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Towards a Model-Driven and Role-Configurable Methodology Suite for Enterprise and Service-Oriented Interoperability

IESA 2010Doctoral Symposium

Brian Elvesæter1, 2 and Arne-Jørgen Berre1

1 SINTEF ICT, P. O. Box 124 Blindern, N-0314 Oslo, Norway{brian.elvesater, arne.j.berre}@sintef.no

2 University of Oslo, Department of Informatics, P. O. Box 1080 Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway

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Presentation Outline

Background Problem Description Research Proposal Research Method Expected Contributions Questions

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Background

Involved in the previous FP6 projects ATHENA and INTEROP focusing on interoperability research. Interoperability for enterprise

applications and software Model Driven Architecture (MDA) Service-oriented architecture (SOA)

PhD research work carried out in the context of the SHAPE project MDA methodology for SOA SOA modelling language Industrial case study http://www.shape-project.eu/

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Problem Description

Modelling is now an integrated part of software engineering approaches.

SOA is a dominating design principle of modern IT systems. Design and implementation of SOA should benefit from advances in

the model-driven engineering (MDE) approach. Allowing specification of both a business and technical view of SOA. Supporting business to IT model refinement. Mapping to different technology platforms .

In this context some main challenges are: How to map the flow of business logic and data to services providing the

needed functionality in a platform-independent way? How to integrate the various models describing goals, processes,

requirements, data and services in a common model architecture that can also be adapted to individual projects and their implementation environment?

How to manage such models and provide links between them that can be used for service composition or managing changes?

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Research Proposal Designing SOAs at the enterprise level

involves several different stakeholders within the enterprise.

The problem of enterprise interoperability is complex and requires support from many methods. We postulate that it is impossible to provide

one universal approach and methodology. We therefore propose to define a knowledge

base of reusable method components each of them addressing one or more specific interoperability problems that can be configured into a full methodology.

The PhD research will define the architecture and implement a prototype solution, focusing particularly on business and IT alignment. Concepts and languages to describe

composition (assembly) and role-configuration of methodologies.

Method components for supporting various roles involved in enterprise SOA interoperability.

Prototype tools to validate, illustrate and test the concepts, languages, methods and services.

Use of and propose and implement extensions to the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF).

References http://www.shape-project.eu/ http://www.soaml.org/ http://www.eclipse.org/epf/

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Research Method State-of-the-art studies in national and

European research projects Identify and describe relevant technologies,

techniques and mechanisms. The main PhD work will follow an iterative

research cycle applied to a real-life case study. Industry use case scenarios focusing on tool-

supported methodology for IT architectures and enterprise interoperability will be established related to Integration Operations (IO).

Production and Process Optimization (PPO) use case scenario.

Integrated Operations (IO) The Norwegian Oil Industry Association (OLF)

has defined the term Integrated Operations (IO) as “real time data onshore from offshore fields and new integrated work processes”.

The technical implication from IO is an increased exchange of information across geographical and organizational boundaries, internally and externally.

New, interoperable IT solutions and standards are needed for this information exchange to be successful.

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Expected Contributions

The PhD work will continue to build on the research results from the ATHENA Interoperability Framework and the SHAPE Methodology for SOA. The expected contributions of the PhD research are: to provide guidelines and method components for how MDE

principles and MDA technologies should be applied to develop interoperable service-oriented systems;

to provide a set of method components covering the SOA development lifecycle that lets you assemble and configure situational methodologies, with special focus on integration and interoperability issues, and alignment of business models and IT models; and

to provide an open-source prototype implementation of a customizable and role-configurable method engineering platform.

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Questions?