Abstract: Applications with Service-oriented Enterprise Architectures in the Cloud are emerging and will shape future trends in technology and communication. The development of such applications integrates Enterprise Architecture and Management with Architectures for Services & Cloud Computing, Web Services, Semantics and Knowledge-based Systems, Big Data Management, among other Architecture Frameworks and Software Engineering Methods. In the present work in progress research, we explore Service-oriented Enterprise Architectures and application systems in the context of Big Data applications in cloud settings. Using a Big Data scenario, we investigate the integration of Services and Cloud Computing architectures with new capabilities of Enterprise Architectures and Management. The underlying architecture reference model can be used to support semantic analysis and program comprehension of service-oriented Big Data Applications. Enterprise Services Computing is the current trend for powerful large-scale information systems, which increasingly converge with Cloud Computing environments. In this paper we combine architectures for services with cloud computing. We propose a new integration model for service-oriented Enterprise Architectures on basis of ESARC - Enterprise Services Architecture Reference Cube, which is our previous developed service-oriented enterprise architecture classification framework, with MFESA - Method Framework for Engineering System Architectures - for the design of service-oriented enterprise architectures, and the systematic development, diagnostics and optimization of architecture artifacts of service-oriented cloud-based enterprise systems for Big Data applications.

Abstract: The concept of "service" has been characterized by different disciplines and authors from various points of view. The variety of characterizations reveals that this notion, although an intuitive one, is far from trivial. Given the importance of services in enterprise computing and Service Science in general, we believe that a clear account of services and service-related concepts is necessary and would serve as a basis for communication, consensus and alignment of various approaches and perspectives. In this paper we propose a commitment-based account of the notion of service captured in a core reference ontology called UFO-S. We address the commitments established between service providers and customers, and show how such commitments affect the service lifecycle. We show that the commitment-based account can serve to harmonize different notions of service in the literature.

Abstract: The execution of business processes generates a lot of data comprising final process results as well as information about intermediate activities, both communicated as events. Automated process execution environments are centrally controlled by process engines that hold the connection between events and the processes they occure in. In contrast, in manual process execution environments, e.g., logistics, these events may not be correlated to the process they origin from. The correlation information is usually not present in the event but in so-called context data, which exists orthogonally to the corresponding process. However, in the areas of process monitoring and analysis, events need to be correlated to specific process instances. To close the gap between recorded events without process correlation and required events with process correlation, we propose a framework that enriches recorded events with context data to create events correlated to processes, so-called process events.

Abstract: As the number and diversity of technologies involved in building enterprise systems continues to grow so does the importance of modeling tools that are able to present customized views of enterprise systems to different stakeholders according to their needs and skills Moreover, since the range of required view types is continuously evolving, it must be possible to extend and enhance the languages and services offered by such tools on an ongoing basis However, this can be difficult with today's modeling tools because the meta-models that define the languages, views and services they support are usually hardwired and thus not amenable to extension In practice, therefore, various workarounds have to be used to extend a tool's underlying meta-model Some of these are built into the implemented modeling standards (eg the UML profile, BPMN 20 and ArchiMate 20 extension mechanisms) while others have to be applied by complementary, external tools (eg model weaving) These techniques not only increase accidental complexity, they also reduce the ability of the modeling tool to ensure adherence to enterprise rules and constraints In this paper we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches for language extension and propose a modeling framework best able to support the main extension use-cases currently found in practice today

Abstract: Enterprise architecture is practiced in different ways, and there are different types of enterprise architects with quite different roles. This paper looks closer at the role of enterprise architects and the importance of the enterprise architects' understanding of boundary issues in their practice. The paper suggests that enterprise architects must focus on problem-finding more than problem-solving, and should develop not just more dialectic skills, but also dialogic skills. The paper also argues that the enterprise architects must gain a deeper understanding of the enterprise, and need to start working with other enterprise disciplines.

