A standard way of describing requirements for system design is according to function. One describes high level functions of the operation of the system and decomposes these into lower level functions which perhaps overlap. For complex systems the number of functions can be large and they may interact, making it important to have a methodical way of describing the structure of functions and thei...

• Behavior-oriented modeling1: The modeler builds a model that exhibits dynamic behavior through simulation of the organization. • Analysis-oriented modeling: The modeler uses a set of related descriptors that enables a structured representation of an organization’s salient features, but that excludes simulation of the organization’s behavior. The emphasis is on analysis and diagnosis. (The bes...

Existing empirical research on the business value of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) has only measured the extent of SOA adoption – but not maturity – to determine whether typical goals, like increased business agility or IT cost reduction, could be achieved. However, a widely implemented SOA might be less mature than an SOA adopted only in particular areas of the organization, which in tu...

The discipline of Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) has emerged during the last decade. In this domain, methodologies and modeling techniques have been suggested in order to support the development process of agent-based systems. Both the scientific and industrial communities have recognized the potential advantages of agent-based systems. Nevertheless, the number of deployed commercia...

Service-oriented computing promotes the construction of applications by composing distributed services that are advertised in an open service market. In such an environment, individual services may change and evolve dynamically, requiring composite services to adapt to such changes. The prevailing strategy is to react on failures and replace the defective component of the composite service. How...

The possibility of a direct link between business workflows and the supporting application system is often seen as the critical strength of the SOA paradigm. Though in practice, today’s web-service technology is often used just to invoke detailed functions of particular application systems. The basic SOA does not address management and other concerns that apply to all components in an SOA. Howe...

Agent-oriented methodologies, as they have been proposed so far, mainly try to suggest a clean and disciplined approach to analyse, design and develop MASs by using specific methods and techniques. Moreover, different studies have been proposed for the evaluation of agent-oriented methodologies adopting specific types of evaluation and criteria. However, little effort has been devoted to the co...

We propose the use of Soft Constraints as a natural way to model Service Oriented Architecture. In the framework, constraints are used to model components and connectors and constraint aggregation is used to represent their interactions. The “quality of a service” is measured and considered when performing queries to service providers. Some examples consist in the levels of cost, performance an...

Most healthcare organisations are service-oriented, fundamentally centred on critical services provided by medical and nursing staff. Increasingly, these human-centric services rely on softwareintensive systems, i.e. medical devices and health informatics, for improving different aspects of healthcare, e.g. enhancing efficiency through automation and patient safety through smart alarm systems. ...