Domain-Specific Conceptual Modeling

Current research in fields such as Business Process Management, Enterprise Architecture Management, Knowledge Management and Software Engineering raises a wide diversity of requirements for Conceptual Modelling, typically satisfied by Design Science artefacts such as modelling methods. When employed in the context of an Agile Enterprise, an underlying requirement for Conceptual Modelling agility emerges—manifested not only on model content level but also on modelling method level. Depending on the questions that must be answered and the systems that must be supported with modelling means, the need for agility may stem from the degree of domain-specificity, from gradual understanding of modelling possibilities, from evolving model-driven systems, etc. The hereby proposed Agile Modelling Method Engineering (AMME) approach thus becomes necessary to extend the traditional perspective of “modelling through standards”; consequently, the benefits of repeatability and wide adoption are traded for responsiveness to dynamic needs identified within an Agile Enterprise.

A community for a specific domain forms around common but specific artifacts found in that domain. For the domain of conceptual modelling, the ADOxx meta-modelling environment is such an artifact, having formed a community through projects, realized tools, and knowledge exchange. This chapter presents the development of conceptual models and their realization in the form of modelling tools using the ADOxx meta-modelling environment. First, it describes relevant concepts of conceptual models, the modelling layers, and modelling methods before introducing their formalization using the ADOxx environment. Second, additional implementation cases are depicted with examples, providing references and elaborating further details on the realization of conceptual models. This chapter is built as a so-called living paper meant to be further extended in the future by members of the OMiLAB community.

Digitalization requires cyber-physical ecosystems to achieve the goals of its transformation process, which should be primarily driven by innovation. OMiLAB (www.​omilab.​org) supports digital innovation within a community of practice and technical environment, based on a global network of physical laboratory nodes. The Digital Innovation Environment (DiEn) powered by OMiLAB located at industrial and academic organizations responds to digital transformation challenges. It facilitates the co-creation, design, and engineering of early prototypes. Digital innovation is challenged by the OMiLAB community of practice through tool-aided conceptual modelling and elevates model value in domain-specific scenarios and experiments.

The literature on domain-specific languages typically positions its discourse relative to a traditional dichotomy between general-purpose and domain-specific. This may be a sufficient distinction for end users, but modeling method engineers need a more refined frame—they are in the position to build artifacts (i.e., modeling methods) where boundaries of the modeling universe of discourse must be aligned with the method requirements (purpose). Therefore, instead of choosing on which side of the dichotomy their artifact belongs, it is more useful for methodologists to think about purpose and specificity as orthogonal dimensions. Modeling method engineers typically work on metamodeling platforms that enable fast prototyping of tools, allowing them to focus precisely on how to serve a purpose and which concepts or properties should be captured as first-class modeling citizens. These are fine-tuning design decisions that should benefit from adequate methodologies—during recent years the Agile Modeling Method Engineering (AMME) framework emerged not only to support such fine-tuning but also to enable the evolution of modeling methods in response to changing purposes or shifting specificity needs. To frame this principle, the chapter proposes a Purpose-Specificity framework where modeling methods may occupy a possibly shifting or expanding gamut of purposes and specificities—contributions to the first volume of this book series are briefly characterized through this lens. For practitioners, the chapter also points to an open tool that operationalizes this idea; for theory builders, a rhetorical analysis on the multidimensional value of models as Design Science artifacts is also derived.

Approaches and methods for enterprise modeling have been the subject of discussion and development in industry and academia during at least the last 30 years. Enterprise modeling supports organizations in coping with challenges related to dynamically changing business environments and the alignment of business goals and information systems to support these goals. For this purpose, different perspectives of an enterprise have to be taken into account—and, also, to be part of enterprise models, such as business goals, processes, products, services, business rules, and organization’s structures. 4EM (for enterprise modeling) is an enterprise modeling method that offers a modeling language covering the different perspectives in conjunction with guidelines for the modeling process, strong stakeholder participation, and a project-based approach to conducting enterprise modeling.

