Skip to main content
Log in

A novel programming framework for architecting next generation enterprise scale information systems

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Information Systems and e-Business Management Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The increasing popularity and usage of internet based services makes design of software system complex and their power unlimited in scale. These systems often involve heterogeneous environment and platforms. They continuously evolve in order to meet the changes in technology and business practices. Emergence of information system architecture based on disparate externally provided internet based services warrant incorporation of novel design primitives in the application design. Traditionally popular application design primitives includes separation, abstraction, compression, uniform composition, replication and resource sharing that has evolved and came to vogue based on past experience and expert practice. This work examines and evaluates approaches to incorporation of new and novel unit operations around which applications can be architected, designed and analyzed for the internet computing and big data era. Incidentally it is found that portions of agent technology provides several unit operations such as migration of code and speech-act based responsibility delegation/application composition as application architectural primitives. This work determines extensions to Web Services-Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) programming framework—called as ACtive Internet Application Framework (ACIAF) and is suited for incorporation of novel unit operations such as migration of code and speech-act based component orchestration/application composition to enable construction of next generation information systems. An analysis of merits and demerits of using WS-BPEL technology to realize ACIAF is also carried out here. Code mobility feature of ACIAF is demonstrated using a use case while loosely coupled application design using ACIAF is theoretically discussed. Formal analyzability of mobility behavior of ACIAF application is highlighted based on its conformance to Petri-net formalism. Further formal logical analyzability/interpolatability of individual actions performed by collaborating ACIAF applications is also highlighted. It is argued here that ACIAF shall provide necessary foundation, guidance and motivation for further detailed technical work on several ideas presented to realize next generation information systems. This work firmly establishes extension to WS-BPEL platform as a most viable approach to realize novel architectural primitives to the design and implementation of next generation information systems.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Aalst WMP (2003) Don’t go with the flow: Web services composition standards exposed. IEEE Intell Syst 18(1):72–76

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aalst WMP (2005) Pi calculus versus Petri nets: let us eat humble pie rather than further inflate the Pi Hype. BPTrends 3(5):1–11

    Google Scholar 

  • Aalst WMP, van Hee K (2004) Workflow management: models, methods, and systems. MIT Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-0262720465

    Google Scholar 

  • Aberg C, Lambrix P, Shahmehri N (2005) An agent-based framework for integrating workflows and web services. WETICE’05 IEEE. doi:10.1109/WETICE.2005.17

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson R (2000) The end of DLL Hell. MSDN Magazine, San Francisco

    Google Scholar 

  • Aversa R, Di Martino B, Venticinque S (2009) Integration of mobile agents technology and globus grid. IEEE Int Conf Comput Sci Eng. doi:10.1109/CSE.2009.121

    Google Scholar 

  • Awad A, Decker G, Lohmann N (2009) Diagnosing and repairing data anomalies in process models. In: Rinderle-Ma S, Sadiq S (eds) BPM 2009 international workshops. Springer, Ulm

    Google Scholar 

  • Banzi M, Caire G, Gotta D (2008) WADE: a software platform to develop mission critical applications exploiting agents and workflows. AAMAS 2008 Industry Track

  • Barbacci M, Longstaff TH, Klein MH, Weinstock CB (1995) Quality attributes. Technical report, CMU/SEI-95-TR-021, ESC-TR-95-021

  • Bass L, Clements P, Kazman R (2003) Software architecture in practice, 2nd edn. Pearson education, Upper Saddle River. ISBN 81-77589962

    Google Scholar 

  • Bellifemine F et al (2005) Jade: a java agent development framework, multi-agent programming. Springer, Vol 15, II, pp 125–147. doi:10.1007/0-387-26350-0_5

  • Bigus JP et al (2002) ABLE: a toolkit for building multiagent autonomic systems. IBM Systems Journal 41(3):350–371. doi:10.1147/sj.413.0350

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boissiera O, Bordini RH, Hübnerc JF, Riccid A, Santid A (2013) Multi-agent oriented programming with JaCaMo. Sci Comput Program 78(6):747–761. doi:10.1016/j.scico.2011.10.004

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bordini RH, Hübner JF, Wooldridge M (2007) Programming multi-agent systems in agentspeak using Jason. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken. ISBN 0470029005

