Service-oriented Enterprise Architecture Research Articles

Evaluation of Free Technologies, as Tools for Business Process Management (BPM)

The article presents an evaluation of free technologies for business process automation, with emphasis only on tools compatible with the General Public License (GPL). The compendium of technologies was based on promoting a ServiceOriented Enterprise Architecture (SOA) and the establishment of a Business Process Management System (BPMS). The methodology for the selection of tools was Agile UP. This proposal allows businesses to achieve technological sovereignty and independence, in addition to the promotion of service orientation and the development of free software based on components.

Digitizing Service Level Agreements in Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture

As service-orientation gathers traction in enterprise engineering, more and more business processes and capabilities alike are wrapped up and viewed as services in today’s digital enterprises. Digital servitization is neither a rebranding nor a syntax sugar in enterprise engineering. It opens the door to innovative business models, novel system architecture, to name just a few. Central to service provisioning is the notion of commitment that captures contractual agreements between the provider and the consumer of the service in question, describing not only computer-interpretable factors (e.g., reliability, payment), but also business rules (e.g., service penalty) of the commitment. Widely known as the service level agreement, this building block of service-oriented enterprise engineering is pushed towards virtual when it comes to digital servitization. In this article, we propose a descriptive framework for digital enterprise services together with devised techniques for the alignment and reinforcement of the service level agreement. The relevance and applicability of the multi-perspective approach to service engineering are among our findings, which are illustrated using a few examples and a real-life case-study.

TACTICS: Validation of the security framework developed for tactical SOA

Contemporary military networks and the requirements arising from future strategic planning, call for the increasing integration of information mobility and network enabled capabilities on the field. Therefore, adopting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts for the development of command and control infrastructures have become essential, since they provide modularity, flexibility and interoperability of services. Nevertheless, constraints related to infrastructure and operational aspects, render current enterprise SOA ineffective for the tactical domain. Accordingly, the goal of TACTICS was the definition and experimental demonstration of a Tactical Services Infrastructure (TSI) that enables contemporary tactical radio equipment to participate in SOA, providing the required functionalities under the imposed constraints. This article presents a comprehensive view of the developed architecture, focusing on the elements that constitute the security framework according to our closing experimental results and field demonstrations.

An enterprise architecture framework for electronic requirements information management

Managing information about client requirements effectively can contribute to improve the quality of built facilities, and their related services. However, the process has been challenging to construction project management often resulting in failed projects. This necessitates an overwhelming need for a better approach. This paper presents a novel enterprise architecture framework for managing information about client requirements across all phases of a construction project and through-life of a built facility. The Integrated electronic Requirements Information Management Framework (eRIM) defines an information-centric, and process and service-oriented enterprise architecture approach to requirements management. It also describes how Information and Communication Technology (ICT)/Information Systems (IS) can support this information management. In developing the framework, findings from three case study projects were collated through observations, a questionnaire and interviews of construction practitioners. It is concluded that when implemented and incorporated in the management of construction projects, the eRIM architecture framework can potentially contribute towards improved and more efficient and effective management of client requirements across all stages of a project. Further work is outlined to operationalize the framework.

Service oriented Enterprise Architecture Frameworks Review for Information System Management of Collaboration networks

Service oriented Enterprise Architecture Frameworks Review for Information System Management of Collaboration networks

An Approach to Knowledge Management in Construction Service – Oriented Architecture

Modern business driving requires agility in the reflecting changes of Service-oriented Enterprise Architecture (SoEA). For this purpose Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) was used for facilitation of structured communication between process participants, process experts and resulted generation of collaborative business process. During such generation all necessary requirements for supporting resources (such as information, know-how, intellectual and professional skills, inputs and outputs, quality and operational risk limitations, moderation, control and monitoring) are taken into consideration using the operational knowledge of experts and project participants that act inside the predefined business area. The work results in updating the business model selecting business services from the virtual SOA torrent (that catches rated cloud services on the internet) and represents the basis for quickly adjustable “real-time” service-oriented enterprise architectures.