Successfully aligning a company’s strategy with its processes is a major concern in practice. Indeed, almost half of the organizations are able to implement a mere 60% of its objectives. This problem has attracted attention in Strategic Management, Organization, and Conceptual Modeling literature. In previous research, we presented a first version of the Process-Goal Alignment (PGA) technique, which is a model-based approach for realizing strategic fit that was designed as the result of an iteration of Action Design Research (ADR). This chapter supplements the first PGA version by reflection and learning during a second cycle of ADR, which entails further development and application of the modeling technique in four real-life case studies. As such, this chapter formalizes the initial design in combination with the insights from the case studies, which results in PGA version 2.0. This also includes a description of the proof-of-concept version of the ADOxx modeling tool. Finally, we also present a brief outlook of future PGA research opportunities.

The integration of goals and business processes models in an MDE context has been widely studied. A specific kind of goals, the organisational goals, are addressed by business strategy. The increasing agility and effect over software systems development of the top-level strategic definitions drive the necessity of considering this domain knowledge into the software development process. However, most of the existing modelling frameworks that consider business strategy concepts are, justifiably, more complex than needed for this specific aim and lack a systematic modelling procedure, hindering their integration in an MDE context. In this chapter, we introduce LiteStrat, a lightweight organisational modelling method for business strategy. By selecting constructs and relationships from existing modelling frameworks, we designed a modelling language and a detailed modelling procedure. We implemented LiteStrat using the ADOxx framework, adapting the LiteStrat’s conceptual metamodel to the ADOxx meta²model. Through a lab demo supported by the tool prototype, we demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.

The design and engineering methodology for organizations (DEMO) is an established theory-based methodology for representing the organization domain of an enterprise in a concise way, using four aspect models. One of the aspect models, the Construction Model (CM), provides an overarching big picture to represent the essence of the construction of an enterprise. The CM hides complexity and hence facilitates the human need for simplicity to manage a problem situation intellectually. In this chapter, we introduce the Way of Thinking encapsulated in three theories that ground the four aspect models and provide a means for managing complexity. We discuss the aim of each aspect model and the Way of Working encapsulated in the Organizational Essence Revealing (OER) method to compose the four aspect models. We highlight the value of the CM and discuss a sub-method, the Enterprise Construction Modeling Method (ECMM), used to compose the CM. The CM metamodel is presented as the primary input for realizing a DEMO Modeling Tool (DMT), using the ADOxx platform. A fictitious enterprise, concerned with pet sitting services, is used to demonstrate the DMT features.

This chapter discusses the authors’ experience of building tool support for a modeling technique called Fractal Enterprise Model (FEM) using the ADOxx metamodeling environment. FEM is introduced as a means for helping the management to comprehend how their organization operates, giving a picture understandable for the management team. It depicts interconnections between the business processes in an enterprise and connects them to the assets they use and manage. Assets considered in the model could be tangible (buildings, heavy machinery, etc.) and intangible (reputation, business process definitions, etc.). First, the chapter presents FEM informally—as a text with examples—and formally, as a metamodel. Then, the authors present the requirements on a tool support for FEM and discuss how these requirements were fulfilled in a tool called the FEM toolkit developed with the help of ADOxx.

Risk consideration in enterprise engineering is gaining attention since the business environment is becoming more and more competitive, complex, and unpredictable. Risk-aware Business Process Management (R-BPM) is a recently emerged management paradigm, which assists organizations in addressing this concern. R-BPM strives to integrate two traditionally isolated areas: risk management and business process management. This chapter will present recent achievements of our long-term research devoted to this field. It consists in developing an integrated process-risk management methodological framework, named BPRIM, and its related multi-view modeling method, called e -BPRIM, which promotes and supports risk-aware process management with AdoBPRIM, a computer-assisted modeling environment based on ADOxx. A case study related to the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in France shall illustrate the usage of the e -BPRIM method with the AdoBPRIM modeling environment.

