CIAO! Enterprise Engineering Network
Header

Program

Program overview – Monday Nov. 9th and Tuesday Nov. 10th 

 

  • Paper 7 – Towards Model-Driven Smart Contract Systems – Code Generation and Improving Expressivity of Smart Contract Modeling
    Authors: Marek Skotnica, Jan Klicpera and Robert Pergl
    Abstract: Public blockchains are increasingly important in industries such as finance, supply-chain management, and governance. In the last two years, there has been increased usage of blockchain for decentralized finance (DeFi). The usage of DeFi mainly consists of cryptocurrency lending and providing liquidity for decentralized exchanges. However, the considerable volume of reports shows large financial losses during network congestion, increasing transaction prices, programming errors, and hacker attacks. One survey suggested that only 40% of people working with DeFi smart contracts understand their source code.
    To address the issues, this paper proposes a model-driven approach to create blockchain smart contracts based on a visual domain-specific language called DasContract. An improved design of the DasContract language is presented, and a code generation process into a blockchain smart contract is described. The proposed approach is demonstrated on a proof-of-concept model of a decentralized mortgage process where the contract is designed, generated, and simulated in a blockchain environment.

 

  • Paper 8 – Personal Space and Territorial Behavior – Sharing a Tabletop in Collaborative Enterprise Modeling
    Authors: Anne Gutschmidt and Henning Dirk Richter
    Abstract: Tabletops represent a convenient digital workspace which serves the purpose of collaborative enterprise modeling well. The participants of a modeling session must, however, share this workspace. In this paper, we will present a study on personal space and territorial behavior in collaborative modeling sessions of six different teams. We found that areas on the tabletop can be identified that are predominantly occupied by certain individuals. This, however, does not automatically imply the existence of personal territories. In fact, we state that personal territories were less represented than a general territory that seemed to belong to the whole team. The absence of an etiquette, e.g., participants usually did not ask for permission before taking away an item situated near a team colleague, underlines this finding and supports our assumption that the participants feel a collective ownership towards the model.

 

  • Paper 9 – Generating REST APIs for Workflow Engines based upon Process and Data Models
    Authors: Dennis Pietruck and Ulrike Steffens 
    Abstract: Workflow engines for automated execution of process models are typically run as backend systems and provide APIs for connecting software components. These connecting components reside on a different level of abstraction, using business- instead of process-specific concepts. To find a remedy, workflow engine APIs are frequently mapped to business-specific APIs specifically developed for this purpose. Modelling a business-specific interface for a workflow engine is a time consuming task.

    In order to reduce development effort, this paper proposes a method to automatically generate domain-specific REST APIs based on both, process models and complementing resource information with only small extra modelling effort, thereby bridging the gap between process and data perspective. We furthermore present an architecture that can be used to implement the proposed method for any workflow engine which provides a REST API. The method promotes the continuous maintenance of process and resource information models. 

    We introduce an initial prototype for the Camunda workflow engine, discuss limitations of the method and give an outlook for future work.

 

  • Paper 10 – Towards Generating Software Systems From Legacy Code: Gathering Associations From Smalltalk Software Modeling
    Authors: Jan Blizničenko and Robert Pergl 
    Abstract: Generating programming code out of models is useful approach towards maintainable software systems, yet legacy systems haveoften no models at all. There are multiple ways to partially automateor aid the process of generating models out of legacy code, yet there isone kind of object-oriented programming languages substantially harderto transform – dynamically typed languages. While statically typed languages enforce programmers to explicitly state data types of various elements, dynamically typed languages do not, presenting significant difficulties when gathering associations between classes. This paper presentsour ongoing effort towards dealing with gathering associations by combining various type inference techniques and tools and how we aim to useUML models as transition form between origin and destination programming languages, producing UML models as useful byproduct. Pharo – Smalltalk-based dynamically typed programming language is used as acase study.

