Souvik Barat

Toward overcoming accidental complexity in organisational decision-making

This paper takes a practitioners perspective on the problem of organisational decision-making. Industry practice follows a refinement based iterative method for organizational decision-making. However, existing enterprise modelling tools are not complete with respect to the needs of organizational decision-making. As a result, today, a decision maker is forced to use a chain of non-interoperable tools supporting paradigmatically diverse modelling languages with the onus of their co-ordinated use lying entirely on the decision maker. This paper argues the case for a model-based approach to overcome this accidental complexity. A bridge meta-model, specifying relationships across models created by individual tools, ensures integration and a method, describing what should be done when and how, and ensures better tool integration. Validation of the proposed solution using a case study is presented with current limitations and possible means of overcoming them outlined.

A Simulation-based Aid for Organisational Decision-making

Effective decision-making of modern organisation often requires deep understanding of various aspects of organisation such as organisational goals, organisational structure, business-as-usual operational processes. The large size of the organisation, its socio-technical characteristics, and fast business dynamics make this endeavor challenging. Industry practice relies on human experts for comprehending various aspects of organisation thus making organisational decision-making a time-, effort- and intellectually-intensive endeavor. This paper proposes a model-based simulation approach to organisational decision-making. We illustrate how this is applied to a real life problem from software service industry.

Enterprise Modeling as a Decision Making Aid: A Systematic Mapping Study

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art enterprise modelling (EM) techniques with an objective to support decision-making. It describes a Systematic Mapping Study based on 173 publications chosen from 7622 EM related publications collated using five digital libraries: Scopus, ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect and Web of Science. The study identifies 29 EM techniques and critically analyses them for suitability as an effective aid to complex dynamic decision-making vis-a-vis a set of characteristics. The paper also reports EM publications trends and the challenges aimed at providing effective aids to complex dynamic decision making.

Actor Monitors for Adaptive Behaviour

Within a configuration of actors, each of which publishes a history, a monitor is an independent actor that triggers an action based on patterns occurring in the actor histories. This paper defines a model of monitors using features of an actor language called ESL including time, static types and higher-order functions. The model is implemented and evaluated in the context of a simple case study based on competitive bidding.

A Model based Realisation of Actor Model to Conceptualise an Aid for Complex Dynamic Decision-making

Effective decision-making of modern organisation requires deep understanding of various aspects of organisation such as its goals, structure, business-as-usual operational processes etc. The large size and complex structure of organisations, socio-technical characteristics, and fast business dynamics make this decision-making a challenging endeavour. The state-of-practice of decision-making that relies heavily on human experts is often reported as ineffective, imprecise and lacking in agility. This paper evaluates a set of candidate technologies and makes a case for using actor based simulation techniques as an aid for complex dynamic decision-making. The approach is justified by enumeration of basic requirements of complex dynamic decision-making and the conducting a suitability of analysis of state-of-the-art enterprise modelling techniques. The research contributes a conceptual meta-model that represents necessary aspects of organisation for complex dynamic decision-making together with a realisation in terms of a meta model that extends Actor model of computation. The proposed approach is illustrated using a real life case study from business process outsourcing industry

A component abstraction for business processes

With continued increase in business dynamics, it is becoming increasingly harder to deliver purpose-specific business system in the ever-shrinking window of opportunity. As business systems for the same intent tend to be similar but never the same, they have considerable overlap with well-defined differences. Software product line engineering techniques attempt to address this problem for software artefacts. Separation of business process concerns from application functionality, as advocated in process centric application development, demands solution on similar lines for business processes too. To this effect, we propose an abstraction for business processes that addresses composition, variability and resolution in a unified manner. We present the abstraction, its model-based realisation, and illustration with an example.

A safety criterion for reusing a business process in the desired integrated

Enterprises are witnessing increased thrust on collaboration and integration of existing applications to provide value-added services across the entire supply chain. Traditionally, enterprise applications are built as point solutions with context-specific built-in assumptions hard-coded in their implementation. Enterprise application integration discipline deals with the mechanism for integrating such isolated applications into a consistent whole. By modeling an enterprise application as a 3-tuple comprising of its data, service and process models, EAI problem can be visualized as view-integration problem over data, service and process models. This paper presents a pragmatic approach to analyze the process model of an existing application with respect the process model of desired application to identify and mitigate the conflicts in the built-in assumptions of two process models. A formal technique to analyze the process model at various levels of granularities and a set of operators to mitigate the conflicts are proposed. The proposed approach maximizes the reusability in the context of EAI

ESL: An Actor-Based Platform for Developing Emergent Behaviour Organisation Simulations

Specification and analysis of complex systems can be approached top-down or bottom-up [11]. A top-down approach conceptualises a system using a global state and the behaviour represented using an aggregated macro-behaviour of the system elements. For example, the System Dynamics (SD) model [8] uses the concepts of stocks, flows, feedback loops and time delays. A top-down approach considers a reductionist view [10] to understand system using the mathematical rigour from operational research, optimization theory, and sophisticated AI algorithms. A bottom-up approach, in contrast, considers the micro-behaviour of individual elements and their interactions. Conceptually, the bottom-up approach relies on emergentism [9] as advocated in actor model of computation [1], and agent-based systems [6].

Conducting Systematic Literature Reviews and Systematic Mapping Studies

Context: An essential part of conducting software engineering (SE) research is the ability to identify extant research on tools, technologies, concepts and methods in order to evaluate and make rational and scientific decisions. The domain from which such knowledge is extracted is typically existing research literature found in journals, conference proceedings, books and gray literature. Empirical approaches that include various systematic review (SR) methodologies such as systematic literature review (SLR) and systematic mapping study (SMS) are found to be effective in this context. They adopt rigorous planning, follow repeatable and well-defined processes, and produce unbiased and evidence-based outcomes. Despite these significant benefits, the general trend on using these systematic review (SR) methodologies is not encouraging in SE research. The primary reasons emerging are twofold - a) SR methodologies are largely cited as time-consuming activities and b) lack of guidance to conduct systematic reviews. This tutorial discusses these concerns and describes an effective way of using SR methodologies for SE research. Objectives: Attendees will be introduced to the key concepts, methods and processes for conducting systematic literature reviews (SLR) and systematic mapping studies (SMS). The benefits, limitations, guidelines for using SR methodologies in an effective manner will discussed in the session. Attendees will be guided on the appropriate formulation of a research question and sub questions; the development of a review protocol such as inclusion criteria, exclusion criteria, quality criteria and classification structures; and execution of review protocol using digital libraries and syntheses of review data. A web based software tool1, for supporting the systematic literature review process will be demonstrated and attendees will get the opportunity to use the tool to conduct the review to help in identification of relevant research and extraction and synthesis of data. Method: We will use a blend of information presentation, interactive hands-on session and knowledge sharing session. The presentation will introduce the key concepts, benefits, limitations and how to overcome the limitations; hands on session will illustrate a review process with a case study, and finally the knowledge sharing session will discuss the experiences, best practices and the lesson learnt.

A Component Abstraction for Business Processes

With continued increase in business dynamics, it is becoming increasingly harder to deliver purpose-specific business system in the ever-shrinking window of opportunity. As business systems for the same intent tend to be similar but never the same, they have considerable overlap with well-defined differences. Software product line engineering techniques attempt to address this problem for software artifacts. Separation of business process concerns from application functionality, as advocated in process centric application development, demands solution on similar lines for business processes too. To this effect, we propose an abstraction for business processes that addresses composition, variability and resolution in a unified manner. We present the abstraction, its model-based realization, and illustration with an example.