Holonic and multi-agent technologies for service and computing oriented manufacturing

This special feature aims at shedding light on new emerging holonic and multi-agent systems operating in a service-and computing oriented manufacturing environment, using the latest ICT technologies such as service-orientation, mobile agents, Web-and Cloud services, virtualization, big data and analytics to name a few. Industrials are seeking for models and solutions that are not only able to provide efficient overall production performance, but also to face reactively a growing set of unpredicted events. The demand for large scale industrial systems running in complex and even chaotic environments requires the consideration of new paradigms and technologies that provide flexibility, robustness, agility and responsiveness. Holonic systems are, actually by definition, targeting challenges that include coping with the heterogeneous nature of manufacturing systems and their on-line interactive nature in combination with competitive pressures. Multi-agent systems is a suitable implementing approach to address these challenge by offering an alternative way to design control systems, based on the decentralization of control functions over distributed autonomous and cooperative entities. Moreover, virtualization of manufacturing execution system workloads offers a set of design and operational advantages to enterprises, the most visible being improved resource utilization and flexibility of the overall solution. At the manufacturing execution system level, cloud computing adoption refers mainly to virtualization of MES workloads. While MES implementations are different and usually depend directly on the actual physical shop floor layout, the general MES functions are aligned with the set of functions defined by ISA-95.03 specification. To achieve high levels of productivity growth and agility to market changes, manufacturers will need to leverage Big Data sets to drive efficiency across the networked enterprise. There is need for a framework allowing the development of manufacturing cyber physical systems that include capabilities for complex event processing and Big Data analytics, which are expected to move the manufacturing domain closer to digital transformation and cloud services within the contextual enterprise. On the other hand, service orientation is emerging at multiple organizational levels in enterprise business, and leverages technology in response to the growing need for greater business integration, flexibility and agility of manufacturing enterprises. Close related to IT infrastructures of Web Services, the Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture represents a technical architecture, a business modelling concept, an integration source and a new way of viewing units of control within the enterprise. Business and process information systems integration and interoperability are feasible by considering the customized product as active controller of the enterprise resources – thus providing consistency between material and informational flows. The areas of Service Oriented Computing and Multi-agent Systems are getting closer, both trying to deal with the same kind of environments formed by loose-coupled, flexible, persistent and distributed tasks. An example is the new approach of Service Oriented Multi-agent Systems (SoMAS).

Empirical insights into the development of a service-oriented enterprise architecture

Organisations use Enterprise Architecture (EA) to reduce organisational complexity, improve communication, align business and information technology (IT), and drive organisational change. Due to the dynamic nature of environmental and organisational factors, EA descriptions need to change over time to keep providing value for its stakeholders. Emerging business and IT trends, such as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), may impact EA frameworks, methodologies, governance and tools. However, the phenomenon of EA evolution is still poorly understood. Using Archer's morphogenetic theory as a foundation, this research conceptualises three analytical phases of EA evolution in organisations, namely conditioning, interaction and elaboration. Based on a case study with a government agency, this paper provides new empirically and theoretically grounded insights into EA evolution, in particular in relation to the introduction of SOA, and describes relevant generative mechanisms affecting EA evolution. By doing so, it builds a foundation to further examine the impact of other IT trends such as mobile or cloud-based solutions on EA evolution. At a practical level, the research delivers a model that can be used to guide professionals to manage EA and continually evolve it.

Software Services Delivered from the Cloud

Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), alongside Radiological Information Systems (RIS) are nowadays widely disseminated, proven useful, hospital information systems components. The “Région Sans Film” (“Filmless Region”) program was launched in 2009 by the French ministry of health in order to help the generalization to all healthcare structures such as hospitals or general physician practices, of PACS, RIS, and archiving of medical images. It is done by means of a mutualized service platform whom building and running has been entrusted to an industrial consortium. This platform implements the latest technologies of medical image processing and of cloud computing. It is built in order to support service-oriented enterprise architecture composed of one main layer of software services. This natively scalable platform is innovative because it is the first one which contains all the materials for the implementation of all services in the cloud. The corresponding SLA are defined in order to be adaptable to the needs of further health structures which could later join the platform by participating in its mutualized purchasing. The goal is not only to share the costs but also to deliver new images sharing services. New business processes/services around sharing of images such as teleradiology or access to the images produced in hospitals to the general practitioners are defined towards the exercise of real filmless radiology.

A View-based Approach to Quality of Service Modelling in Service-oriented Enterprise Systems

Service-oriented enterprise architecture and emerging advanced technologies bring up new problems for enterprise systems engineering or, more exactly, for service-oriented enterprise systems (SoESs) engineering. One of the most important issues is the modelling of quality of services (QoS). The QoS is a complex and multi-sided concept. In various contexts and for different aims it may be defined quite differently. In the context of SoES, QoS has also some specifics that in several aspects differ from the systems implementing service-oriented architecture (SOA) in other contexts, for example, in business-to-consumer or utility-service ones. The paper suggests that it is possible to identify several understandings of QoS reflecting the viewpoints of different SoES stakeholders in a similar way as it is carried out for software products. It also proposes a conceptual view-based framework for QoS modelling in web-based SoES and for balancing different viewpoints.