Abstract: Software testing is a critical process for achieving product quality. Its importance is more and more recognized, and there is a growing concern in improving the accomplishment of this process. In this context, Knowledge Management emerges as an important supporting tool. However, managing relevant knowledge to reuse is difficult and it requires some means to represent and to associate semantics to a large volume of test information. In order to address this problem, we have developed a Reference Ontology on Software Testing (ROost). ROost is built reusing ontology patterns from the Software Process Ontology Pattern Language (SP-OPL). In this paper, we discuss how ROost was developed, and present a fragment of Roost that concerns with software testing process, its activities, artifacts, and procedures.

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of transforming natural language business specifications into formal models suitable for use in information systems. In particular, the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) standard is used as a starting point for both the natural language specifications and the formal representation. In recent years, SBVR-based approaches have been proposed for transforming natural language business rules into models, such as UML Class Diagrams, however, most focus on the transformations performed after the SBVR models have been created and, therefore, simplify or entirely neglect the natural language to SBVR transformation. There are a number of difficulties in transforming natural language into formal models, such as ambiguity and inconsistency. This paper presents a solution based on a unique combination of techniques from Cognitive Linguistics and Knowledge-based Configuration in order to transform natural language business specifications into SBVR models. We present a comparative survey of state-of-the-art approaches and argue that current solutions do not fulfil the criteria necessary to meet our goals. We demonstrate our approach and show how it improves translation of natural language business specifications into formal models and increases the level of automation for Model-Driven Engineering.

Abstract: Healthcare organizations are increasingly using information technology to ensure patient safety, increase effectiveness and improve efficiency of healthcare delivery. While the use of health information technology (HIT) has realized many improvements, it has also introduced new failure modes arising from data quality and IT system usability issues. This paper presents an approach towards addressing these failure modes by applying real-time analytics to existing streams of clinical messages exchanged by HIT systems. We use complex event processing provided by the Event Swarm software framework to monitor data quality in such systems through intercepting messages and applying rules reflecting the syndromic surveillance model proposed in [4]. We believe this is the first work reporting on the real-time application of syndromic surveillance rules to legacy clinical data streams. Our design and implementation demonstrates the feasibility of this approach and highlights benefits obtained through improved operational quality of HIT systems, notably better patient safety, reduced risks in healthcare delivery and potentially reduced costs.

Abstract: With the increase in the number of quality attributes (e.g. cost, availability, reusability), that are being considered in the process of enterprise architecture analysis, the decision maker needs a systematic way to balance these attributes against each other to obtain the best possible architecture. Utility theory addresses this need by providing methods for numerical representation of preferences of a stakeholder involved in a decision-making process. In this paper utility theory key concepts are explained with examples. The process of calculating the utility metric, which reflects stake holder's set of preferences to select the most preferred architecture scenario is explained. The paper provides an explanation of how utility theory can be applied in enterprise architecture models which are meta-object facility compliant. This paper concludes by an example comparing two quality attributes on two architecture scenarios using utility theory and calculating the decision maker's overall utility metric across both quality attributes is provided. This shows the applicability of utility theory on architecture scenario analysis with multiple quality attributes.

Abstract: Reference architecture can help in enterprise architecture management to develop and operate standardized and maintainable software landscapes. Similar to the software architectures of single systems, however, they are threatened by architecture erosion, i.e. the continuous divergence between intended architectures and their actual realizations. Architecture erosion has negative effects on the maintainability of software systems and on other quality attributes. In this paper, we report on the application of a rule-based architecture conformance checking approach in an industrial case study in which we investigate an industrial reference architecture for the German public administration. The reference architecture and its constraints for implementations are formalized as architecture rules enabling automatic conformance checking tool support. The results from the case study show that the approach is capable of checking reference architecture conformance in realistic settings and helps to avoid software architecture erosion.

