications of the core notions regarding business rules are presented. They are illustrated by means of a small example case.

Jan L. G. Dietz

Process Flexibility: A Survey of Contemporary Approaches

Abstract

Business processes provide a means of coordinating interactions between workers and organisations in a structured way. However the dynamic nature of the modern business environment means these processes are subject to a increasingly wide range of variations and must demonstrate flexible approaches to dealing with these variations if they are to remain viable. The challenge is to provide flexibility and offer process support at the same time. Many approaches have been proposed in literature and some of these approaches have been implemented in flexible workflow management systems. However, a comprehensive overview of the various approaches has been missing. In this paper, we take a deeper look into the various ways in which flexibility can be achieved and we propose an extensive taxonomy of flexibility. This taxonomy is subsequently used to evaluate a selection of systems and to discuss how the various forms of flexibility fit together.

Helen Schonenberg, Ronny Mans, Nick Russell, Nataliya Mulyar, Wil van der Aalst

Subsuming the BPM Life Cycle in an Ontological Framework of Designing

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework to represent life-cycle activities performed in business process management (BPM). It is based on the function-behaviour-structure (FBS) ontology that represents all design entities uniformly, independently of the specific stages in their life cycle. The framework specifies a set of distinct activities that operate on the function, behaviour and structure of a business process, subsuming the different life-cycle stages within a single framework. This provides an explicit description of a number of BPM issues that are inadequately addressed in current life-cycle models. They include design-time analysis, flexibility of tasks and sub-processes, interaction between life-cycle stages, and the use of experience.

Udo Kannengiesser

Information Gathering for Semantic Service Discovery and Composition in Business Process Modeling

Abstract

When creating an execution-level process model today, two crucial problems are how to find the right services (service discovery and composition), and how to make sure they are in the right order (semantic process validation). While isolated solutions for both problems exist, a unified approach has not yet been available. Our approach resolves this shortcoming by gathering all existing information in the process, thus making the basis of semantic service discovery and task composition both broader and more targeted. Thereby we achieve the following benefits: (i) less modeling overhead for semantic annotations to the process, (ii) more information regarding the applicability of services, and (iii) early avoidance of inconsistencies in the interrelation between all process parts. Consequently, new or changed business processes can be realized in IT more efficiently and with fewer errors, thus making enterprises more agile in response to new requirements and opportunities.

Norman May, Ingo Weber

Collaboration and Interoperability

Challenges in Collaborative Modeling: A Literature Review

Abstract

Modeling is a key activity in conceptual design and system design. Users as well as stakeholders, experts and entrepreneurs need to be able to create shared understanding about a system representation. In this paper we conducted a literature review to provide an overview of studies in which collaborative modeling efforts have been conducted to give first insights in the challenges of collaborative modeling, specifically with respect to group composition, collaboration & participation methods, modeling methods and quality in collaborative modeling. We found a critical challenge in dealing with the lack of modeling skills, such as having a modeler to support the group, or create the model for the group versus training to empower participants to actively participate in the modeling effort, and another critical challenge in resolving conflicting (parts of) models and integration of submodels or models from different perspectives. The overview of challenges presented in this paper will inspire the design of methods and support systems that will ultimately advance the efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative modeling tasks.

Michiel Renger, Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten, Gert-Jan de Vreede

A Petri-Net Based Formalisation of Interaction Protocols Applied to Business Process Integration

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach for Business Process Integration based on Interaction Protocols. It enables both integration and collaboration of autonomous and distributed business processes modules. We present a semantic formalisation of the interaction protocols notations used in our approach. The semantics and its application are described on the basis of translation rules to Coloured Petri Nets and the benefits of formalisation are shown. The verified and validated interaction protocols specification is exploited afterwards with an intermediate agent called « Integrator Agent » to enact the integration process and to manage it efficiently in all steps of composition and monitoring.

Djamel Benmerzoug, Fabrice Kordon, Mahmoud Boufaida

Enterprise Architecture

Competencies and Responsibilities of Enterprise Architects

A Jack-of-All-Trades?

Abstract

This paper is not concerned with enterprise architecture as a product or as a process, but rather concerns itself with the professionals who are responsible for the creation of the products and the execution of the associated processes: the enterprise architects.

We will discuss the responsibilities of enterprise architects, as well as the basic competencies and personality types which an enterprise architect is expected to have in meeting these responsibilities. Since enterprise architects are likely to operate in teams we also discuss the competencies needed to effectively work in teams.

The presented results are based on existing studies into the skills of architects, surveys conducted among enterprise architects, as well as the experience of our organisations in teaching future enterprise architects.

