Enterprise Interoperability

The problems of enterprise interoperability, portability, maintenance and integration are not exactly new. From the first time code was stored in memory, the problems of legacy integration with new users and new uses of computing systems began. The explosion of computing vendors and tools hasn’t exactly made the problem any easier. In fact, it’s the explosion of information in general that is causing the problem. We expect information at our fingertips, but somehow we expect that to come about magically, despite different developers, different development styles, different coding languages, operating systems, instruction set architectures – and a general lack of planning (or indeed, reading of the literature). The most important problem is the enormous explosion of information available in the world, and the increasing demands for globalized, mobile, agile, connected business processes across newly digital value chains. The resulting complexity makes integration even harder than it was before – and it was near impossible before. There is some hope, however. That hope is formal modeling, with associated metrics and continuous improvement of processes based on customer and supplier feedback. That is much easier to achieve, however, when those business models are "live" – that is, rather than simply documenting the business process, they in fact are the business process. This requires not only formal models, but formal models with well-defined semantics. The combination of Business Process Modeling (BPM) with Model Driven Architecture (MDA) promises just that. This keynote will discuss the driving factors for BPM and MDA, and the standards that support the approach.

The economic success of enterprises increasingly depends on their ability to react to changes in their environment in a quick and flexible way. Examples of such environmental changes include regulatory adaptations (e.g. introduction of Sarbanes-Oxley or Basel II), market evolution, altered customer behavior, process improvement, and strategy shifts. Companies have therefore identified business agility as a competitive advantage required for coping with business trends like increasing product and service variability, faster time-to-market, and increasing division of labor along the supply chain. In particular, the agile enterprise should be able to quickly set up new business processes as well as to adapt existing ones. However, networked enterprises must not accomplish such business process changes independent from the interactions they have with their partners and customers; e.g., business contracts and business compliance rules must be ensured after business process changes as well. This keynote will discuss major research challenges to be tackled in this context. Further, it will present advanced methods, concepts and technologies enabling collaboration and interoperability support for the agile enterprise in a networked world.

The present business era is labeled by collaborations across enterprise boundaries and by utilisation of service-based computing. Pervasive computing utilities are created to match the basic business activities, such as contracting and breach management, adaptation of innovative business models, and collaboration management. Categories of computer assisted breeding environments and automated service collaboration management ecosystems have been developed to address these needs. However, a maturity framework is required for comparing solutions and indicating gaps in systems development and standardisation, and for adoption of a sufficient set of multidisciplinary research and evaluation methodologies. This paper first introduces steps towards a maturity model, focusing on features that contribute to the correctness of collaborations and scalability of the ecosystem. Second, it introduces the choices made in Pilarcos ecosystem. Finally, it discusses the need for standards and maturity models on this domain, and raises issues on the research methodologies required.

SaaS applications have been widely adopted especially by small and medium enterprises. At the same time, the features "multi-tenancy" and "loosely coupled" bring new challenges to enterprises interoperability. On the basis of the layered interoperability model, the paper presents an approach based on interoperability points to implement interoperation between SaaS applications in the service layer. After carrying out the interoperability point matching algorithm, the intermediary Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) performs dynamic selection of interoperability points dictated by Quality of Service (QoS) attributes. In the premise of a comprehensive consideration of the functional and non-functional preferences and constraints, dynamic interoperation between SaaS applications is realized. Finally, this paper shows a case study of applying the interoperability approach.

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) provides new opportunities toward the servitization, and embeds a set of functional features to enhance the collaboration among various service providers and their resources. The main target is to compose dedicated manufacturing cloud, by encompassing a set of cloud services, to manufacture a requested service. CMfg is a recent concept, but already widely spread in the academic and industrial researches in China. The paper firstly focuses on the manufacturing environment background to understand its purpose. Thus as an introduction, the concept of CMfg is discussed. Finally, we present a method based on intuitionistic fuzzy set for the similarity evaluation between cloud services and service clusters. The objective is to match the best service cluster to provide composite resource services as cloud service candidates. Our method is ABC (Artificial Bee Colony) optimized, and its performance are discussed through experiments.