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bordini RH et al (2009) Multi-agent programming: languages, tools and applications. Springer, New York. ISBN 0387892982

    Google Scholar 

  • Bpel (2016) Open source BPEL engine. http://ode.apache.org/

  • BPMN (2016) Business process modeling notation v 2.0. http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0/PDF/ (also at: http://www.bpmn.org)

  • Bradshaw JM (ed) (1997) Software agents. AAAI Press, Cambridge, pp 1–46. ISBN 978-0262522342

    Google Scholar 

  • Brazier FMT, Kephart JO, Parunak HVD, Huhns MN (2009) Agents and service-oriented computing for autonomic computing: a research agenda. Internet Comput IEEE 13(3):82–87. doi:10.1109/MIC.2009.5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Breugel F, Koshkina M (2006) Models and verification of BPEL. http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~franck/research/drafts/tutorial.pdf

  • Brown WA, Laird R, Gee C, Mitra T (2008) SOA governance. IBM Press, Indianapolis. ISBN 0137147465

    Google Scholar 

  • Bughin J, Chui M (2010) The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday. McKinsey Quarterly, Seattle

    Google Scholar 

  • Chi J, Song J (2007) Intelligent-agent and web-service based service composition for E-business. CCECE. doi:10.1109/CCECE.2007.215

    Google Scholar 

  • Chunlin L, Zhengding L, Layuan L (2003) Design and implementation of a hybrid agent platform. Programm Comput Softw 29(1):28–42. doi:10.1023/A:1021915913509

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Constantinides E, Fountain SJ (2008) Web 2.0: conceptual foundations and marketing issues. J Direct Data Digit Mark Pract 9:231–244. doi:10.1057/palgrave.dddmp.4350098

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cooney D, Roe P (2003) Mobile agents make for flexible web services. http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw03/papers/cooney/paper.html

  • Covington MA (1997) Speech acts in electronic communication with special reference to KQML and ANSI X12. In: 13th conference on system sciences. ISBN 0-8186-7862-3/97

  • Dastani M et al (2010) Specification and verification of multi-agent systems. Springer, New York. ISBN 978-1-4419-6984-2

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Ebrahim N, Iyer SR, Punathil G, Reghunath R (2015) Identification of critical web services and their dynamic optimal relocation. Patent numbers: US 8990388 B2, US20120124193, US20130013774, USA Patent, 2015

  • Erl T (2005) Service-oriented Architecture. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River. ISBN 0-13-185858-0

    Google Scholar 

  • Fahland D, Favre C, Koehler J, Lohmann N, Völzer H, Wolf K (2011) Analysis on demand: instantaneous soundness checking of industrial business process models. Data Knowl Eng 70(5):448–466

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • FIPA (2016) Foundation for intelligent physical agents. http://www.fipa.org/

  • FIPA-ACL (1998) FIPA specification-agent communication langugae: Part 2. FIPA, 1998. www.fipa.org/repository/aclspecs.html

  • Gable GG, Sedera D, Chan T (2008) Re-conceptualizing information system success: the IS-Impact Measurement Model. J Assoc Inf Syst 9(7):377–408

    Google Scholar 

  • Gamma E, Helm R, Johnson R, Vlissides J (1995) Design patterns. Addison-Wesley, Boston. ISBN 0201633612

    Google Scholar 

  • García R (ed.) (2008) Semantic web for business: cases and applications. Information Science Reference, 2008. ISBN 978-1-60566-067-7

  • GeneOntology (2001) The gene ontology consortium, creating the gene ontology resource: design and implementation. Genome Res 11:1425–1433. doi:10.1101/gr.180801

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grunbacher P, Egyed A, Medvidovic N (2003) Reconciling software requirements and architectures with intermediate models. Softw Syst Model. doi:10.1007/s10270-003-0038-6

    Google Scholar 

  • Gu Q, Lago P (2009) Exploring service-oriented system engineering challenges: a systematic literature review. SOCA 3:171–188. doi:10.1007/s11761-009-0046-7

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Guan S-U, Guan S-U, Tan SL, Hua F (2004) A modularized electronic payment system for agent-based E-commerce. J Res Pract Inf Technol 36(2):67–87

    Google Scholar 

  • Havey M (2005) Essential business process modeling. O’Reilly, Cambridge. ISBN 0596008430