Abstract: This paper is presenting a discussion of feral information systems (FIS) in relationship to enterprise architecture (EA) thereby aiming to better qualify the architectural understanding of information systems not in line with corporate IT/IS strategy and policies. A qualitative and case-based approach is used as empirical foundation of this paper. With users developing own IS, classical strategy-based EA approaches are challenged. Identifying FIS can strongly improve insight into organizational processes and shortcomings official EA. A functional and temporal perspective is proposed to guide EA processes to embrace unofficial, user-driven systems. As FIS tend not to follow any rules of corporate IS, EA embrace of FIS is more complex. Using a meta-model for the social and operational character of FIS this complexity can be managed along with the improve business insight. The recognition of FIS in EA both opens up for insight in local adaptations of business processes, but can also create room for low-cost innovation and rapid response to changes in business conditions. Several forecasts are suggesting corporate IT/IS to be more user-driven and with reduced control from IT/IS professionals. This paper is opening a discussion on EA practice when centralized control is assumed to decline. EA has a tendency to be developed "top-down" emphasizing strategic alignment. In this contributed it is suggested to include social and operational alignment in EA practice.

Abstract: A key promise of process languages based on open standards, such as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language, is the avoidance of vendor lock-in through the portability of process definitions among runtime environments. Despite the fact that today, various runtimes claim to support this language, every runtime implements a different subset, thus hampering portability and locking in their users. In this paper, we intend to improve this situation by enabling the measurement of the degree of portability of process definitions. This helps developers to assess their process definitions and to decide if it is feasible to invest in the effort of porting a process definition to another runtime. We define several software quality metrics that quantify the degree of portability a process definition provides from different viewpoints. We validate these metrics theoretically with two validation frameworks and empirically with a large set of process definitions coming from several process libraries.

Abstract: It is shown how a service-oriented and model-based approach for Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Engineering can provide agile support for the different abstraction and modeling levels from business model and service innovation to cloud-based service realisation. Business model innovation is supported with a basis in a business model framework with six views, where each view is supported by a corresponding diagram from the Value Delivery Modeling Language (VDML). Service innovation is supported by the Service Modeling Language (ServiceML), which shares the core collaboration models of VDML for role modeling and value networks, according to the five views of the AT-ONE service innovation method. Service realisation is supported by further transformation to SoaML and a model-based service execution platform. This approach presents a framework using the emerging OMG standard language VDML together with ServiceML for service design and engineering, relating value models, process models, user interface and interaction flow models, and service architectures and service contract models.

Abstract: The open, distributed approach of the Web and the relationship's prevalence of applications and services is transforming both the way we develop software and how they operate and interact with each other. As a result, a novel breed of applications is emerging, and consequently new mental models are needed to deal with them. In this paper, we weave "social" relationships into software, leading to the notion of "relationship-aware" software. Relationship-aware software uses the metaphor of human social relationships and, at the simplest level, is software whose behavior takes into account other software it interacts with. Here, we revisit the concept of relationship and extend the notion of Social Machines to establish a unifying abstraction model that is used for specifying relationship-aware applications and services. To engineer relationship-aware applications, this paper presents a guideline that address some issues related to the engineering exercise. In addition, an analysis describing Facebook as a relationship-aware Social Machine with 282 interaction views is also reported in the paper.