 

  • Paper 11 – Ontological analysis of the evolvability of the firewall rule base
    Author: Geert Haerens 
    Abstract: The TCP/IP based firewall is a notorious non-evolvable system. Changes to the firewall often result in unforeseen side effects, resulting in the unavailability of network resources. The root cause of these issues lies in the order sensitivity of the rule base. It is not only essential to define the correct rule. The rule must be placed at the right location in the rule base. As the rule base becomes more extensive, the problem increases. According to Normalized Systems, this is a Combinatorial Effect.
    This paper studies the ontology of a rule base and its implementation in an actual firewall. Based on this study, we explain why existing firewalls do not prevent evolvability issues. A new ontological model and implementation are proposed, using Normalized Systems, which drastically increases the firewall rule base’s evolvability.

 

  • Paper 12 – Validation of DEMO’s conciseness quality and proposal of improvements to the Process Model
    Authors: Duarte Pinto, David Aveiro, Dulce Pacheco, Bernardo Gouveia and Duarte Gouveia
    Abstract: The Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) comprises a set of models and diagrams to represent an organization. While applying DEMO on a project in a local town council, we saw a need for improvements in the Process Model. Thus, in this paper we propose improvements to the current body of knowledge regarding DEMO’s Process Model representations, fusing the contents of the Process and Cooperation models. Namely we propose a semantically richer Process Diagram and a Transaction Description Table, to achieve a more agile and comprehensive solution to depict the essence of organizational reality. Our approach presents the information in a more straightforward and transparent way, which is easier to understand by collaborators. This project also confirmed the known DEMO conciseness metric of allowing a reduction of over 95% in the complexity of representations. One of our main research contributions is that, even though the information is more accessible and easier to grasp in the diagrams we propose, the processes’ complexity is still present in the description table.

 

  • Paper 13 – Fact Model in DEMO – urban law case and proposal of representation improvements
    Authors: Bernardo Gouveia, David Aveiro, Dulce Pacheco, Duarte Pinto and Duarte Gouveia
    Abstract: This paper reports the findings and insights obtained from the application of a DEMO-based methodology in a collaboration project with a local town council on the subject of the Portuguese Building Code of law. As agreed with the council, one of the goals of this project was to model the universe of discourse of their Urban Appraisal Department. Its activity is subject to very complex legal restrictions encompassing several knowledge domains such as architecture, engineering, etc. The unique circumstances and requirements of the project motivated a novel version of DEMO’s Fact Model. Specifically, 510 surveyed facts, composed of 65 concepts and 445 composing attributes along with their rationale, were specified in two main artifacts presented in this paper: the Fact Diagram and the Fact Description Table. Moreover, 567 combinations between 119 types of application deliverables and 21 types of urban operations – all of which are subject to future changes – were considered as instances of concepts in type-square structures related to application deliverable management. Our main research contributions are the synthesization and expressive power of the improved Fact Model, which allowed us to overcome the complexity and intricacies of legislation and create representations more easily understood and productively discussed by the full range of stakeholders regardless of their technical prowess, experience, or background.

 

  • Paper 14 – Evolving the DEMO Specification Language
    Authors: Mark Mulder and Henderik Proper
    Abstract: This paper reports on the current state of the DEMO Specifi-cation Language (DEMOSL). The Design and Engineering Methodology for Organisations (DEMO) is the principal methodology in EnterpriseEngineering (EE), while the DEMOSL defines the accompanying integrated modelling landscape. DEMO provides a method to produce so-called essential models of or-ganisations, which are highly abstracted ontological models. For the DEMOSL this implies that it should enable the integration of the different models used in organisations when they apply DEMO, while also enabling tool support, visualisation, as well as the exchange of models.

