Software and Systems Modeling最新文献

The servitization of business is moving industry to business models driven by customer demand. Customer satisfaction is connected with financial rewards, forcing companies to invest in their users’ experience. User journeys describe how users maneuver through a service. Today, user journeys are typically modeled graphically, and lack formalization and analysis support. This paper proposes a formalization of user journeys as weighted games between the user and the service provider and a systematic data-driven method to derive these user journey games from system logs, using process mining techniques. As the derived games may contain cycles, we define an algorithm to transform user journeys games with cycles into acyclic weighted games, which can be model checked using to uncover potential challenges in a company’s interactions with its users and derive company strategies to guide users through their journeys. Finally, we propose a user journey sliding-window analysis to detect changes in the user journey over time by model checking a sequence of generated games. Our analysis pipeline has been evaluated on an industrial case study; it revealed design challenges within the studied service and could be used to derive actionable recommendations for improvement.

Nontermination is an unwanted program property for some software systems, and a safety property for other systems. In either case, automated discovery of preconditions for nontermination is of interest. We introduce NtHorn, a fast lightweight nontermination analyser, which is able to deduce non-trivial sufficient conditions for nontermination. Using Constrained Horn Clauses (CHCs) as a vehicle, we show how established techniques for CHC program transformation and abstract interpretation can be exploited for the purpose of nontermination analysis. NtHorn is comparable in effectiveness to the state-of-the-art nontermination analysis tools, as measured on standard competition benchmark suites (consisting of integer manipulating programs), while typically solving problems faster by one order of magnitude.

Abstract

Competence-based approaches have received increased attention, as the demand for qualified people with the right combination of competences establishes itself as a major factor of organizational performance. This paper examines how competences can be incorporated into Enterprise Architecture modeling: (i) we identify a key set of competence-related concepts such as knowledge, skills, and attitudes, (ii) analyze and relate them using a reference ontology (grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology), and (iii) propose a representation strategy for modeling competences and their constituent elements leveraging the ArchiMate language, discussing how the proposed models can fit in enterprise competence-based practices. Our approach is intended to cover two tasks relevant to the combined application of Enterprise Architecture and Competence Modeling: ‘zooming in’ on competences, revealing the relations between competences, knowledge, skills, attitudes and other personal characteristics that matter in organizational performance, and ‘zooming out’ of competences, placing them in the wider context of other personal competences and overall organizational capabilities. An assessment of the representation is offered in the form of an empirical survey.

Abstract

The perception of the value and propriety of modern engineered systems is changing. In addition to their functional and extra-functional properties, nowadays’ systems are also evaluated by their sustainability properties. The next generation of systems will be characterized by an overall elevated sustainability—including their post-life, driven by efficient value retention mechanisms. Current systems engineering practices fall short of supporting these ambitions and need to be revised appropriately. In this paper, we introduce the concept of circular systems engineering, a novel paradigm for systems sustainability, and define two principles to successfully implement it: end-to-end sustainability and bipartite sustainability. We outline typical organizational evolution patterns that lead to the implementation and adoption of circularity principles, and outline key challenges and research opportunities.

The capability to integrate Internet of Things (IoT) technologies into business processes (BPs) has emerged as a transformative paradigm, offering unprecedented opportunities for organisations to enhance their operational efficiency and productivity. Interacting with the physical world and leveraging real-world data to make more informed business decisions is of greatest interest, and the idea of IoT-enhanced BPs promises to automate and improve business activities and permit them to adapt to the physical environment of execution. Nonetheless, combining these two domains is challenging, and it requires new modelling methods that do not increase notation complexity and provide independent execution between the process and the underlying device technology. In this work, we propose FloBP, a model-driven engineering approach separating concerns between the IoT and BPs, providing a structured and systematic approach to modelling and executing IoT-enhanced BPs. Applying the separation of concerns through an interdisciplinary team is needed to ensure that the approach covers all necessary process aspects, including technological and modelling ones. The FloBP approach is based on modelling tools and a microservices architecture to deploy BPMN models, and it facilitates integration with the physical world, providing flexibility to support multiple IoT device technologies and their evolution. A smart canteen scenario describes and evaluates the approach’s feasibility and its possible adoption by various stakeholders. The performed evaluation concludes that the application of FloBP facilitates the modelling and development of IoT-enhanced BPs by sharing and reusing knowledge among IoT and BP experts.

