Retaining business value in a legacy commercial enterprise resource planning system today often entails more than just maintaining the software to preserve existing functionality. This type of system tends to represent a significant capital investment that may not be easily scrapped, replaced, or re-engineered without considerable expense. A legacy system may need to be frequently extended to impart new behavior as stakeholder business goals and technical requirements evolve. Legacy ERP systems are growing in prevalence and are both expensive to maintain and risky to evolve. Humans are the driving factor behind the expense, from the engineering costs associated with evolving these types of systems to the labor costs required to operate the result. Autonomic computing is one approach that addresses these challenges by imparting self-adaptive behavior into the evolved system. The contribution of this dissertation aims to add to the body of knowledge in software engineering some insight and best practices for development approaches that are normally hidden from academia by the competitive nature of the retail industry. We present a formal architectural pattern that describes an asynchronous, low-complexity, and autonomic approach. We validate the pattern with two real-world commercial case studies and a reengineering simulation to demonstrate that the pattern is repeatable and agnostic with respect to the operating system, programming language, and communication protocols. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Designing and developing enterprise applications is a complex and resource intensive process, as it often must address thousands of requirements. At the same time, the software architecture of most enterprise applications at their core have many features and structures in common. Designers from different teams do not normally share design elements because of the competitive and proprietary nature of development, and enterprise applications design and development teams end up re-inventing the wheel when tackling a new product. My objective is to formulate new design patterns for enterprise application architectures that assist software architects with reusable solutions to improve design quality and productivity. I achieve this by presenting seven patterns, each providing a solution to a specific challenge or a problem that is common to many enterprise applications. The Business Object Pattern provides a generic approach to design extensible Business Objects and their frameworks for enterprise applications. The pattern covers a number of concepts, including the Dynamic business object, the Static business object, constraints for validity, editability, and attribute visibility, as well as the mechanisms for workflow. The Business Object Life Cycle Pattern introduces the concept of stages which comprise a business object’s life cycle, and their relation to the business object’s integrity during that life cycle. The Simple Change History Pattern provides a concept of enforcing record keeping of the owner and date of the last change performed on a given business data object. The Business Data Object Versioning Pattern offers a solution by introducing a new version of a given business data object which allows for preservation of the original data. The Change History Record Pattern defines a solution for cases when there is a need to capture detailed information about the changes performed on a given business object, such as who made the changes, when, and what changes were made. The Permission Based Granular Access Control Pattern offers a basic approach for access control to objects and their attributes. Finally, the Money Object Pattern offers a language neutral approach to internationalization and globalization of business applications which require multi-currency capability. It is hoped that applying these patterns will provide many advantages, ranging from quicker delivery times to a more reliable software, and ultimately help achieve a systematic approach to designing and building complex enterprise applications. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

In order to remain competitive, the integration of their information systems is an imperative for many large organisations. Applications that originally have been developed independently are now required to interoperate to support new or different functions of the enterprise. Although the mechanisms for application interoperation exist provided by the technology, due to the sheer number and complexity of the running systems, integration solutions � centralised or distributed�appropriate at the local level do not translate successfully to the whole enterprise. Centralised integration approaches often satisfy only some of the integration requirements, they are very expensive, and are fraught with danger since they imply an �all or nothing� approach. Distributed approaches, on the other hand, suffer from complexity and scalability problems as the number of system interfaces to be implemented and the number of execution-time invocations grows with the number of component applications. This dissertation makes a contribution to the field of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) within the framework of distributed systems technology. Based on real-life case studies experience, we present here a federated approach that controls the size and complexity of the integration effort by reusing existing systems as much as possible and reducing the number of interacting applications. Only selected local elements are exposed to the organisational milieu, and a consistent supporting infrastructure is provided to make systems interactions possible. Our approach provides a flexible and scalable strategy to enterprise integration, avoiding the shortcomings of traditional approaches. We respect existing organisational structures, and demonstrate how appropriate federation infrastructure and protocols enable the interoperation of existing systems. The three main facets of enterprise knowledge are systematically incorporated into the integration effort: a) by the use of domain ontologies to support data integration; b) by the development of a methodology to include business rules; and c) by the development of FEW, a federated workflow model to implement the business processes of the organisation.

Manufacturing today has become a matter of the effective and efficient application of information technology and knowledge engineering. Manufacturing firms success depends to a great extent on information technology, which emphasizes the integration of the information systems used by a manufacturing enterprise. This integration is also called enterprise application integration (here the term application means information systems or software systems). The methodology for enterprise application integration, in particular enterprise application integration automation, has been studied for at least a decade; however, no satisfactory solution has been found. Enterprise application integration is becoming even more difficult due to the explosive growth of various information systems as a result of ever increasing competition in the software market. This thesis aims to provide a novel solution to enterprise application integration. The semantic data model concept that evolved in database technology is revisited and applied to enterprise application integration. This has led to two novel ideas developed in this thesis. First, an ontology of an enterprise with five levels (following the data abstraction: generalization/specialization) is proposed and represented using unified modeling language. Second, both the ontology for the enterprise functions and the ontology for the enterprise applications are modeled to allow automatic processing of information back and forth between these two domains. The approach with these novel ideas is called the enterprise semantic model approach. The thesis presents a detailed description of the enterprise semantic model approach, including the fundamental rationale behind the enterprise semantic model, the ontology of enterprises with levels, and a systematic way towards the construction of a particular enterprise semantic model for a company. A case study is provided to illustrate how the approach works and to show the high potential of solving the existing problems within enterprise application integration.

