Ulrich Winkler

Model-Driven Framework for Business Continuity Management

Nearly one in five businesses suffer a major disruption every year. These disruptions often affect thousands of customers and consumers. A disruption could result in financial and legal losses, as well as damage to reputation. For example, on 4 January 2010, SALES FORCE, a company offering online enterprise support services, experienced an outage for over an hour, affecting 68,000 customers [6]. Another example is PayPal, a service for processing online payments. PayPal was down for 4.5 hours worldwide on 4 August 2009; PayPal usually processes 2,000 USD per second for its customers.

BOB the builder: a fast and friendly model-to-petrinet transformer

Petri-Nets are a very expressive modelling concept. However, modelling industrial problems using Petri-Nets is not a trivial task as Petri-Nets do not provide support for constructing large models. Modelling a complete business process, for example, with several activities and associated resources using Petri-Nets becomes a complex task. Model transformations are a promising technology to address this problem. In this paper we present an extended Petri-Net model that supports modelling industrial problems via model transformations. We also introduce a transformation framework that allows to graphically define model transformations by templates.

Business driven BCM SLA translation for service oriented systems

A Business Continuity Management (BCM) Impact Analysis derives business-level BCM SLAs which need to be translated at IT-level, infrastructure-level and facility-level services. However, translation of SLAs across a service oriented system is not an easy task. In this patent we present a new Petri-Net based procedure to define and to translate BCM SLAs for service oriented systems. As a result of our approach we are able to introduce a BCM SLA classification schema. We will describe our approach in the context of a use-case.

Models and Methodology for Automated Business Continuity Analysis

Businesses and enterprises depend more than ever on IT service systems. Business processes are vulnerable to disruptions caused by failures in IT systems. Business Continuity Management addresses this problem and tries to identify and determine strategies and responses to overcome or mitigate possible business disruptions. In this paper we introduce a novel Business Continuity Model for IT systems and a Statistical Process Control based approach to perform an automated Business Impact Analysis.

Model-driven engineering in practice: integrated performance decision support for process-centric business impact analysis

Modern businesses and business processes depend on an increasingly interconnected set of resources, which can be affected by external and internal factors at any time. Threats like natural disasters, terrorism, or even power blackouts potentially cause disruptions in an organisations resource infrastructure which in turn negatively impacts the performance of dependent business processes. In order to assist business analysts dealing with this ever increasing complexity of interdependent business structures a model-driven workbench named Model-Driven Business Impact Analysis (MDBIA) has been developed with the purpose of predicting consequences on the business process level for an organisation in case of disruptions. An already existing Model-Driven Performance Engineering (MDPE) workbench, which originally provided process-centric performance decision support, has been adapted and extended to meet the additional requirements of business impact analysis. The fundamental concepts of the resulting MDBIA workbench, which include the introduction of the applied key models and transformation chain, are presented and evaluated in this paper.

ERP b3: business continuity service level agreement translation and optimisation

ERP B3 is a SLA@SOI framework based solution for Service Level Agreements driven, on demand and dynamic provisioned business applications. We extended the ERP B3 framework with a process-centric Business Continuity Analysis toolkit. In this demo we want to show how our toolkit helps Business Continuity Manager (a) to estimate business impact of failed IT services (b) to validate SLAs and verify if selected SLAs are appropriated and (c) to determine an optimal set of service-level SLAs to minimise business disruptions.

SLA translations with a model-driven business impact analyses framework

A Business Continuity Management (BCM) Impact Analysis derives business-level BCM Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which need to be translated at service-level, infrastructure-level and facility-level. However, translation and optimization of SLAs across a large and distributed serviceoriented system is not an easy task. In this demo we will present our Stochastic-Petri-Net based approach to automatically translate and optimize BCM SLAs for large service oriented systems. We will do the demo in the context of a business use-case.