The dynamic environments where modern businesses operate in are a source of continuous change. As a result, change has emerged as an indispensable aspect of business management and analysis. The notion of capability is an essential element in business designs; therefore, business transformation is associated with monitoring and analyzing changing capabilities. Enterprise modeling can facilitate these tasks, and even though a plethora of capability modeling approaches exists, there is a lack of a method specialized for modeling capability change. The KYKLOS method, which is introduced in this chapter as a means to address the abovementioned challenge, is the result of an ongoing Design Science project aiming to provide methodological and tool support for businesses whose capabilities undergo changes or need to do so in the future. Its purpose is not only to capture the information types that are essential to the complex capability change phenomenon but also to guide the transition of capabilities. It is complemented by a homonymous tool developed using the ADOxx metamodeling platform.

An Internet of Things (IoT)-based service includes several devices and applications. A service’s security depends on the vulnerabilities of its individual components. Thus, because a security assessment is of high importance, it starts to be conducted in the design phase of the service’s model. The Stochastic Petri net (SPN) modelling method can sufficiently depict the complexity and the unpredictability in terms of the time and the sequence of the events in an IoT service. Therefore, the SPN model can form the appropriate basis of a security assessment method. In this chapter, we propose an ADOxx-based modelling tool, the SAPnet, which includes the ontology toolkit for SPN modelling enriched with the tools that enable the necessary security assessment. SAPnet provides a modeler-friendly interface for the composition and updating of the security vulnerabilities list that affects the model, as well as fast and accurate results regarding the security metrics of the model, at any point of the design phase. The functionalities of SAPnet are tested in the security assessment of iBuC, an IoT-based novel transportation service. More specifically, we evaluate the security of iBuC’s fleet management in two customised real-life scenarios. We observed that SAPnet provides fast and accurate results and visual aids to the modeler during the design and security assessment process.

When modeling real-world activities involving social, economic, and technical aspects, conceptual modeling is a necessary prerequisite to set the stage and define the system boundaries. This can become a very difficult task, however, especially when all the relevant actors, shareholders, and stakeholders together with their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are not known. One of the methodological challenges in this is to provide a unified framework for collecting as many relevant perspectives and pieces of information as possible for creating a fully comprehensive representation that is both insightful and readily understood. Another challenge is to transform these findings into standardized and re-usable information which can serve as input for other modeling tools downstream in the tool chain. In this chapter, we will present both a methodology based on value networks and a modeling tool (EcoViz), which is intended to address these issues and can also be used directly before the typical conceptual modeling starts in the course of a “pre-conceptual phase.” We will also show how the identified interactions can be used for an insightful qualitative analysis and exploration of socio-technical ecosystems. To demonstrate how and where EcoViz can be applied, we will show four real-world cases from different domains.

Modern information systems rely on data analytics and use various data sources to steer information processing and process execution activities. Capability-driven development is a method for the design and delivery of this kind of information systems. This chapter elaborates a method extension for capability-based modeling of data ecosystems for the purpose of ensuring their resilience. The ecosystem perspective is adopted because there is a need to understand the interactions among the various parties involved in capability delivery. The ecosystem model allows to analyze the impact on reliability and other properties of data providers on capability delivery resilience. The meta-model is elaborated together with a set of rules for analyzing the ecosystem model. The model is perceived as a property graph, and the network theory is used for the analysis. The ADOxx meta-modeling platform is used to implement the modeling tool, which is integrated with a graph database, where the model analysis is performed. The method and the tool are demonstrated using an example of a winter road maintenance ecosystem.

The Space of Services (SoS) method was developed with the idea of completing a set of methods and techniques for designing services and digital transformation in different contexts. The method allows positioning services in four quadrants and in relation to other services and finally improvement and adding value to it. Services are multidimensional in nature. The dimensions of services, which are also design components, include various functional and structural elements of the service, but also the system of service delivery, users and the market. SoS is trying to overcome the complexity of simultaneous consideration of different design dimensions by reducing the number of dimensions that we observe at the same time to pairs. The method was implemented on ADOxx platform.