    Google Scholar 

  • Hollingsworth D (1995) The workflow reference model (Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC)), Document Number TC00-1003, Issue 1.1, 1995. http://www.wfmc.org/standards/docs/tc003v11.pdf

  • Huebscher MC, McCann JA (2008) A survey of autonomic computing. ACM Comput Surv 40(3):7

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huhns MN (2002) Agent as web services. IEEE Internet Comput 6(4):93–95. doi:10.1109/MIC.2002.1020332

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huhns MN, Singh MP (1998) Workflow agents. Internet Comput IEEE 2(4):94–96. doi:10.1109/4236.707813

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huhns MN, Singh MP (2005a) Service-oriented computing: key concepts and principles. Internet Comput IEEE 9(1):75–81. doi:10.1109/MIC.2005.21

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huhns MN, Singh Munindar P (2005b) Research directions for service-oriented multiagent systems. Internet Comput IEEE 9(6):65–70. doi:10.1109/MIC.2005.132

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ISO25010 (2011) ISO/IEC 25010:2011 standard: Systems and software engineering—systems and software quality requirements and evaluation (SQuaRE)—System and software quality models, 2011

  • JadexTool (2016) Jadex agent programming environment. http://www.activecomponents.org/

  • Juric MB, Sasa A, Rozman I (2009) WS-BPEL extensions for versioning. Inf Softw Technol 51(8):1261–1274. doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2009.03.003

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kamel Boulos MN, Wheeler S (2007) The emerging Web 20 social software: an enabling suite of sociable technologies in health and health care education. Health Information & Libraries Journal 24(1):2–23. doi:10.1111/j.1471-1842.2007.00701.x

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kamngar F, Levine D, Zaruba GV, Thomas R (2005) Mobile agent connection establishment and management (CEMA)—message EXCHANGE for pervasive computing environments. J Supercomput 31:79–99. doi:10.1023/B:SUPE.0000049326.25067.80

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Katasonov A, Terziyan V (2008) Semantic agent programming language (S-APL): a middleware platform for the semantic web. 2008 IEEE Int Conf Seman Comput. doi:10.1109/ICSC.2008.82

    Google Scholar 

  • Kazman R, Bass L (1994) Toward deriving software architectures from quality attributes. Technical Report CMU/SEI-94-TR-10

  • Keisler HJ, Keisler JM (2014) Observing, reporting and deciding in networks of sentences. Ann Pure Appl Logic 165(3):812–836. doi:10.1016/j.apal.2013.10.008

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kotis K, Vouros GA (2006) Human-centered ontology engineering: the HCOME methodology. Knowl Inf Syst 10(1):109–131. doi:10.1007/s10115-005-0227-4

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Koutsomitropoulos DA, Meidanis DP, Kandili AN, Papatheodorou TS (2008) Establishing the semantic web reasoning infrastructure on description logic inference engines. In: Manolopoulos Y et al. (Eds.) ICEIS 2006. LNBIP 3. Springer, pp 351–362

  • Lettmann T et al (2011) Modeling agents and agent systems. Trans Comput Collect Intell 5:157–181

    Google Scholar 

  • Lloyd JW, Ng KS (2011) Declarative programming for agent applications. Auton Agent Multi Agent Syst 23:224–272. doi:10.1007/s10458-010-9138-1

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Logan B (2015) A future for agent programming. In: Baldoni M et al. (ed.) Engineering multi-agent systems. LNAI 9318, Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-26184-3_1

  • Lohmann N (2007) A feature-complete Petri net semantics for WS-BPEL 2.0. In: Heckel MDR (eds) Web services and formal methods, WS-FM. Proceedings, LNCS. Springer

  • Lohmann N (2008) Correcting deadlocking service choreographies using a simulation-based graph edit distance. In: Dumas M et al (Eds) Business Process Management, BPM 2008, Milan, Sep 1–4, 2008, vol. 5240 of LNCS, pp. 132–147, Springer

  • Lohmann N, Massuthe P, Stahl C, Weinberg D (2008) Analyzing interacting WS-BPEL processes using flexible model geneneration. Data Knowl Eng 64(1):38–54

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lohmann N, Verbeek HMW, Ouyang C, Stahl C (2009a) Comparing and Evaluating Petri Net Semantics for BPEL. Int J Business Process Integration and Management 4(1):60–73