In elderly care the shortage of available financial and human resources for coping with an increasing number of elderly people becomes critical. Current solutions to this problem focus on efficiency gains through the usage of information systems and include homecare services provided by IT systems. However, the current IT systems that integrate homecare services have difficulties in handling the user-context dynamicity and the diversity of needs and preferences of care-receivers. This makes the available homecare services hardly interoperable at the process level, particularly due to the lack of support for process flexibility. In this paper, we present an approach capable of dealing with such interoperability issues based on aspect-oriented service composition. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach and of the proposed architecture by implementing a prototype for a reminder service scenario.

There are many cases in the clinical practice where using personalized medical products could decrease the cost of treatment and risk of possible complications. However, due to the large costs and long manufacturing lead time, the medical products are customized to the individual patient’s needs only in a few critical treatments. One of the main cost factors of the collaboration between the clinical centres and custom medical product suppliers is uptake of human effort in exchange of knowledge between two domains and corresponding issues. In this paper, we use the concepts of the networked enterprises to define the extended clinical workflow which spans the medical and manufacturing practice. We identify the associated systems infrastructure of this workflow and related interoperability issues. The extended workflow is demonstrated on the case study for custom orthopedic implants manufacturing.

Reaching agreements between organizations in a collaborative environment is a way to ensure interoperability between these organizations at all levels. For business processes interoperability this agreement can be reached by well defining the cross-organizational process. However most BPM frameworks have used meta-models centered on flows of activities, with the data manipulated by these activities seen as second-class citizens. For business analysts (for example in complex product design collaborative environments) data plays a major role. In this paper, we propose a methodology backed by a conceptual framework to model the cross-organizational process relying on the product model. This framework defines the evolution of the product model through a finite number of states, and then automatically generates executable artifacts to support the collaboration during run-time phase. This approach is being implemented in the living laboratory provided by EADS in the context of the European project IMAGINE.

Data standards are a powerful, real-world tool for enterprise interoperability, yet there exists no rigorous methodology for selecting among alternative standards approaches. This paper is a first step toward creating a detailed engineering basis for choosing among standards approaches. We define a specific sub-problem within a community’s data sharing challenge, and focus on it in depth. We describe the major choices (kinds of standards) applied to that task, examining tradeoffs. We present characteristics of a data sharing community that one should consider in selecting a standards approach—such as relative power, motivation level, and technical sophistication of different participants—and illustrate with real-world examples. We then show that one can state simple decision rules (based on engineering experience) that system engineers without decades of data experience can apply. We also comment on the methodology used, extracting lessons (e.g., “negative rules are simpler”) that can be used in similar analyses on other issues.

In the design phase of business and software system development, it is desirable to predict the properties of the system-to-be. Existing prediction systems do, however, not allow the modeler to express uncertainty with respect to the design of the considered system. In this paper, we propose a formalism, the Predictive, Probabilistic Architecture Modeling Framework (P²AMF), capable of advanced and probabilistically sound reasoning about architecture models given in the form of UML class and object diagrams. The proposed formalism is based on the Object Constraint Language (OCL). To OCL, P²AMF adds a probabilistic inference mechanism. The paper introduces P²AMF, describes its use for system property prediction and assessment, and proposes an algorithm for probabilistic inference.

In the design phase of business collaboration, it is desirable to be able to predict the profitability of the business-to-be. Therefore, techniques to assess qualities such as costs, revenues, risks, and profitability have been previously proposed. However, they do not allow the modeler to properly manage uncertainty with respect to the design of the considered business collaboration. In many real collaboration projects today, uncertainty regarding the business’ present or future characteristics is so significant that ignoring it becomes problematic. In this paper, we propose an approach based on the Predictive, Probabilistic Architecture Modeling Framework (P²AMF), capable of advanced and probabilistically sound reasoning about profitability risks. The P²AMF-based approach for profitability risk prediction is also based on the e³-value modeling language and on the Object Constraint Language (OCL). The paper introduces the prediction and modeling approach, and a supporting software tool. The use of the approach is illustrated by means of a case.

