Functional software architecture: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:44, 31 March 2005

Revision as of 14:45, 31 March 2005

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Within the area of enterprise engineering formal methodologies, methods and techniques are designed, tested and extensively used in order to offer organizations reusable business process solutions:

**The [[#Computer Integrated Manufacturing Open Systems Architecture]] (CIMOSA) methodology[3]

**The [[#Integrated DefinitionDEFinition]] (IDEF) methodology [4]

**[[#Petri Nets]] [5]

**[[#Unified Modeling Language]] (UML) or Unified Enterprise Modeling Language (UEML) [6,7]

**[[#Enterprise Function Diagrams]] (EFD)

These methodologies/techniques and methods are all more or less suited in modeling the enterprise and its underlying processes. So, which of them are suited for the further development of Information Technology systems that are needed for effective and efficient (re)designed processes? More important, why using a time consuming enterprise methodology when information and software engineers can’t or won’t use the unclear results in the development of efficiency enabling IT systems? Before we can give the answers to these questions some short descriptions of the listed methods above are given.

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[[Image:EFDpublishing.PNG]]

''Figure 2: EFD of a publish company producing books and digital material''

So, maybe EFD could be used as a business front-end to a software modeling language like UML. The major resemblance with IDEF as a modeling tool indicates that it can be done. However, more research is needed to improve the EFD technique in such a way that formal mappings to UML can be made (see dashed line figure 1). Work of Kim et. al. [1] about the complementary use of IDEF and UML has contributed to the acceptance of IDEF as business-front end. A similar study should be done with EFD and UML.