Abstract: Visualizations are common means to analyze Enterprise Architecture (EA) models and support decision makers with relevant information on organizational processes, information systems, infrastructure, and their interconnections. These EA visualizations are tailored typically to the specific information demand of stakeholders. Currently, creating such stakeholder-specific visualizations requires experts with a strong technical background due to complex configurations and inflexible tool solutions. In particular business users often lack technical expertise. At the same time, their concerns and questions often arise spontaneously. In this vein, visualizations that can be generated without expert knowledge would enable business users to perform ad-hoc analyses of an EA information model. Against this background, we propose a solution which facilitates analyses of arbitrary EA information models by non-technical stakeholders. Our approach is based on ad-hoc, configurable visualizations. We introduce an end-user friendly wizard that lowers the barrier for the creation of EA visualizations. The wizard is based on structural pattern matching of models. Key to our approach are abstract viewpoints that model best-practice knowledge of EA visualizations and abstract view models which model the information demand of abstract viewpoints. Our contributions in this paper are 1) a meta-information model capable to capture both the technical information demand of an abstract viewpoint and the information offer of an EA information model, 2) a pattern matching algorithm calculating viable configurations for bindings of visualizations to information, and 3) a wizard to support non-technical stakeholders with the creation of these visualizations. We present an implementation of our approach and show user interface design of the wizard. The wizard recommends feasible configurations automatically in order to unburden the configuration process for non-technical stakeholders.

Abstract: The paradigm of service-oriented architectures has emerged as an architectural style for designing enterprise applications. Requirements engineering for such applications comprises the specification of business goal models representing stakeholder objectives and the operationalization to business process models that specify the required composition of services. Inconsistencies between business goals and derived business processes can lead to service compositions that are not in line with the actual stakeholder objectives. For preserving consistency it is required to consider logical and temporal dependencies among goals (e.g. the order in which they need to be achieved) in the derivation of business processes. In previous work, we provided a technique for the elicitation and specification of dependencies between business goals. Extending this approach, we aim at validating the consistency between business goal models and business process models regarding these dependencies. In this paper, we present a pattern-based approach for the automated generation of verifiable business process quality constraints from business goal models. We describe how these constraints can be used to check the consistency between business goals and business processes and demonstrate the applicability of our approach in a case study by using the implemented tool support.

Abstract: This paper presents a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for expressing business rules in a business-friendly language and sufficiently formal in order to be machine-processed. The core feature of this DSL is that its semantic leverages the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) standard which is a metamodel for specifying the semantic models of business using natural language. Our DSL provides business stakeholders with a custom editor with auto-completion, automatic highlighting, content assist, error handling and an outline view on the model. It is built on a parser generated from a grammar which defines the controlled and structured syntax to guide a non technical user to express declarative business rules in SBVR Structured English (SSE). Thus our DSL can bridge the gap between business and Information Technology (IT) experts by allowing them to share the same semantics around the business model in order to minimize the loss of semantics and avoid the miscommunication due to the ambiguities of natural language.

Abstract: Cloud computing is a concept for the provisioning of internet-based information technology services as a common supply, similar to water supply, electric power supply, and telecommunication services. Several conceptual frameworks to describe and characterize Cloud service offers exist. As they are developed by different groups and organizations, they differ in their intention, type of formulation, the level of description, and in terms of which key issues of cloud service evaluation are addressed. To help overcoming the prevalent skepticism of enterprises regarding Cloud service offers, we surveyed different frameworks for Cloud service offer description. Based on this survey, we propose a consolidated reference architecture to uniformly describe and evaluate Cloud service offers, regardless of whether an organization's own offers or the offers of external providers are evaluated. In addition, we present Cloud Service Navigators (CSN) as a suitable visualization technique to describe visually and compare Cloud service offers and requests.

Abstract: Online social networks provide a range of business opportunities. However, there are various threats and risks that are sparsely considered in research so far. Such possible risks are the loss of reputation and control, industrial espionage, social engineering and malware, for example. Also, many companies are unsure about appropriate activities in online social networks and what key figures might be used to assess their activities economically. The aim of this paper is the identification of technical and managerial risks and the detailed, structured description of each risk. We conducted an extensive literature review to find possible risks in online social networks and social media in general. For risk characterization we evolved a conceptual risk model that outlines all relevant concepts and properties (e.g., risk sources, consequences and risk factors). Thus, a risk catalog for corporate risks in online social networks is presented. The risk catalog describes each risk in detail and consists of four main risk categories: Loss of control, loss of reputation, information leakage and managerial risks. This paper presents one of the first approaches for the systematical identification and description of corporate risks in online social networks.

