Tirdad Rahmani

Using Expressive Traceability Relationships for Ensuring Consistent Process Model Refinement

Traceability is widely recognized as being crucial for various software development-related applications, including maintenance, quality assurance, and change management. However, most existing approaches do not augment traceability relationships with semantics going beyond natural language descriptions, thus limiting the potential for automatizing relevant activities such as consistency checking or change propagation. Based on a case study being concerned with preserving the consistency of business process model refinements, this paper introduces a generic, technology-independent, yet expressive approach for defining semantically rich traceability relationships. The concept is instantiated and implemented on the basis of the ADOxx modeling platform and the GReQL query language.

Process Refinement Validation and Explanation with Ontology Reasoning

In process engineering, processes can be refined from simple ones to more and more complex ones with decomposition and restructuring of activities. The validation of these refinements and the explanation of invalid refinements are non-trivial tasks. This paper formally defines process refinement validation based on the execution set semantics and presents a suite of refinement reduction techniques and an ontological representation of process refinement to enable reasoning for the validation and explanation of process refinement. Results show that it significantly improves efficiency, quality and productivity of process engineering.

Ontology-Guided Software Engineering in the MOST Workbench

This chapter reports about the software process guidance in ontology-driven software development (ODSD), one of the core ontology-enabled services of the ODSD environments. Ontology-driven software process guidance amounts to a significant step forward in software engineering in general (cf. Fig. 1.1 on p. 3). Its role is to guide developers through a complex software development process by providing information about the consistency of artefacts and about the tasks to be accomplished to reach a particular development goal.

Model-Driven Software Development

Since ontology-driven software development (ODSD) is an integration of ontology technologies and model-driven software development (MDSD), it is necessary to identify and analyse technologies applied in MDSD. We define basic concepts, such as model-driven engineering, metamodelling, model transformation and technological space, and describe the state-of-the-art implementations of these concepts.

Ontology Reasoning for Process Models

Processes in software development generally have two facets. They can be model objects, as described in Sect. 4.2, and also workflows, as described in Sect. 4.3. In this chapter, we analyse typical problems in process modelling and develop ontology reasoning technologies to address them in the ODSD infrastructure. We show how different ontological representation of process models can be constructed for different purposes and how reasoning can be applied to guarantee the consistency of models.

Case Studies for Marrying Ontology and Software Technologies

In this chapter, we conclude Part I with several industrial case studies for motivating consistency-preserving software development. Many of these case studies will be revisited in later chapters, in particular Chaps. 9 and 10. Many of the solutions are based on the scalable reasoning technologies to be introduced in Chap. 5. The rest of this chapter is organised as follows. Section. 4.1 shows which problems companies meet when they want to specify correct and consistent domain models of telecommunication device configurations. Another case study (Sect. 4.2) treats consistency preservation for behavioural models (process models). In business process refinement, the more concrete, refined processes have to conform to the abstract business processes the consultant specified. Showing this form of consistency of refinement is not easy for the process architect, as it turns out. Section 4.3 presents the problem of consistency of product lines, their correct modelling of their variant spaces and the consistent selection of their variants.

Guidance in Business Process Modelling

This chapter shows how process modellers can be supported by guidance. If a telecommunication provider introduces a value-added service, this might involve the establishment of new business processes, whose specification is not trivial. A guidance engine can help a process engineer develop a new business process by stepwise refining, i.e. creating a more concrete version of the process from an abstract version. The guidance engine identifies inconsistencies and proposes possible refinement steps. The topics covered in this chapter range from theoretical foundations of business process refinement over the formalisation of refinement problems in ontologies to implementation issues. The presented solutions were developed in the MOST project.