model-driven business process platforms

8/8/2019 Model-Driven Business Process Platforms

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Model-Dr iven Business Proc ess Plat form s

David S. FrankelLead Standards Architect Model Driven SystemsSAP Labs


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SAP AG and David S Frankel 2005, MDA / 2

Ec onom ic Dr iver : The Innovat ion Ec onom y

Last-generation value proposition

!Applications embody well-validated, accepted businessprocesses

Next-generation business reality! Innovative business model and associated processes define an

enterprises competitive advantage

"Not enough to have a great product

"Must also have a great business model

!Not attractive to simply follow a business process definedelsewhere

!Outsourcing all but core business processes

!Need flexibility in designing and executing innovative businessprocesses

"Core business processes"Value Chains / Value Networks for accessing mission-critical, non-

core processes


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The Tec hn ic a l Pla t fo rm St ac k

Means A

depends on B

A

B

Operating System / VM

Machine

DBMS Network

Systems

Transaction

Systems

Middleware

Level of

Abstraction


4/25 SAP AG and David S Frankel 2005, MDA / 4

Business Proc ess Plat formRais ing t he Abst rac t ion Level of t he Sof t w are Pla t form


Machine

DBMS Network

Systems

Transaction

Systems

BusinessProcess

Platform

Custom businessprocesses & analytics

Application

Platform

TechnicalPlatform

Middleware

Reusable, ExecutableEnterprise Application Services

Composite Applications



Desk t op Applic a t ion Pla t forms and Business Proc ess Pla t form s

MS Office is a desktop applicationplatform

! Has hundreds of components (has had them for 15 years)"Stateless: e.g. a thesaurus component

"Stateful: CRUD operations on office documents and calendars

! Powerful tools for rapid assembly of innovative desktop applications

"Visual basic

"Code wizards

A BPP has an enterprise application platform

!Will have hundreds (or more) components"Stateless, e.g. calculations

"Stateful: CRUD operations on systems of record

! Model-driven tools

"Composite application construction tools"Business Process Management tools

Synergy

!Integrating desktop and enterprise application platforms"Opens up another order of magnitude of possibilities for innovative composite

applications



Com posi t e App: Procure-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, Manufacture-to-Inventory

= Invoke

Supply Chain

Price Look Up

PartsInventory

ProductDescriptions

Product-PriceOptimizer

Manufacturing

Planning & Production

David Burdett, SAP Labs

Sellers Auction

Composite



Model Com pi lers and t he Abst rac t ion Leve l

Application ModelCheckingAccount

minBalance : Float

Account

id : Stringbalance : Float

Customer

id : String

1..*

1

+account

1..*

+customer1

context PreferredChecking inv:

--Cannot go below the minBalance

balance >= minBalance

SavingsAccount

Model Compilation Abstraction Gap

Level of

Abstraction


Machine

DBMS Network

Systems

Transaction

Systems

Middleware

Model Driven Tool s



Model-Driven Tool sEm pow er ing t he Business Proc ess Ex per t (BPX)


Machine

DBMS Network

Systems

Transaction

Systems

BusinessProcessPlatform

TechnicalSoftwarePlatform

Composite

Applications

Abstraction Gap

Composite Application Models

Model Compilation

Business Process Models

Direct Model Execution

Middleware

ApplicationPlatformReusable, Executable

Enterprise Application Services



This Wi l l Not be an Easy Transi t ion

This jump in the platform abstraction level is more difficult than thelast jump (middleware)

! Just as raising the abstraction level for development languages above3GLs is more difficult than the last jump to 3GLs

Crawl, Walk, Run

! Provide business value at every step



As Servic e-Or ient ed BPPs Sc ale Up

Semantically thin specifications reach their limits

! How do you achieve semantic interoperability on top of syntacticinteroperability?

" Do collaborating parties have a common understanding the contract of aservice?

" You cant rely on informal conversations among people" The parties might have different human languages as native tongues

! How do you find suitable services to compose?

" Suitable functional behavior

" Suitable quality of service?

! Same for reusable business processes

Configuration/version/dependency management problems do not go

away! They can even get worse


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A Met adat a-Ric h Envi ronm ent

Need a metadata-rich environment to assisthumans using thebusiness process platform

! Specifying Constraints

"Service message/data types specified as precisely as possible

#

Invariants"Service operations functional contract specified as precisely as possible

# Preconditions and postconditions (more numerous than invariants)

"Using machine-readable, declarative constraint languages

"Weve know how to do this for decades

"Also improves quality

"Also need to learn to specify QoS requirements and capabilities as preciselyas possible

!Inferences identify candidates or flag potential problem combinations"Let the human decide what to do

"Record what the human decides

"Show the next human what the others decided

"

Learn

Abst rac t Bus iness In format ion Mode l: IT V iew po int


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context PreferredChecking inv:

--Cannot go below the minBalance

balance >= minBalance

CheckingAccount

minBalance : Money

Account

id : Stringbalance : Money

Customer

socialSecurityNum : Stringname : Stringaddress : String

1..n

1

+account

1..n

+customer

1

PreferredChecking

{disjoint}

Money

SavingsAccount

interestRate : Decimal

Decimal

Abst rac t Bus iness In fo rmat ion Mode l: IT V iew po intWit h an Invar iant Rule

Invariant rule expressed in UMLs

Object Constraint Language (OCL).