Abstract: Sometimes the business process model is not known completely, but a set of compliance rules can be used to describe the ordering and temporal relations between activities, incompatibilities, and existence dependencies in the process. The analysis of these compliance rules and the temporal events thrown during the execution of an instance, can be used to detect and diagnose a process behaviour that does not satisfy the expected behaviour. We propose to combine model-based diagnosis and constraint programming for the compliance violation analysis. This combination facilitates the diagnosis of discrepancies between the compliance rules and the events that the process generates as well as enables us to propose correct event time intervals to satisfy the compliance rules.

Abstract: At every step in creating an enterprise design, architects encounter risks and opportunities. In most cases, risk assessment and treatment is done using the company's internal methodology or based on some best-practices known by the architect. We propose a method that can combine both qualitative and quantitative risk analysis and also incorporate risk mitigation solutions. In IT security, attack-defence trees (ADT) were used successfully to represent attacks and counter-measures. The goal of this paper is to leverage the ADT approach in order to assess risks and opportunities in enterprise architecture. To that end, we elaborate a framework to identify the best ways to mitigate risks and increase an enterprise's profitability based on architectural principles. This framework will be validated with a practical case study from the insurance sector.

Abstract: This paper deals with the problem of efficiently deploying business processes in service oriented environments with the purpose of enhancing operational agility and improving governance. Today's solutions rely on early coupling between the business process layer and the underlying service oriented architecture layer and this constrains evolution in either of the two layers to the ability of the other layer to adapt. The presented approach leverages abstract architectural mappings that indirectly connect business process activities with service-based assets. It consists of a deployment mechanism that is capable of taking these mappings and generating fully executable artifacts for a variety of runtime platforms. The deployment mechanism is encapsulated in a self-contained entity that is instantiated and executed each time a business process needs to be deployed. This entity contains all the necessary data for the deployment, while ensuring complete accountability of operations. This approach promotes late binding of processes to the underlying SOA and it has the potential to significantly increase the speed of implementing changes in business operations while ensuring long-term sustainability. In addition it promotes independent evolutions of processes and services while encouraging incremental convergence of the SOA towards the needs of the business domain.

Abstract: Enterprise Architecture (EA) and IT Service Management (ITSM) are two complementary IT governance approaches, with distinct IT and organizational perspectives. Nowadays, ITIL is the de facto standard for implementing ITSM. However, it is still unclear how to measure the value that ITIL brings to organizations. This paper addresses the EA of organizations that use ITIL best practices to perform ITSM, focusing on the modeling and assessment of ITIL value in those architectures. Therefore, this paper's goal is threefold: (1) to find out if ITIL already contains the concepts that are usually needed to represent value, (2) to model these concepts according to an EA point of view and (3) to demonstrate how to use an architecture-based approach to choose between ITIL implementation projects.

Abstract: This paper reviews the support for modeling KPI-related concepts in several enterprise modelling approaches and enterprise architecture frameworks. The scarcity of KPI modeling in EA approaches led us to open our scope of investigation to proposals in Business Process Management (BPM) area. Inside each approach, we first describe how these efforts propose to align goal-related concepts with KPI-related concepts (if the approach presents some kind of support for goal modeling). Further, the conceptual characterization for modeling KPI-related concepts in the context of EA models is also explored. Finally, we devote some considerations on how the KPI-related concepts are used to measure the properties of the EA elements and evaluate the achievement of goals. We conclude the paper proving challenges for the conceptual representation of a KPI modeling language that aims at measuring goal satisfaction the context of EA models.