In future, the so called “sensing enterprise”, as part of the Future Internet, will play a crucial role in the success or the failure of an enterprise. We present our vision of an enterprise interacting with the physical world based on a retail scenario. One of the main challenges is the interoperability not only between the enterprise IT systems themselves, but also between these systems and the sensing devices. We will argue that semantically enriched service descriptions, the so called linked services will ease interoperability between two or more enterprises IT systems, and between enterprise systems and the physical environment.

Interoperability research, to date, primarily focuses on data, processes and technology and not explicitly on business rules. The core problem of interoperability from an organisation’s perspective is the added value generated from collaborating with other parties. The added value from a data, process and technology perspective has been widely researched. Therefore it is the aim of this study to provide insights into the added value for organisations to collaborate when executing business rules management solutions. Explanations of possibilities, opportunities and challenges can help to increase the understanding of business rules interoperability value creation. Presented results provide a grounded basis from which empirical and practical investigation can be further explored.

In the field of trust and reputation systems research, there is a need for common and more mature evaluation metrics for the purpose of producing meaningful comparisons of system proposals. In the state of the art, evaluations are based on simulated comparisons of how quickly negative reputation reports spread in the network or which decision policy gains more points against others in a specific gamelike setting, for example. We propose a next step in identifying criteria for a maturity model on the behavioural analysis of reputation-based trust systems.

Traditional service composition approaches face the significant challenge of how to deal with massive individualized requirements. Such challenges include how to reach a tradeoff between one generalized solution and multiple customized ones and how to balance the costs and benefits of a composition solution(s). Service network is a feasible method to cope with these challenges by interconnecting distributed services to form a dynamic network that operates as a persistent infrastructure, and satisfies the massive individualized requirements of many customers. When a requirement arrives, the service network is dynamically customized and transformed into a specific composite solution. In such way, mass requirements are fulfilled cost-effectively. The conceptual architecture and the mechanisms of facilitating mass customization are presented in this paper, and a competency assessment framework is proposed to evaluate its mass customization and cost-effectiveness capacities.

In front of the increasing complexity of information systems, improving enterprise interoperability has become a crucial element for better management. To address this issue, several research projects have been launched during the last decade and have resulted in a set of frameworks which help organizing and performing enterprise interoperability projects efficiently. In addition to these frameworks, many metrics have been also developed to measure the interoperability degree between systems. However, these frameworks and metrics are not sufficient to better control execution of these projects. Indeed, they don’t take into account resource management and unanticipated events or situations that can be encountered during execution. Moreover, there is a real lack in methodologies to deal with this situation. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new approach to control interoperability improvement projects execution by using control theory, project planning theory and a specific quantitative interoperability metric RatIop.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) plays an important role by linking heterogeneous applications in order to support business processes within and across organizations. In this context, semantic conflicts often arise and have to be dealt with to ensure successful interoperation. In recent years, many EAI initiatives have aimed at addressing semantic interoperability challenges by employing ontologies in various ways. This paper aims to reveal, through a systematic review method, some aspects associated with semantic EAI initiatives and the adoption of ontologies by them, namely: (i) the business application domains in which these initiatives have been conducted; (ii) the focus of the initiatives regarding integration layers (data, message/service, and process); (iii) the adoption of ontologies by EAI research along the years; and (iv) the characteristics of these ontologies. We provide a panorama of these aspects and identify gaps and trends that may guide further research.

Modeling the enterprise from different views, at different levels of abstraction, and in different modeling languages yields a variety of models. Oftentimes the models referring to the same subject exist independently of each other and their semantic relations are hard to discover or to analyze. This fact hinders the effective exploitation of enterprise models for the purpose of integration and interoperability. The method proposed in this paper is based on semantic annotations and aims for the externalization and machine readability of the model contained information. This assures the accessibility for further automatic processing and facilitates the discovery and analysis of inter-model relations.