BPM Based Robust E-Business Application Development

Sponsors:

IKTA (Information and Communication Technologies and Applications, Hungarian Ministry of Education)

Period:

2000-2002

Participants:

Department of Measurement and Information Systems, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
University of Veszprém, Hungary, Department of Computer Science
University of Veszprém, Hungary, Department of Tourism
Center of Information Technology, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Balatontourist Co.

Objective:

Simple e-commerce applications are replaced by e-business applications that are more complex and provide much greater functionality. Unfortunately their design and implementation is much more complex. Such applications are characterized by that not only the customer-company relationship has an electronic form, but also the internal business processes of the company are realized by computers. Accordingly the whole information storage, processing and retrival of the company is done electronically, in form as a "web application" that allows a much tighter integration of different business areas.

Quality of Service (QoS) was a crucial property of e-commerce application. It becomes even more important in e-business applications, since the operation of the company depends on it. QoS is characterized by:

• reliability;
• availability;
• proper behaviour;
• sufficient performance.

What the user observes as Quality of Service depends not only on the quality of software implementation but on the the behavior of the system in critical, unexpected cases. Systems are called robust if they meet the above requirements. Design and implementation must be made very carefully to reach robustness. The main problem in case of e-business systems is that these systems are composed not only of hardware and software but they depend on several other factors like human operators, external and internal non-computational resources.

The aim of the project is to develop a new technology and to test it in form of an experiment. The technology should allow the development of robust e-business applications. As such the project wants:

• to go beyond simple e-commerce applications;
• to provide a methodology to extend the scope of the UML language from software design to model the logical, qualitative and quantitative behaviour of the whole system;
• to give a solution to cope with the low quality of service originating from the unreliability and failures of the heterogenous application environment;
• to develop an efficient and reliable development method for the e-business systems of small- and medium sized enterprices;
• to make an experiment to test and present the above solutions.

Related work and results:

The theory of UML/Dataflow based fault modeling and evalutaion and the development approach of robust applications by using algorithm based fault tolerance was elaborated at the Fault-Tolerant Systems Research Group of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics:

• Theory and basic algorithms of dataflow based modeling and evaluation especially Failure Mode and Effect Analysis are described in: Gy. Csertán, A. Pataricza, and E. Selényi: Dependability Analysis in HW-SW codesign In Proc. of the IEEE International Computer Performance and Dependability Symposium, IPDS'95, pages 316-325, April Erlangen,  Germany, 1995. and in full detail in: Gy. Csertán: A Framework for Early Testability Assesment PhD thesis, Department of Measurement and Information Systems of the Technical University of Budapest, 1998. (supervisor A. Pataricza)
• The transformation from UML models to dataflow model (described by an XML file) is presented in P. Harang: From UML to Dataflow via XML Diploma Thesis, 2001, in Hungarian (supervisor A. Pataricza).
• The UML-based modeling of business processes is described in: A. Pataricza, Gy. Csertán, O. Dobán, A. Gábor, J. Sziray: Process Modeling and Optimization in UML In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Engineering Systems, INES-2001, Helsinki, September 16-18, 2001. and in full detail in: A. Pataricza (ed.): BPM Based Modeling Paradigm for e-Business Applications, Technical Report, IKTA-00173/2000 Project (Phase 1), 2002, Budapest, Hungary (in Hungarian).
• The application of algorithm based fault tolerance in business processes is presented in: Gy. Csertan, A. Pataricza, P. Harang, O. Doban, G. Biros, A. Dancsecz, F. Friedler: BPM Based Robust E-Business Application Development, In Proc. of EDCC-4, Toulouse, France, 2002.

Further information:

András Pataricza , Ph.D.