A Role-Based Capability Modeling Approach for Adaptive Information Systems

Most modeling approaches lack in their ability to cover a full-fledged view of a software system’s business requirements, goals, and capabilities and to specify aspects of flexibility and variability. The modeling language Capability Driven Development (CDD) allows modeling capabilities and their relation to the execution context. However, its context-dependency lacks the possibility to define dynamic structural information that may be part of the context: persons, their roles, and the impact of objects that are involved in a particular execution occurrence. To solve this issue, we extended the CDD method with the BROS modeling approach, a role-based structural modeling language that allows the definition of context-dependent and dynamic structure of an information system. In this paper, we propose the integrated combination of the two modeling approaches by extending the CDD meta-model with necessary concepts from BROS. This combination allows for technical development of the information system (BROS) by starting with capability modeling using CDD. We demonstrate the combined meta-model in an example based on a real-world use case. With it, we show the benefits of modeling detailed business requirements regarding context comprising environment- and object-related information.