 

  • Paper 15 – Towards Scenario-based Transformation from DEMO to BPMN
    Authors: Marne De Vries and Dominik Bork
    Abstract: The heterogeneity in enterprise design stakeholders and models generally demands for consistent and efficient transformations of enterprise design knowledge between different conceptual modelling language representations. A systematic process and precise model transformation specifications are a prerequisite for realizing such transformations. The Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) approach represents the organization design of an enterprise in four linguistically based, semantically sound aspect models. The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) on the other hand enables more flexibility in creating models and benefits from wide adoption in industry, the execution of processes e.g., by simulations, and the availability of proper tooling. A transformation of DEMO models into BPMN models is thus desirable to enable both, the semantic sound foundation of the DEMO models and the wide adoption and execution possibilities of the de-facto industry standard BPMN. Previous research already developed some principles and practices for transforming DEMO models into BPMN models, based on DEMOSL 3.7. This study focuses on the latest DEMO language specification, DEMOSL 4.5, since we believe that more clarity is required to specify consistent, well-motivated transformation specifications. We present a list of main requirements for developing transformation specifications to transform concepts represented on the coordination structure diagram (CSD) and process structure diagram (PSD) to BPMN concepts in generating BPMN collaboration diagrams. The main contribution of this article is nine transformation scenarios that are validated by multiple demonstration cases.

 

  • Paper 16 – Decentralized Enforcement of DEMO ActionRules Using Blockchain Smart Contracts
    Authors: Marta Aparício, Sérgio Guerreiro and Pedro Sousa
    Abstract: Blockchain technology is a solution to coordinate inter-organizational processes involving untrusted parties. Blockchain is by design an immutable record, so it is non-trivial or even infeasible to update Smart Contract. Concerning the automatic generation of Smart Contracts, Model-Driven Engineering is a software engineering method that uses models with various views and levels of abstraction to achieve different goals in the software development process. Models with a lower level of abstraction can be used to directly generate software production code. This paper sets out to address the hypothesis of using Blockchain Smart Contracts to implement DEMO Action Models. If the hypothesis ends up being admissible, through demonstration and verification, this will mean the reuse of Ontological models in line with the correct implementation of the Smart Contract on Blockchain.

 

  • Doctoral Consortium Session 1 – Software User Acceptance Testing based on Enterprise Ontology principles
    Candidate: René Ceelen
    Abstract: Almost everyone experiences the enormous influence of information technology (IT) on the arrangement of organizations and society. The reliability of IT is highly critical for organizations, and the awareness has grown that IT is a compelling means to achieve higher performance. But lots of IT initiatives fail. Research over a lengthy period did not prove any positive relationship between IT investments and measurable improvements in enterprise performance. Maizlish and Handler[1] mentioned that the root cause is failure to define success criteria at the start of the project. Hoogervorst[2] said that a core reason for strategic failures is the lack of coherence and consistency among the various components of an enterprise. The higher the degree of fit among the various components of the enterprise, the more effectively the enterprise is likely to operate. Standish Group[3] is reporting that the main cause of failure in IT projects is the lack of user involvement. The essence of IT development with its complexity, conformity, changeability, and invisibility[4] makes introducing defects into the software construction a fact. Boehm[5] concluded that the main economic problem from the perspective of software testing is the exponential growth of costs by finding software issues near to the acceptance phase. Summarizing the reasons mentioned above, designing enterprise unity and integration is fundamental and does not come ’incidentally.’ When designing the enterprise, the software engineering aspects and its software acceptance must also be designed using the same models and engineering aspects. Our claim in this research is that when the whole system from enterprise engineering, software engineering, and acceptance engineering is using the same ’language’ less IT initiatives fail and will be used for the right purpose.

 

  • Doctoral Consortium Session 2 – Applying DEMO To Electronic Prescribing and Regulatory Compliance Within The English NHS: A Case Study
    Candidate: Desmond Omadoye
    Abstract: Healthcare systems in most developed nations are dynamic, complex, and heavily regulated because of the nature of its activities and the implication for patient safety. In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS), a publicly funded health organisation is one such heavily regulated system, paid for by tax payers contributions and designed to ensure care is free and should be provided at the point of need. Since the 1990’s there has been an increase in the regulatory requirements of the English NHS arising from systemic institutional failures and medication error, which have led to the adverse effects for patients. Healthcare organisations thus have a duty of care and a legal obligation towards patients, while patients on the other hand have a legitimate expectation that an agreement reached between the patient and the healthcare organisation in the pursuit of a course of treatment will progress safely and achieve the agreed outcome. This thesis investigates how design and engineering methodology for organisation (DEMO) can be applied to electronic prescribing within the English NHS for the purpose of reducing the prevalent medication error as widely reported during prescribing and administration and thus assist in medication compliance.