Abstract: The complex software development projects of today may require developers to use multiple requirements engineering approaches. Different teams may have to use different requirements modeling formalisms to express requirements related to their assigned parts of a given project. This situation poses difficulties in achieving interoperability and integration of requirements models for the purpose of reasoning on the overall system requirements. It is challenging to compose distributed models expressed in different notations and to reason on the composed models. In this paper we present a metamodeling approach which allows reasoning about requirements and their relations on the whole/composed models expressed in different requirements modeling approaches. In a previous work we expressed the structure of requirements documents as a requirements metamodel in which the most important elements are requirements relations and their types. The semantics of these elements is given in First Order Logic (FOL) and allows two activities: inferring new relations from the initial set of relations and checking consistency of relations. In this work we use the requirements metamodel as a core metamodel to be specialized for different requirements modeling approaches and notations such as Product-line and SysML. Mainly, the requirements relations in the metamodel are specialized to support relations in different requirements modeling approaches. The specialization allows using the same semantics and reasoning mechanism of the core metamodel for multiple requirements modeling approaches. To illustrate the approach we use an example from automotive domain expressed with two modeling approaches: product-line requirements models and SysML for system requirements.

Abstract: With the increasing significance of the service-oriented paradigm for implementing business solutions, assessing and analyzing such solutions also becomes an essential task to ensure and improve their quality of design. One way to develop such solutions, a.k.a., Service-Based systems (SBSs) is to generate BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) processes via orchestrating Web services. Development of large business processes (BPs) involves design decisions. Improper and wrong design decisions in software engineering are commonly known as antipatterns, i.e., poor solutions that might affect the quality of design. The detection of antipatterns is thus important to ensure and improve the quality of BPs. However, although BP antipatterns have been defined in the literature, no effort was given to detect such antipatterns within BPEL processes. With the aim of improving the design and quality of BPEL processes, we propose the first rule-based approach to specify and detect BP antipatterns. We specify 7 BP antipatterns from the literature and perform the detection for 4 of them in an initial experiment with 3 BPEL processes.

Abstract: Process mining has been studied for many years but has not been so widely adopted in real business practices. In this study, we propose a practical approach to process mining. This approach has three characteristics. Firstly, we make use of transaction databases of business systems that don't necessarily have an identifier throughout a process instance, rather than workflow logs. Secondly, we visualize and analyze what really happened without model inference. Thirdly, we also analyze exceptional processes as well as typical processes. This approach is implemented in a tool called BPM-E and was successfully adopted in real business systems in Japan, North America, and Europe. We show two case studies of BPM-E in this paper to explain how it works after the technical description.

Abstract: Event-based communication styles are potential solutions for facilitating high flexibility, scalability, and concurrency of distributed systems due to the intrinsic loose coupling of the participants. However, software developers often find the event-driven communication style unintuitive, especially for large and complex systems with numerous constituting elements, because of its non-deterministic characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on DERA-an event actor-based framework-which can be used to describe distributed event-based systems with reduced nondeterminism. DERA's graphical notations support representing a current snapshot of an event-based system closely to the intuitive perception of the developers. We propose a formal specification of the event actors-based constructs and the graphical notations based on Petri nets in order to enable formal analysis of such snapshots. Based on this, an automated translation from event actors-based constructs to Petri nets using template-based model transformation techniques is also developed. The applicability of our approach is shown through an industrial case study in the field of service platform integration.

Abstract: Enterprise applications such as available-to-promise (ATP), financial accounting, and dunning typically employ a mixed database workload with short-running transactional as well as analytical queries with resource-intensive aggregations. The latter type of queries can be significantly accelerated by using materialized views with pre-calculated aggregates. However, this speed-up comes with the cost of view maintenance which is necessary to guarantee consistency when the underlying data changes. In this paper, we evaluate existing view maintenance strategies in the context of a columnar in-memory database that is designed for mixed workloads. We propose a novel view maintenance strategy that takes the main-delta architecture and resulting merge process of columnar storage into account. A further contribution is a cost model which determines the best maintenance strategy given a specific workload. Our experiments using an ATP application show that our novel strategy outperforms other strategies in mixed workloads with an insert-ratio of more than 40 percent.