Abstract

The process mining domain is actively supported by techniques and tools addressing the discovery of single-participant business processes. In contrast, approaches for discovering collaboration models out of distributed data stored by multiple interacting participants are lacking. In this context, we propose a novel technique for discovering collaboration models from sets of event logs that include data about participants’ interactions. The technique discovers each participant’s process through already available algorithms introduced by the process mining community. Then, it analyzes the logs to extract information on the exchange of messages to automatically combine the discovered processes into a collaboration model representing the distributed system’s behavior and providing analytics on the interactions. The technique has been implemented in a tool evaluated via several experiments on different application domains.

Enterprise Risk Management involves the process of identification, evaluation, treatment, and communication regarding risks throughout the enterprise. To support the tasks associated with this process, several frameworks and modeling languages have been proposed, such as the Risk and Security Overlay (RSO) of ArchiMate. An ontological investigation of this artifact would reveal its adequacy, capabilities, and limitations w.r.t. the domain of risk and security. Based on that, a language redesign can be proposed as a refinement. Such analysis and redesign have been executed for the risk elements of the RSO grounded in the Common Ontology of Value and Risk. The next step along this line of research is to address the following research problems: What would be the outcome of an ontological analysis of security-related elements of the RSO? That is, can we identify other semantic deficiencies in the RSO through an ontological analysis? Once such an analysis is provided, can we redesign the security elements of the RSO accordingly, in order to produce an improved artifact? Here, with the aid of the Reference Ontology for Security Engineering (ROSE) and the ontological theory of prevention behind it, we address the remaining gap by proceeding with an ontological analysis of the security-related constructs of the RSO. The outcome of this assessment is an ontology-based redesign of the ArchiMate language regarding security modeling. In a nutshell, we report the following contributions: (1) an ontological analysis of the RSO that identifies six limitations concerning security modeling; (2) because of the key role of the notion of prevention in security modeling, the introduction of the ontological theory of prevention in ArchiMate; (3) a well-founded redesign of security elements of ArchiMate; and (4) ontology-based security modeling patterns that are logical consequences of our proposal of redesign due to its underlying ontology of security. As a form of evaluation, we show that our proposal can describe risk treatment options, according to ISO 31000. Finally, besides presenting multiple examples, we proceed with a real-world illustrative application taken from the cybersecurity domain.

Models have long since been used, in different shapes and forms, to understand, communicate about, and (re)shape, the world around us; including many different social, economic, biological, chemical, physical, and digital aspects. This is also the case in the context of enterprise architecture (EA), where we see a wide range of models in many different shapes and forms being used as well. Researchers in EA modeling usually introduce their own lexicon, and perspective of what a model actually is, while accepting (often implicitly) the accompanying ontological commitments. Similarly, practitioners of EA modeling implicitly also commit to (different) ontologies, resulting in models that have an uncertain ontological standing. This is because, for the subject domain of enterprise architecture models (as opposed to the content of such models), no single ontology has gained major traction. As a result, studies into aspects of enterprise architecture models, such as “model quality” and “return on modeling effort”, are fragmented, and cannot readily be compared or combined. This paper proposes a comprehensive applied ontology, specifically geared to enterprise architecture modeling. Ontologies represent structured knowledge about a particular subject domain. It allows for study into, and reasoning about, that subject domain. Our ontology is derived from a theory of modeling, while clarifying concepts such as “enterprise architecture model”, and introduces novel concepts such as “model audience” and “model objective”. Furthermore, the relevant interrelations between these different concepts are identified and defined. The resulting ontology for enterprise architecture models is represented in OntoUML, and shown to be consistent with the foundational ontology for modeling, Unified Foundational Ontology.

Porting software to new target architectures is a common challenge, particularly when dealing with low-level functionality in drivers or OS kernels that interact directly with hardware. Traditionally, adapting code for different hardware platforms has been a manual and error-prone process. However, with the growing demand for dependability and the increasing hardware diversity in systems like the IoT, new software development approaches are essential. This includes rigorous methods for verifying and automatically porting Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) to various devices. Our framework addresses this challenge through formal methods and code generation for embedded RTOS. We demonstrate a hardware-specific part of a kernel model in Event-B, ensuring correctness according to the specification. Since hardware details are only added in late modeling stages, we can reuse most of the model and proofs for multiple targets. In a proof of concept, we refine the generic model for two different architectures, also ensuring safety and liveness properties. We then showcase automatic low-level code generation from the model. Finally, a hardware-independent factorial function model illustrates more potential of our approach.