This invariant is independent of

implementation technology

Form al Abst rac t Model of a Business Serv ice


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Form al Abst rac t Model o f a Business Serv iceWit h Pre-c ondi t ions and Post-Condi t ions

FundsXFer

XFerFromChecking(in fromAcct : CheckingAccount, in toAcct : SavingsAccount, in amount : Money)

context FundsXFer::XFerFromChecking (fromAcct : CheckingAccount, toAcct : SavingsAccount amount : Money) : voidpre:

--There must be sufficient funds in the checking account to support the transfer

fromAcct.balance >= amountpre:--The checking account and the savings account must belong to the same customerfromAccount.customer = toAcct.customer

post:

--The balance of the checking account is reduced from its orginal amount by the amount of the transferfromAcct.balance = fromAcct.balance@pre - amountpost:

--The balance of the savings account is increased from its original amount by the amount of the transfertoAcct.balance = toAcct.balance@pre + amount

Signature

Pre/post conditionsIndependent of implementation technology


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C f i t i I i t


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Conf igurat ion Invar iant s

Constraints having to do with a components design-time or deployment-

time configuration parameters! The value of one configuration parameter may constrain the values of others

! Tools can enforce these kinds of constraints, with some limitations

! Tools can also detect collisions among configuration constraints that would

result from specific combinations of components" Sometimes detection is certain and sometimes only suspected

Categories of tool support1

! Constraint checking: Checking whether a particular configuration satisfies the

constraints

! Constraint propagation: Inferring the values of undecided configuration settingsfrom the values of decided settings

! Constraint satisfiability: Checking whether a set of constraints has at least onesolution

1Krzysztof Czarnecki and Chang Hwan Peter Kim, Cardinality-Based Feature Modeling andConstraints: A Progress Report, Proceedings of the First International Conference on SoftwareFactories, OOPSLA 2005.

B i P M d l i N t t i (BPMN)


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Business Proc ess Model ing Not at ion (BPMN)

Example from Introduction to BPMN by Stephen White, IBMAvailable at www.bpmi.org

Col laborat ive Business Proc esses


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Buyer

Shipper

Seller

ChoreographedmessageOrchestration

Col laborat ive Business Proc esses

Metadata Ac ross t he L i fec yc le


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yModel-Dr iven = Met adat a-Driven (Wit h Trac eabi l i t y)

BusinessProcess

Models

CompositeApplication

Models

Platform-Specific

Component

Descriptors

DeploymentMetadata

Service-Level

Agreements

OperationsMetadata

Operational

RDBSchemas

WarehouseStar

Schemas

ServiceDefinitions

Disparate metadata management mechanisms for

! Serialization, XML

! Parsing! Versioning

! APIs

Common Metadata Management Infrastructure

Seek ing Form al Grounding for MDA


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g gTo Im prove Aut omat ed Ass is t ance

MOF/XMI Based

Tooling (e.g. Semantic

Web Eclipse Plug-In)

MOF/XMI Based

Tooling (e.g. Semantic

Web Eclipse Plug-In)

OWL-XMI

Bridge

OWL-XMI

Bridge

Native Semantic Web

Ontology DevelopmentTool

Native Semantic Web

Ontology DevelopmentTool

Generic UML

Modeling Tool

Generic UML

Modeling Tool

XMIOWL Document

XMIOWL Document

Native

OWL Document

Native

OWL Document

UML Model

Using UML Profile

UML Model

Using UML Profile

UML-OWL

Bridge

UML-OWL

Bridge

Generic

UML Model

Generic

UML Model

A B C

Means tool A outputs

B, and B serves as

input to tool C.

ER ModelER Model

ER ToolER Tool

ER-OWL

Bridge

ER-OWL

Bridge

Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM)

Anot her Sc al ing Up Chal lenge


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Anot her Sc al ing Up Chal lenge

How do you build reusable components?

! Component-based development has proven hard in practice

! How do you anticipate requirements of composite applications?

Produc t L ine Pract ic es


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Produc t L ine Prac t ic es

Reusable assets for the product line

Created via core asset development

Individual systems produced viaproduct development

Individual

Product 1

Individual

Product n

Individual

Product 2

Production

PlanThe Sims Water Line

ArchitectureComponents

Domain-Specific

Language(s)

Specialized

Compiler(s)

Apply ing Product L ine Prac t ic es


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Apply ing Product L ine Prac t ic es

Business Process Platform

Asset Bases for Product Lines

Level ofAbstraction

Composite

Applications

Asset Bases for

Product Lines

Composite

Applications

Summary


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Summary

Business process platforms are coming

! Transition will be gradual, but powerful

! Model-driven tools are important for making the platforms usable

Configuration management has to be faced square-on

Metadata-rich environments, formal grounding, and product linepractices needed to manage the complexity

Vigorous competition for a growing pieif we do this right


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model-driven business process platforms

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