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lohmann N, Verbeek HMW, Dijkman R (2009b) Petri net transformations for business processes—a survey. Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency II, Springer 2009:46–63

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lohmann N, Mennicke S, Sura C (2010) The Petri Net API: A collection of Petri net-related functions. In: Schwarick M, Heiner M (eds) Proceedings of the 17th German Workshop on Algorithms and Tools for Petri Nets (AWPN 2010), Cottbus, Germany, October 7–8, 2010, volume 643 of CEUR Workshop, pp 148–155

  • Luck M, McBurney P, Shehory O, Willmott S (2005) Agent technology: computing as interaction (A Roadmap for Agent Based Computing), AgentLink, 2005. ISBN 085432 845 9. http://www.agentlink.org/roadmap/index.html

  • Maleshkova M, Pedrinaci C, Domingue J (2010) Semantic annotation of Web APIs with SWEET. In: 7th ESWC2010

  • Maréchaux JL (2006) Combining service-oriented architecture and event-driven architecture using an enterprise service bus, IBM developer works

  • Martin D et al (2004a) Bringing semantics to web services: The OWL-S Approach. In: Cardoso J, Sheth A (eds) SWSWPC 2004. LNCS 3387, Springer, pp 26-42

  • Martin D et al (2004b) OWL-S: semantic markup for web services. W3C Member Submission. https://www.w3.org/Submission/OWL-S/

  • Martin D et al (2007) Bringing semantics to web services: the OWL-S Approach. World Wide Web 10(3):243–277. doi:10.1007/s11280-007-0033-x

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mazeiar S, Ladan T (2009) Self-adaptive software: landscape and research challenges. ACM Trans Autonomous & Adaptive Systems 4(2):14

    Google Scholar 

  • McKean J, Shorter H, Luck M, McBurney P, Willmott S (2008) Technology diffusion: analysing the diffusion of agent technologies. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 17(3):372–396. doi:10.1007/s10458-008-9052-y

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Medvidovic N, Taylor RN (2000) A Classification and Comparison Framework for Software Architecture Description Languages. IEEE Trans Software Eng 26(1):70–93

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Milanovic N (2011) Non-functional properties in service oriented Architecture:Requirements, Models and Methods. Model Labs, Berlin. ISBN 978-1-60566-795-9

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Müller R (2010) Formal characterisation of partners of an open net. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Thesis report), Institut für Informatik

  • Murugesan S (2007) Understanding Web 2.0. IT Professional. doi:10.1109/MITP.2007.78

    Google Scholar 

  • Murugesan S (2009) Handbook of research on Web 2.0, 3.0, and X.0. Information Science Reference, Hershey. ISBN 978-1605663845

    Google Scholar 

  • Newcomer E, Lomow G (2005) Understanding SOA with web services. Addison Wesley, Boston. ISBN 0-321-18086-0

    Google Scholar 

  • Noy NF (2004) Semantic integration: a survey of ontology-based approaches. SIGMOD Record 33(4):65–70. doi:10.1145/1041410.1041421

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nwana HS, Ndumu DT (1999) A perspective on software agents research. Knowl Eng Rev 14(2):1–18

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ODE (2016) Apache ODE (Orchestration Director Engine) software (WS-BPEL v 2.0 compliant container). http://ode.apache.org/

  • ODEAPI (2016) BPEL-ODE Process Management API specification. http://ode.apache.org/bpel-management-api-specification.html

  • ODEJaCOb (2016) Apache Orchestration director engine – Java concurrency object layer. http://ode.apache.org/developerguide/jacob.html

  • Okouya D, Fornara N, Colombetti M (2013) An infrastructure for the design and development of open interaction systems. In: Cossentino M et al (Eds) Engineering multi-agent systems, EMAS 2013, LNCS 8245, 2013, pp 215-234. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-45343-4

  • Pokahr A, Braubach L, Lamersdorf W (2003) Jadex: A BDI Reasoning Engine. In: Bordini RH et al. (Ed) Multi-agent programming. Springer, pp 149–174. ISBN: 978-0-387-26350-2. doi:10.1007/0-387-26350-0_6

  • Pratschner S (2001) Simplifying deployment and solving DLL Hell with the.NET framework. MSDN Magazine, San Francisco