Servitization is a global trend in the manufacturing industry that requires a challenging and complex transformation. In this context, engineering and design Product-Service Systems (PSS), capturing both product and service perspectives and balancing customer satisfaction and internal efficiency, are becoming more and more essential. To this purpose, the SEEM (SErvice Engineering Methodology) methodology is proposed, and the SEEM Modeling toolkit supporting its implementation is presented. Lastly, this chapter describes the methodology and the tool implementations in a case study on an Italian manufacturing company.

Digitization is popular in today’s business ecosystems. However, digitization is not straightforward and introduces challenges such as sensor issues, edge computing, network dependencies, and security. Therefore, the idea is to propose a modelling method enabling to guide key aspects for the digitization process. For this reason, the proposed modelling method prototype concentrates on (a) the collection of requirements, (b) the analysis of the contextual environment, as well as (c) the monitoring by guiding the selection of an appropriate digitization device. The modelling method is extended by a physical OMiLAB Innovation Corner experiment that eases, on one hand, understanding the domain problem and, on the other hand, facilitates the selection of an appropriate digitization unit by taking into account potential physical issues as well as the requirements related to the business perspective.

To reduce the cost of developing integrated intelligent applications where multiple robots, agents, and sensors cooperate to realize multiple tasks by integrating heterogeneous intelligence, we have been developing a platform named PRINTEPS (PRactical INTElligent aPplicationS). Since PRINTEPS provides a user-friendly workflow editor and a generator based on ROS (Robot Operating System) and SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), users who do not know robots and AI techniques will be able to execute ROS codes generated from user-level workflows. We propose the generator based on a ROS-based workflow schema. We describe how we model ROS elements such as services, publishers, and subscribers with the proposed schema and generate ROS codes from the workflows. We also evaluate the proposed schema and generator by applying it to practical applications.

Reasoning about actions, change, and causality constitutes an important field of research in artificial intelligence. Several formal action languages have been proposed, addressing the need to qualify change and facilitate (commonsense) reasoning in dynamic settings. The Event Calculus (EC), in particular, permits the representation of causal and narrative information. Although action languages are well established as a means to model dynamic domains, their adoption by knowledge engineers is often hindered by modelling errors and steep learning curves. It has been argued that visual modelling tools could assist knowledge engineers in their modelling tasks and improve the quality of the resulting models by obtaining a better understanding of the semantics. We present ECAVI (Event Calculus Analysis and VIsualisation), a domain-independent visual modelling tool for designing dynamic domains in the Event Calculus. ECAVI is mainly addressed to inexperienced modellers, aiming to acquaint them with the features of the Event Calculus and to guide them during the process of designing their dynamic problem settings.

ProVis—Probability Visualized—is a tool for constructing tree diagrams and unit squares. Tree diagrams are often used in mathematics education to structure multi-stage random experiments. Unit squares illustrate dependencies between two-dimensional characteristics and their values. The intention of this project is to foster the use of digital tree diagrams and unit squares in the classroom. ProVis exempts the students from operating and gives them opportunity to model, interpret, and analyse complex statistical situations. For the development of ProVis, seven requirements based on didactic considerations are proposed, which a statistical education software should fulfil. The metamodel of the method underlying ProVis is presented. Also the related functionalities are outlined. The realization of the metamodel and the implementation of the involved concepts appear to be complex in construction as well as in interdependence. Nevertheless, it was the intention of the developers to realize a software, which is quite easy to handle. For this reason, a convenient interface is offered. The features of ProVis are demonstrated by discussing a case study in a recent context. ProVis is implemented on the metamodeling platform ADOxx. It is available for free on the OMiLAB-Austria homepage.

Internationalization is a global trend of society development. In order to get on board with this trend, universities are making great efforts to create possibilities for students to participate in mobility and exchange programs and learn from others. Students’ decision to take this great step get out of their comfort zone and manage their stay in an unknown environment depends on many influencing factors, the most important one being a smooth recognition process of the study period and credits earned abroad. SCoRe4Mobility is a tool supposed to help students and responsible people at the home university to find similar courses at other universities and make the selection of the most compatible destination for mobility easier.

