LAYERED ARCHITECTURE FOR ASSEMBLING BUSINESS APPLICATIONS FROM DISTRIBUTED COMPONENTS

Modern business applications are generally characterized as: distributed across many processors and/or sites, access data from multiple sources and have web-based interfaces. These applications may also involve systems or processes from multiple companies or vendor provided services. The changing business environment and technologies requires that the application be agile and adoptable in short period. Component based development has recently attracted increased attention as a preferred technology for developing business applications. However, the tools and techniques for the design, implementation, management and deployment of applications based on these technologies are at a very early stage of development. This paper presents an overview of a distributed architecture for the deployment of applications based on business components. The application of the architecture in an auto insurance claim domain is briefly described. A number of open research issues have been identified.

Component-Based Software Developing Method for Group Companies Management Information System

Considering the special requirements of group enterprise information management software, a new method of massive software development was put forward basing on the component technology and facing the ＂assemblage＂. It generalizes five key parts of the method system including the overall strategy, the application project method basing on the operation ＂assemblage＂, the field project method basing on component, the development method facing the component on the basis of the visible component platform, and the software development process model basing on the component ＂assemblage＂. Besides, this paper describes the process and principle of this method application with an example of the construction of a Communications Investment Group enterprise＇s management information system. The method provides a new idea for breaking away from the predicament appeared in the construction of present enterprise informatization and exploring the way of software industrialization.

Enterprise-level business component identification in business architecture integration

The component-based business architecture integration of military information systems is a popu- lar research topic in the field of military operational research. Identifying enterprise-level business components is an important issue in business architecture integration. Currently used methodologies for business component identification tend to focus on software-level business components, and ignore such enterprise concerns in business architectures as organizations and resources. Moreover, approaches to enterprise-level business component identi- fication have proven laborious. In this study, we propose a novel approach to enterprise-level business component identification by considering overall cohesion, coupling, granularity, maintainability, and reusability. We first define and formulate enterprise-level business components based on the component business model and the Department of Defense Architecture Framework （DoDAF） models. To quantify the indices of business components, we formulate a create, read, update, and delete （CRUD） matrix and use six metrics as criteria. We then formulate business com- ponent identification as a multi：objective optimization problem and solve it by a novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm called the ＇simulated annealing hybrid genetic algorithm （SHGA）＇. Case studies showed that our approach is more practical and efficient for enterprise-level business component identification than prevalent approaches.

A fuzzy formal concept analysis based approach for business component identification

Identifying business components is the basis of component-based software engineering. Many approaches, including cluster analysis and concept analysis, have been proposed to identify components from business models. These approaches classify business elements into a set of components by analyzing their properties. However, most of them do not consider the difference in their properties for the business elements, which may decrease the ac- curacy of the identification results. Fhrthermore, component identification by partitioning business elements cannot reflect which features are responsible for the generation of certain results. This paper deals with a new approach for component identification from business models using fuzzy formal concept analysis. First, the membership between business elements and their properties is quantified and transformed into a fuzzy formal context, from which the concept lattice is built using a refined incremental algorithm. Then the components are selected from the concepts according to the concept dispersion and distance. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency are validated by applying our approach in the real-life cases and experiments.