Integration of Lightweight Semantic Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture within Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems

Integration of Lightweight Semantic Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture within Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems

SOA based Data Architecture for HTML5 Web Applications

Web Services based architectures have already been established as the preferred way to integrate SOA specific components, from the front-end to the back-end business services. One of the key elements of such architecture are data-based or entity services. In this context, SDO standard and SDO related technologies have been confirmed as a possible approach to aggregate such enterprise-wide federation of data services, mainly backed by database servers, but not limited to them. In the followings, we will discuss an architectural purpose based on SDO approach to seamlessly integrate presentation and data services within an enterprise SOA context. This way we will outline the benefits of a common end-to-end data integration strategy. Also, we will try to argue that using HTML5 based clients as front end services in conjunction with SDO data services could be an effective strategy to adopt the mobile computing in the enterprise context.Keywords: SDO-Service Data Objects, Data Access Services, HTML5, Web Services, Cloud Computing, SQL, Data Integration, Mobile Computing1 Introduction: Data Architectures and Enterprise Mobile ComputingAlthough Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) have became a well established and widely acknowledged computing paradigm, its proliferation into the enterprise environment still struggles to resolve some crucial issues as heterogeneous data source integration. In fact, an entire class of SOA services is responsible with the data level and most often these are known as entity services. Their most obvious function is to abstract and then to integrate different data source providers (mostly database servers) across the enterprise, often very distinctive in their internal nature [1:293-323],As such, the Enterprise Data Source Integration [2] process ultimately assumes some kind of global and centralized data model, but in a decoupled, transparent and technologically independent manner. This process could be regarded as a Federative Data Integration strategy that assumes two aspects:* schema integration/denomination: the data services will use a common metadata layer to describe composite data structures, integrity rules and quality rules, that will hide the schema complexities and manage the changes of the data structures in evolution;* actual data integration: the data services will use a common data type system to operate on the data coming from a wide range of heterogeneous data sources. This data type system will provide a common data format layer that will hide the specific data formats and manage their changes in evolution.The Service Data Objects (SDO) based approach to integrate data services could be easily extend-able to standardize servicedata-based communication across the entire SOA stack, as in Figure 1. The traditional web presentation services, heavily based on server-side computing, seem to be a natural fit, but the adoption of the HTML5-based autonomous applications, easy to deploy in mobile computing context, might prove to be a very promising approach.In short, SDO is just another standardized specification aimed to handle data across multiple heterogeneous data source types. Among the most interesting characteristics of the SDO programming model [3], [4] we could mention:* offers a common platform to standardize access across heterogeneous data source types;* offers support for both static and dynamic data types; also SDO data model is grounded on data-graphs which do not consist only into a single data set, but into a cluster of data-sets containing interreferenced data-objects;* offers support to query, update, and to introspect data: SDO data structures are strong typed by separated metadata objects that come along with data-graphs; moreover, the SDO data model defines a special kind of transactional structures, named data object sequences, to describe CRUD changes on interchangeable data objects;* offers clean separation model of application code from data access code;* uses a feature-rich, very adaptive XML based data type format. …

A Model of View-Based Enterprise Business Service Quality Evaluation Framework

The symbiosis between an enterprise architecture and service-oriented architecture results in so-called service-oriented enterprise architecture and brings up new problems for service-oriented enterprise systems engineering. One of the most important is a business service quality definition, specification and evaluation. The paper proposes a formal model of enterprise business service quality evaluation framework to encompass and balance all the viewpoints and perspectives on an enterprise business service quality.

Modeling enterprise service-oriented architectural styles

Modern enterprise consists of complicate business processes and systems. The Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (ESOA) becomes an important architectural style that defines the principles for coping with the complexity of designing and implementing business systems. This paper classifies ESOA styles to six substyles and proposes a generic and abstract model for ESOA styles. The model consists of seven sets: services, service consumers, service data, infrastructure, processes, management and quality attributes. This paper formally defines each set and their relationships in ESOA style model, and discusses the roles of these sets. The model can be applied to specify various ESOA styles. As case studies, the definition of instance of ESOA style is applied to analyze and evaluate a Java component-based ESOA-style architecture and several other ESOA-style architectures. Finally, this paper concludes by comparing the proposed model with related ESOA models.

Studying the Documentation of an API for Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture

All software today is written using application programming interfaces (APIs). We performed a user study of the online documentation of a large and complex API for Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (eSOA), which identified many issues and recommendations for making API documentation easier to use. eSOA is an appropriate testbed because the target users include high-level business experts who do not have significant programming expertise and thus can be classified as “end-user developers.” Our study showed that the participants’ background influenced how they navigated the documentation. Lack of familiarity with business terminology was a barrier for developers without business application experience. Both groups avoided areas of the documentation that had an inconsistent visual design. A new design for the documentation that supports flexible navigation strategies seems to be required to support the wide range of users for eSOA. This paper summarizes our study and provides recommendations for future documentation for APIs.