Manufacturing today has become a matter of the effective and efficient application of information technology and knowledge engineering. Manufacturing firms success depends to a great extent on information technology, which emphasizes the integration of the information systems used by a manufacturing enterprise. This integration is also called enterprise application integration (here the term application means information systems or software systems). The methodology for enterprise application integration, in particular enterprise application integration automation, has been studied for at least a decade; however, no satisfactory solution has been found. Enterprise application integration is becoming even more difficult due to the explosive growth of various information systems as a result of ever increasing competition in the software market. This thesis aims to provide a novel solution to enterprise application integration. The semantic data model concept that evolved in database technology is revisited and applied to enterprise application integration. This has led to two novel ideas developed in this thesis. First, an ontology of an enterprise with five levels (following the data abstraction: generalization/specialization) is proposed and represented using unified modeling language. Second, both the ontology for the enterprise functions and the ontology for the enterprise applications are modeled to allow automatic processing of information back and forth between these two domains. The approach with these novel ideas is called the enterprise semantic model approach. The thesis presents a detailed description of the enterprise semantic model approach, including the fundamental rationale behind the enterprise semantic model, the ontology of enterprises with levels, and a systematic way towards the construction of a particular enterprise semantic model for a company. A case study is provided to illustrate how the approach works and to show the high potential of solving the existing problems within enterprise application integration.

Since the advent of RPC Stub Generator, software tools that translate a high level specification into executable programs have been instrumental in facilitating the development of distributed software systems. Developers write programs at a high level abstraction with high readability and reduced initial development cost. However, existing approaches to building code generation tools for such systems have difficulties evolving these tools to meet challenges of new standards, new platforms and languages, or changing product scopes, resulting in generator tools with limited lifespan. The difficulties in evolving generator tools can be characterized as a combination of three challenges that appear inherently difficult to solve simultaneously: the abstraction mapping challenge translating a high-level abstraction into a low-level implementation), the interoperable heterogeneity challenge stemming from multiple input and output formats, and the flexible customization challenge to extend base functionality for evolution or new applications. The Clearwater approach to code generation uses XML-based technologies and software tools to resolve these three challenges with three important code generation features: specification extensibility, whereby an existing specification format can accommodate extensions or variations at low cost; generator pliability, which allows the generator to operator on an extensible specification and/or support multiple and new platforms; and flexible customization, which allows an application developer to make controlled changes to the output of a code generator to support application-specific goals. The presentation will outline the Clearwater approach and apply it to meet the above three challenges in two domain areas. The first area is information flow applications (e.g., multimedia streaming and event processing), a horizontal domain in which the ISG code generator creates QoS-customized communication code using the Infopipe abstraction and specification language. The second area is enterprise application staging (e.g., complex N-tier distributed applications), a vertical domain in which the Mulini code generator creates multiple types of source code supporting automatic staging of distributed heterogeneous applications in a data center environment. The success of applying Clearwater to these domains shows the effectiveness of our approach.

Implementing self-management for enterprise systems is difficult. First, the scale and complexity of such systems makes it hard to understand and interpret system behavior or worse, the root causes of certain behaviors. Second, it is not clear how the goals specified at a system-level translate to component-level actions that drive the system. Third, the dynamic environments in which such systems operate requires self-management techniques that not only adapt the system but also adapt their own decision making processes. Finally, to build a self-management solution that is acceptable to administrators, it should have the properties of tractability and trust, which allow an administrator to both understand and fine-tune self-management actions. This dissertation work introduces, implements, and evaluates iManage, a novel system state-space based framework for enabling self-management of enterprise-scale systems. The system state-space, in iManage, is defined to be a collection of monitored system parameters and metrics (termed system variables). In addition, from amongst the system variables, it identifies the variables of interest, which determine the operational status of a system, and the controllable variables, which are the ones that can be deterministically modified to affect the operational status of a system. Using this formal representation, we have developed and integrated into iManage techniques that establish a probabilistic model relating the variables of interest and the controllable variables under the prevailing operational conditions. Such models are then used by iManage to determine corrective actions in case of SLA violations and/or to determine per-component ranges for controllable variables, which if independently adhered to by each component, lead to SLA compliance. To address the issue of scale in determining system models, iManage makes use of a novel state-space partitioning scheme that partitions the state-space into smaller sub-spaces thereby allowing us to more precisely model the critical system aspects. Our chosen modeling techniques are such that the generated models can be easily understood and modified by the administrator. Furthermore, iManage associates each proposed self-management action with a confidence-attribute that determines whether the action in question merits autonomic enforcement or not.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 2005. / Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008. / Committee Member: Ahamad, Mustaque; Committee Member: Eisenhauer, Greg; Committee Member: Milojicic, Dejan; Committee Member: Pu, Calton; Committee Member: Schwan, Karsten.

Zugl.: Marburg, Univ., Diss., 2008