    Google Scholar 

  • Rao AS, George MP (1995) BDI agents from theory to practice. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi Agent Systems, ICMAS-95, San Francisco

  • ResourcesAgent (2016) Historical resources on agent technology. http://agents.umbc.edu/introduction

  • Russell S, Norvig P (2003) Artificial intelligence, 3rd edn. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River

    Google Scholar 

  • Savarimuthu BTR et al (2005) Integrating web services with agent based workflow management system (WfMS), Web Intelligence, 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM. International Conference. doi:10.1109/WI.2005.81

    Google Scholar 

  • Schiemann B, Schreiber U (2006) OWL-DL as FIPA-ACL content language. In: Formal ontology for communicating agents, Malaga, Spain

  • Schmidt MT, Hutchison B, Lambros P, Phippen R (2005) The enterprise service bus: making service-oriented architecture real. IBM Systems Journal 44(4):781–797. doi:10.1147/sj.444.0781

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sessions R (2007) A comparison of the top four enterprise-architecture methodologies. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb466232.aspx

  • Shehory O, Sturm A (eds) (2014) Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. Springer, New York. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-54432-3

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith CU (2015) Software performance engineering then and now: a position paper. WOSP-C’ 15:2015. doi:10.1145/2693561.2693567

    Google Scholar 

  • Sudeikat J et al (2004) Evaluation of agent—oriented software methodologies—examination of the gap between modeling and platform. AOSE’04. Springer, pp. 126–141. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-30578-1_9

  • Sycara K et al. (2003) The RETSINA MAS, a case study. LNCS, 2003, Springer, Vol 2603/2003, pp.103–119. doi:10.1007/3-540-35828-5_15

  • Talantikitea HN et al (2009) Semantic annotations for web services discovery and composition. Computer Standards & Interfaces 31(6):1108–1117

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Trione L, Long D, Gotta D, Sacchi G, WeMash W (2009) WADE: unleash the power of collective intelligence. In: 8th AAMAS 2009, pp 53–60

  • Venkatesan D (2010) Development of a novel software architecture for active internet applications. ICWS2010. doi:10.1109/ICWS.2010.86

    Google Scholar 

  • Venkatesan D, Sridhar S (2016) A novel method and environment for scalable web service orchestration. In: Proceedings of IEEE 12th 2016 world congress on services computing (SERVICES 2016), San Francisco, pp 128–129. doi:10.1109/SERVICES.2016.27

  • Vieira R et al (2007) On the formal semantics of speech-act based communication in an agent-oriented programming language. J Artif Intell Res  29:221–267. doi:10.1613/jair.2221

    Google Scholar 

  • Wang M, Wang H (2005) Intelligent agent supported business process management. In: Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii international conference on system sciences. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2005.332

  • Weerawarana S, Curbera F, Leymann F, Storey T, Ferguson DF (2005) Web services platform architecture: SOAP, WSDL, WS-Policy, WS-addressing, WSBPEL, WS-reliable messaging and more. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River

    Google Scholar 

  • Weiss G (2012) Multi-agent technology, 2nd edn. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Wieland M et al (2008) Context integration for smart workflows. In: 6th IEEE International Conference 2008, pp 239–242. doi:10.1109/PERCOM.2008.27

  • Wooldridge M (2009) Introduction to multi-agent systems, 2nd edn. Wiley, New York. ISBN 978-0-470-51946-2

    Google Scholar 

  • WS-Addressing (2006) Web Services Addressing 1.0 – Core standard, http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/PR-ws-addr-core-20060321

  • WS-BPEL (2007) OASIS Web Services Business Process Execution Language v 2.0. http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsbpel/2.0/OS/wsbpel-v2.0-OS.html

  • Xu J, Pears S (2006) A dynamic shadow approach to fault-tolerant mobile agents in an autonomic environment. Real-Time Systems 32(2006):235–252. doi:10.1007/s11241-005-4682-5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yu L (2009) A developer’s guide to the semantic web, Springer. e-ISBN 978-3-642-15970-1. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-15970-1

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to D. Venkatesan.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Venkatesan, D., Sridhar, S. A novel programming framework for architecting next generation enterprise scale information systems. Inf Syst E-Bus Manage 15, 489–534 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-016-0330-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-016-0330-y

Keywords

Navigation