Early Capacity Testing of an Enterprise Service Bus

An enterprise service-oriented architecture is typically done with a messaging infrastructure called an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). An ESB is a bus which delivers messages from service requesters to service providers. Since it sits between the service requesters and providers, it is not appropriate to use any of the existing capacity planning methodologies for servers, such as modeling, to estimate the capacity of an ESB. There are programs that run on an ESB called mediation modules. Their functionalities vary and depend on how people use the ESB. This creates difficulties for capacity planning and performance evaluation. This article proposes a capacity planning methodology and performance evaluation techniques for ESBs, to be used in the early stages of the system development life cycle. The authors actually run the ESB on a real machine while providing a pseudo-environment around it. In order to simplify setting up the environment we provide ultra-light service requestors and service providers for the ESB under test. They show that the proposed mock environment can be set up with practical hardware resources available at the time of hardware resource assessment. Our experimental results showed that the testing results with our mock environment correspond well with the results in the real environment.

Service-Oriented Enterprise Network Performance Analysis

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the model-driven architecture (MDA) have been recognized as major evolutionary steps in enterprise integration (EI) in service-oriented computing environments. Service-oriented enterprise (SOE) networks (SOEN) are emerging with the significant advances of EI, SOA, and MDA. However, the implementation and optimization of SOEN is still lacking integrated SOA, MDA, and performance analysis and optimization (PAO) methods. This paper introduces an integrated solution of SOA and MDA with a simulation-based three-stage PAO method with stage 1 being an analytic hierarchy process (AHP)-based comprehensive performance calculation for service matching and binding, stage 2 being a simulation-based comprehensive performance evaluation for business process/service composition, and stage 3 being a business process simulation-based performance optimization for SOEN. The SOE architecture, performance analysis framework, performance indicators, and performance operators are discussed. The system uses MDA as the system development philosophy, SOA as the system implementation infrastructure, and the simulation-based PAO methods to analyze and optimize the SOEN performance. A case study of the SOEN illustrates the usage of the integrated solution.

Early Capacity Testing of an Enterprise Service Bus

An enterprise service-oriented architecture is typically done with a messaging infrastructure called an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). An ESB is a bus which delivers messages from service requesters to service providers. Since it sits between the service requesters and providers, it is not appropriate to use any of the existing capacity planning methodologies for servers, such as modeling, to estimate the capacity of an ESB. There are programs that run on an ESB called mediation modules. Their functionalities vary and depend on how people use the ESB. This creates difficulties for capacity planning and performance evaluation. This article proposes a capacity planning methodology and performance evaluation techniques for ESBs, to be used in the early stages of the system development life cycle. The authors actually run the ESB on a real machine while providing a pseudo-environment around it. In order to simplify setting up the environment they provide ultra-light service requestors and service providers for the ESB under test. The authors show that the proposed mock environment can be set up with practical hardware resources available at the time of hardware resource assessment. Their experimental results showed that the testing results with our mock environment correspond well with the results in the real environment.

Event-driven service coordination for business process integration in ubiquitous enterprises

The Internet has improved service-oriented enterprises to allow for real-time enterprises, collaborative process management, and supply chain integration. However, ubiquitous enterprise environments are becoming more and more complicated since a variety of communication devices are emerged and interconnected to the existing enterprise systems. Service-oriented architecture based on web services technology provides a promising platform from which enterprises can coordinate seamlessly with e-Services in heterogeneous information systems. Nevertheless, adopting the architecture for ubiquitous enterprise environments poses some challenges since the wireless/wired systems around the enterprise may dynamically interact in the network and cause a considerable amount of meaningful state changes (called “events”). In this paper, a methodology that uses event-driven service technology and active rule processing is introduced for business process integration of ubiquitous enterprises. The event-driven approach to business process integration can supplement the service-oriented enterprise architecture by facilitating real-time event processing and distributed service coordination. We illustrate the proposed architecture by applying it to an international post-sales service company that sells electronic products.

Review of "Enterprise Service-Oriented Architectures: Concepts, Challenges, Recommendations by James McGovern, Oliver Sims, Ashish Jain, and Mark Little," Springer-Verlag, 2006, $59.95, ISBN: 140203704X

Review of "Enterprise Service-Oriented Architectures: Concepts, Challenges, Recommendations by James McGovern, Oliver Sims, Ashish Jain, and Mark Little," Springer-Verlag, 2006, $59.95, ISBN: 140203704X