 

Program overview Monday October 19th

Papers – titles and abstracts

  • Paper 5 – Integrating Benefits Dependency Network in ArchiMate
    Authors: Fernando Antunes and Sérgio Guerreiro
    Abstract: A significant number of IT projects fail to deliver the desired outcomes. Failure causes are (i) the dominance of black-box financial management approaches offering poor indicators, e.g., return-on-investment or cost reduction, or (ii) not identifying the real business benefits provided by the value that can be generated by an IT investment. The Benefits Dependency Network (BDN) provides a solution to link the essential IT capabilities with the business changes necessary to deliver those benefits with the overall investment objectives and required benefits. Alignment between Information Technologies (IT) investments and business objectives is recurrently referred in literature as a paramount task owning direct impact in the organization’s profit. Enterprise Architecture (EA) plays an important role in describing the dependencies between an IT migration road map and the business counterparts, therefore, facilitating stakeholder’s decisions. This paper proposes a new ArchiMate viewpoint to model the understanding, designing and managing of the business benefits of an IT investment. The solution is demonstrated on an industrial case that provides the ground to argue the integration of BDN in ArchiMate, in specific the relationships between the different architectural layers with appropriate level of abstraction to support decision making process.

 

  • Paper 6 – On Domain Conceptualisation
    Authors: Henderik A. Proper and Giancarlo Guizzardi
    Abstract: The growing role of models across the life-cycle of enterprises, and their information and software systems, fuels the need for a more fundamental reflection on the foundations of modelling.
    Two of the core theories of the discipline of enterprise engineering (\Stress{Factual Information} (FI) theory and the \Stress{Model Universe} (MU) theory) aim at contributing to these foundations.
    The latest versions of the FI- and MU-theories have recently been published. Offering an analysis and criticism to them enables us to continue the important debate on the semiotic, ontological, and general philosophical foundations of domain modelling and enterprise modelling in particular.
    A core concept in the field of domain modelling is the conceptualisation of the domain.
    In this paper, we specifically focus on the development of a deeper understanding of domain conceptualisations, while reflecting on the way this notion is positioned in the FI- and MU-theories.

Forum Invited Talk

  • Title – The Evolution of DEMO
    Speaker: Jan Dietz
    Authors: Jan Dietz and Hans Mulder
    Abstract: In the evolution of Design and Engineering Methodology for Organisations (DEMO) discussions and evaluations have fuelled the further development of the methodology. In this paper we present and discuss the major improvements of DEMO-4 in comparison with the previous versions. The paper contains two critiques that were written after the publication of the DEMO-4, and contains a section for online discussion of the theoretical importance and the practical impact of DEMO-4 during the EEWC2020.

 

 

Program overview Monday September 28th

Papers – titles and abstracts

  • Paper 1 – Modeling the Emergence of Value and Risk in Game Theoretical Approaches
    Authors: Glenda Amaral, Daniele Porello and Giancarlo Guizzardi
    Abstract: Game theory is largely about interactions of agents whose decisions affect each other. The combination of agents’ actions corresponds to outcomes, which may impact agents’ goals, either positively or negatively. The analysis of the probable consequences and expected utilities of all possible outcomes is fundamental to support agents when deciding whether to engage in a certain strategy. In this paper, we move in this direction by initiating the investigation of the ontological foundation of the emergence of value and risk from outcomes in game theoretical approaches. In order to understand the influence of these forces over outcomes, a precise and rigorous conceptualization, based on foundational ontologies, is needed. To this aim, we present and discuss here a preliminary ontological modeling of basic concepts of game theory, as well as the relation to value, risk and outcomes.