Claudia Steghuis, Erik Proper

Interoperability Strategies for Business Agility

Abstract

In times of increasing uncertainty and turbulence in the business environment, the concept of agility has become a new guiding principle for the change and development of enterprises. Agile business requires agile information systems and this have consequences on how the systems should interoperate. This paper describes and analyzes the impact of information systems interoperability strategies on business agility. Three interoperability strategies are identified; unification, intersection and interlinking. Cases from Swedish Health Care are used to demonstrate the application of the strategies. The conclusion is that the choice of interoperability strategy has significant impact on business agility and should therefore be analyzed and evaluated carefully. If the wrong strategy is chosen, there is a considerable risk for misalignment and expensive consequences. The challenge is to create architectural solutions for interoperability that are in harmony with the demands of the business, both in a short term and a long term perspective.

Mats-Åke Hugoson, Thanos Magoulas, Kalevi Pessi

Towards a Business-Oriented Specification for Services

Abstract

By far the best known standard for registering and searching for services is the UDDI. A great weakness of this standard is its technology-driven way of specifying services; it is still inadequate for specifying the majority of aspects that are relevant from a business point of view. This stands in sharp contrast to the main premises of SOA, i.e. increased flexibility by the reuse of services and better business/IT-alignment by speaking the same language. A more comprehensive approach to specifying services is the business component specification framework. One of the aspects that needs to be specified according to this framework are the business tasks. The framework, however, does not define precisely what a task is and how a task should be identified. In this paper we propose taking the enterprise ontology as a starting point for specifying these tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate our approach using a life insurance company case.

Linda Terlouw

Model Transformation and Simulation

Automated Model Transformations Using the C.C Language

Abstract

This paper introduces the C.C programming language, which is designed for automated model transformations. The C.C language is outcome of our research and has been implemented in the CASE tool of a British software company. This technology started to be used by companies in the Central Europe and for business and software engineering courses at several Czech and Slovak universities, Loughborough University in the UK and Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. An interesting side-effect of this technology is C.C language application as a first teaching language in algorithmization, programming and software engineering courses.

Vojtěch Merunka, Oldřich Nouza, Jiří Brožek

Improvement in the Translation Process from Natural Language to System Dynamics Models

Abstract

In order to solve social science problems or make models for business forecasts, descriptive information in natural language is as important as measured numerical information. While numerical information is widely used in various stages, most descriptive information is employed only to describe the background or the very primitive stage of modelling. However, descriptive information has rich contents. One uses it to organise one’s ideas and to communicate with other people. The modelling method which can employ this rich content information is System Dynamics. It has an interface to express such descriptive information, stock flow diagrams. Moreover, these diagrams are also used when numerical simulations are conducted. However, matching descriptive information and diagrams has depended on model builders’ skill and mental models. This paper shows matching rules between descriptive information and stock flow diagrams as improvement in an existing method.

Yutaka Takahashi

Developing a Simulation Model Using a SPEM-Based Process Model and Analytical Models

Abstract

It is hard to adopt a simulation technology because of the difficulty in developing a simulation model. In order to resolve the difficulty, we consider the following issues: reducing the cost to develop a simulation model, reducing the simulation model complexity, and resolving the lack of historical data. We propose an approach to deriving a simulation model from a descriptive process model and widely adopted analytical models. We provide a method to develop simulation models and a tool environment to support the method. We applied our approach in developing the simulation model for a government project. Our approach resolves the issues by the transformation algorithms, the hierarchical and modularized modeling properties of UML and (Discrete Event System Specification) DEVS, and widely adopted analytical models.

Seunghun Park, Hyeonjeong Kim, Dongwon Kang, Doo-Hwan Bae

Formal Modeling and Discrete-Time Analysis of BPEL Web Services

Abstract

Web services are increasingly used for building enterprise information systems according to the Service Oriented Architecture (Soa) paradigm. We propose in this paper a tool-equipped methodology allowing the formal modeling and analysis of Web services described in the Bpel language. The discrete-time transition systems modeling the behavior of Bpel descriptions are obtained by an exhaustive simulation based on a formalization of Bpel semantics using the Algebra of Timed Processes (Atp). These models are then analyzed by model checking value-based temporal logic properties using the Cadp toolbox. The approach is illustrated with the design of a Web service for GPS navigation.

Radu Mateescu, Sylvain Rampacek

Backmatter

Titel: Advances in Enterprise Engineering I
herausgegeben von: Jan L. G. Dietz
Antonia Albani
Joseph Barjis
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-540-68644-6
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68643-9
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68644-6