Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly
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Selected Topics on Advanced Information Systems Engineering: Editorial Introduction to the Issue 5 of CSIMQ
Get PDFThe 5th issue of the journal on Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling (CSIMQ) presents extended versions of five papers selected from the CAiSE Forum 2015. The forum was part of the 27th edition of international Conference on Advanced Information Systems engineering (CAiSE 2015), which took place in June 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden. Information systems engineering draws its foundation from various interrelated disciplines including, e.g., conceptual modeling, database systems, business process management, requirements engineering, human computer interaction, and enterprise computing to address various practical challenges in development and application of information systems. The guiding subjects of CAiSE 2015 were Creativity, Ability, and Integrity. The CAiSE Forum aimed at presenting and discussing new ideas and tools related to information systems Engineering
Early Validation of Automation Plant Control Software using Simulation Based on Assumption Modeling and Validation Use Cases
Get PDFIn automation plants, technical processes must be conducted in a way that products, substances, or services are produced reliably, with sufficient quality and with minimal strain on resources. A key driver in conducting these processes is the automation plant’s control software, which controls the technical plant components and thereby affects the physical, chemical, and mechanical processes that take place in automation plants. To this end, the control software of an automation plant must adhere to strict process requirements arising from the technical processes, and from the physical plant design. Currently, the validation of the control software often starts late in the engineering process in many cases – once the automation plant is almost completely constructed. However, as widely acknowledged, the later the control software of the automation plant is validated, the higher the effort for correcting revealed defects is, which can lead to serious budget overruns and project delays. In this article we propose an approach that allows the early validation of automation control software against the technical plant processes and assumptions about the physical plant design by means of simulation. We demonstrate the application of our approach on the example of an actual plant project from the automation industry and present it’s technical implementatio
Selected Topics on Enterprise and Automated Systems: Editorial Introduction to Issue 4 of CSIMQ
Get PDFNowadays enterprise and automated systems play an important role in different business, physical, and social contexts. The fourth issue of the journal Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly suggests five challenging studies in this area addressing stakeholder personalities, enterprise actions, business process OR-joint semantics, validation of automated plant control, and safety analysis in complex embedded systems
A Complete and the Most Liberal Semantics for Converging OR Gateways in Sound Processes
Get PDFAlthough the semantics of converging OR gateways (also known as OR-joins) in business processes is far from trivial, they are frequently used. In this paper, we describe a general definition for soundness of processes guaranteeing the absence of deadlocks and no lack of synchronization for each possible OR-join semantics. Then, we derive a criterion — completeness — to evaluate existing approaches of OR-join semantics. As a result, no currently existing OR-join semantics is complete; therefore, there are actually correct processes being not successfully executable. For that, we provide our own approach based on a traditional relation of compiler construction; and we show that this approach is complete and can be called the most liberal possible
The Influence of Syntactic Quality on Pragmatic Quality of Enterprise Process Models
Get PDFAs approaches and tools for process and enterprise modelling are maturing, these techniques are being taken into use on a large scale in an increasing number of organizations. In this paper we report on the use of process modelling in connection to the quality system of Statoil, a large Norwegian oil company, in particular, on the aspects found necessary to be emphasized to achieve the appropriate quality of the models in this organization. Based on the investigation of usage statistics and user feedback on models, we have identified that there are problems in comprehending some of the models. Some of these models has poorer syntactic quality than the average syntactic quality of models of the same size. An experiment with improving syntactic quality on some of these models has given mixed results, and it appears that certain syntactic errors hinder comprehension more than others
A Model-driven Role-based Access Control for SQL Databases
Get PDFNowadays security has become an important aspect in information systems engineering. A mainstream method for information system security is Role-based Access Control (RBAC), which restricts system access to authorised users. While the benefits of RBAC are widely acknowledged, the implementation and administration of RBAC policies remains a human intensive activity, typically postponed until the implementation and maintenance phases of system development. This deferred security engineering approach makes it difficult for security requirements to be accurately captured and for the system’s implementation to be kept aligned with these requirements as the system evolves. In this paper we propose a model-driven approach to manage SQL database access under the RBAC paradigm. The starting point of the approach is an RBAC model captured in SecureUML. This model is automatically translated to Oracle Database views and instead-of triggers code, which implements the security constraints. The approach has been fully instrumented as a prototype and its effectiveness has been validated by means of a case study
Selected Topics on Information Logistics: Editorial Introduction to the Issue 2 of CSIMQ
Get PDFThe content of this issue presents novel four research results in information logistics and knowledge supply represented by the best papers of the 7th International Workshop on Information Logistics (ILOG) which took place in Lund (Sweden) in September 2014 and the paper on the bibliometric analysis of performance modeling. The focus of the ILOG workshop series is on advances in information logistics as a forum for sharing knowledge and experiences between the academic community and practitioners from industry and the public sector. ILOG was initiated in 2005; since its foundation it has been hosted in Sweden (2005, 2014), Germany (2006, 2009), Latvia (2011), Russia (2012) and Poland (2013)
A Formal Method for Conceptual Fit Analysis
Get PDFOne criterion that has received little attention in Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems selection is what we call conceptual fit. The criterion assesses the fit between the conceptual structure of the user requirements and that of a candidate system. In this paper, we evaluate the fit in terms of the existing misfits. We formally define the notion of conceptual misfit and we present a method that determines the conceptual misfits between the user requirements and a set of candidate systems. The method consists of defining a superschema, expressing the user requirements and the implementation of the candidate systems on the basis of that superschema, and the automatic computation of the existing conceptual misfits. The method has been formalized in UML/OCL. We show how our method improves on existing conceptual fit analysis methods for COTS selection
Usability Evaluation of Variability Modeling by means of Common Variability Language
Get PDFCommon Variability Language (CVL) is a recent proposal for OMG's upcoming Variability Modeling standard. CVL models variability in terms of Model Fragments. Usability is a widely-recognized quality criterion essential to warranty the successful use of tools that put these ideas in practice. Facing the need of evaluating the usability of CVL modeling tools, this paper presents a Usability Evaluation of CVL applied to a Modeling Tool for firmware code of Induction Hobs. This evaluation addresses the configuration, scoping and visualization facets. The evaluation involved the end users of the tool whom are engineers of our Induction Hob industrial partner. Effectiveness and efficiency results indicate that model configuration in terms of model fragment substitutions is intuitive enough but both scoping and visualization require improved tool support. Results also enabled us to identify a list of usability problems which may contribute to alleviate scoping and visualization issues in CVL
Contract-Based Design of Embedded Systems Integrating Nominal Behavior and Safety
Get PDFThe distributed design process for safety-critical embedded systems has become an increasingly difficult challenge: Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in vehicles, for instance, participate in many vehicle functions, while each vehicle function, in turn, is spread across several ECUs. Many suppliers participate in systems design and many partial functions are reused from past projects, not always knowing the assumptions at the time of their development. In particular, efficient allocation of safety mechanisms and a sound safety case are difficult tasks for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Contract-based development has gained popularity as an approach for supporting distributed development by explicitly annotating assumptions and guarantees to components, but an integrated process covering specification of nominal behavior and safety has not been described so far. We present such an integrated development approach that encompasses the systematic breakdown of nominal system behavior using contracts, the consistent derivation of safety analysis by interpreting several types of contract violations as a specification for failure modes, and the subsequent integration of safety mechanisms that cover these failure modes through safety contracts. The approach equally fits hardware and software and is therefore applicable on the system level. We demonstrate it by an electric drive example. The extensibility of our approach towards Cyber Physical Systems, which compose themselves at runtime, is briefly outlined at the end of the article