 

  • Paper 2 – An enterprise-engineering based approach to develop institutional capacity
    Authors: Andreas De Boer and Marne De Vries
    Abstract: Significant progress has been made in the South-African early childhood and Grade R spheres. However, South-Africa has a long way to go to meet the needs of majority of its children. Institutional capacity (IC) refers to the administrative and managerial aspects of an Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC). Failure to build this capacity impacts the quality of services delivered to the most vulnerable children in our society. The purpose of this article is to extract knowledge from the institutional capacity knowledge area, as well as the enterprise engineering body-of-knowledge as a baseline for developing an institutional capacity development approach (ICDA) for early childhood development centers. The ICDA should be be useful to South-African ECD administrators, if they intend to develop institutional capacity, leading to the improvement in quality of services delivered. ICDA is the main contribution of this article. For future research, we suggest that ICDA is demonstrated at a real-world ECDC in South Africa.

 

  • Paper 3 – Testing the concept of the RUN-time adaptive enterprise – Combining Organization and IT agnostic enterprise models with Organization Implementation Variables and Low Code Technology
    Authors: Martin Op T Land, Marien Krouwel and Steven Gort
    Abstract: Our research program aims at finding and testing methods that allow organizations to become more RUN-time adaptive enterprises, with a near-zero time-to-market for new or changed products and services. Indeed, to thrive in increasingly more disruptive environments, an enterprise’s IT time-to-market should sustainably no longer be on the critical path of business time-to-market. Earlier research suggests that key elements for such a method are (a) an organization and IT agnostic way of modeling products and services and its collaboration network, using DEMO, (b) a universal transaction pattern of coordination and production acts as atoms for building business processes, and (c) designing the aspects in which organizational adaptivity is desired, in terms of Organization Implementation Variables (OIVs). To test the combined application of these elements in practice, ICTU and Capgemini conducted a Proof of Concept on Social Housing during 5 weeks. The resulting application, built with the Mendix low code platform, showed the ability to reorganize – in this case: reconfiguring accountabilities inside and across organizations – at run-time, without the need to change software. Future research should clarify to what extent such intrinsic application adaptivity can be increased, e.g., by (a) embedding the use of APIs, (b) automated support of all coordination acts in the universal transaction pattern, and (c) parametrizing more OIVs.

 

  • Paper 4 – Enterprise Coherence Metrics in Enterprise Decision Making
    Authors: Joost Bekel and Roel Wagter
    Abstract: Many organizations still struggle to translate strategy into design. Main reason for strategic failure is lack of coherence and consistency. Enterprise Architecture (EA) can be regarded as a key function to facilitate strategy execu-tion, thus coherence. General Enterprise Architecting defines enterprise coherence as ‘the extent to which all relevant aspects of an enterprise are connected, in such a way that these connections facilitate an enterprise obtaining/meeting its desired results’. With respect to the value that EA represents to an organization, there is a growing need to demonstrate its importance and usefulness, also in quantitative terms. Expressing EA value quantitatively is hard. Enterprise coherence is currently not measured within enterprises. However, graphs can be regarded as a way to understanding systems on a quantitative and predictive basis. For enterprise coherence calculation, a graph of interrelated directions and decisions, which we will call the enterprise guidance graph (EGG), is therefore introduced. Based on EGG we envision an Enterprise Coherence Index (EC-index) that takes decisions and guiding statements as input, and gives enterprise coherence as output. We took inspiration from networks derived from natural systems and their proposed metrics, and apply them to the organizations. The research encompasses an experiment within an international financial company with circa 3000 employees in which an EGG is constructed, and coherence metrics are calculated and analyzed. Feedback from Subject Matter Experts is gathered. We conclude that an instrument for showing and measuring coherence is valued, and that support is given for quantification through the use of graphs, with enterprise coherence being one of the relevant metrics. This research aims to aid in improving structured enterprise engineering and measurable value from EA.