Integrating archival information from different cultural heritage institutions to support historical research has been a commonly pursued goal among humanities digital research infrastructures. Due to the lack of standards in performing such processes, there is a need to provide guidance to interested parties and share knowledge deriving from successful practices. In this chapter, we introduce the Historical Information Curation (HIC) model that aims to address this need. Based on our experience with aggregating and curating archival collections, we have developed a two-faceted model for such processes, capable of supporting both the structural representation of the required workflows and the analysis of their dynamics.

This chapter focuses on identifying a process of methodological conceptualization of a modelling method, in the context of categorical mechanisms, starting with the conceptualization phase of the domain and ending with its implementation and validation. Our approach is motivated by the finding that, at least in some phases, the process of conceptualization and implementation of the modelling method is not supported by sufficiently strong semantic foundations in relation to its importance. In this idea, we will pay special attention to the phase of mathematical formalization of the concept of modelling method by identifying or defining categorical mechanisms with implicit semantics appropriate to this concept. We will also identify a way to specify a modelling tool, independent of the metamodelling platform. Our approach is supported by conceptualizing and implementing a modelling method.

The need for innovative products and business models has increased in recent years, as they are seen as an important selling point in today’s economy. As a consequence, various approaches and tools were introduced to tackle such design problems. Even though these approaches have their advantages, we found a lack in approaches that consider the synergies from using tangible methods (like organising sticky notes on a whiteboard) and computer-aided tools to capture and share the knowledge beyond pictures and lengthy texts. Therefore, we propose an approach to link these two worlds (tangible and digital) and a corresponding proof-of-concept prototype in the form of the Scene2Model tool, which offers an automated transformation from tangible objects to digital models.

Nowadays, we still identify a plethora of methods and techniques that can be deployed in the development of information systems (ISs). “Optimal” methods are still far from obvious. For decades we have developed a methodology approach and a framework, named IIS*Studio, for support of the IS development process. IIS*Studio can be categorized as a Model-Driven Software Development and Domain-Specific Modeling framework and relies on a specific meta-model named as IIS*Case Meta-model. It is aimed at improving the IS development process by increasing designers’ efficiency and the overall quality of the systems being developed. In this chapter, we present an implementation of a selected part of the IIS*Case Meta-model in the ADOxx Modeling and Configuration Platform and demonstrate its usage in a small case study. By such an experiment, we create a new possibility of the meta-model verification and validation.

This chapter presents a domain-specific modelling language, BPMN4MoPla, which extends the standard BPMN for the purpose of supporting business decision-making in mobility planning. Specifically, requirements for robotic car movements were derived and used for the modelling language extension. To achieve greater support of decision-making in mobility planning, the new modelling method was implemented as a cyber-physical system. Validation of the method was carried out in two complementary ways: (1) with respect to the extended language by modelling a mobility plan use case with BPMN4MoPla and (2) with respect to the expected execution behaviour by transforming and then executing the BPMN4MoPla model in two different modelling environments widely used in research and industry, respectively.

The Web of Things enriches Web development ecosystems with new kinds of data sources, complementing databases whose content used to be originated primarily from manual user input with data picked by sensors and physical devices. Consequently, the traditional notions of service orchestration or ETL data pipelines must be revisited to capture the technological specificity of digital ecosystems where workflow execution must combine traditional REST-based data APIs with data obtained through alternate protocols. CoAP is such a protocol introduced by the Web of Things for constrained devices—i.e., data sources where HTTP is not always adequate, or must be complemented with a lighter, UDP-based approach. We revisit the concept of model-driven data pipelines by extending BPMN with technology-specific concepts and properties that are able to trigger both HTTP and CoAP requests from a modeling environment. For this, a BPMN-centric modeling method was implemented, which may be used either as a design-time tool to maintain a Web API ecosystem or as a run-time dashboard to trigger the execution of API requests using either HTTP or CoAP, which makes it fit for testing data services in the Web of Things environment or to orchestrate them using BPMN as control flow. The implementation was built as an extension to the open-source BEE-UP modeling tool with the help of the ADOxx metamodeling platform.