Business Services in EA:

Modeling & Formalization

Lam-Son Lê

Faculty of Computer Science & Engineering

HCMC University of Technology

Vietnam

Outline

1. HCMC Univ of Tech, Vietnam & ESP research group

2. Modeling business services in EA

3. Relationship between services

4. Applications

5. Further topics

6. References

HCMC Uni of Tech –

leading university of

technology in southern

area of Vietnam

Faculty of Computer Science & Engineering

Staff: 60 research & teaching; 20: secrectaries

1

HCMC University of Tech, where is it

on your map?

Two campuses in HCM City

A few figures about HCMC Uni of Tech

Founded in 1957 – celebrating 60th anniversary later this year

11 faculties, 30K students, staff = 2000 in number

Leading university of technologies in southern area of Vietnam

Official web: http://www.hcmut.edu.vn

Faculty of Computer Science &

Engineering, HCMC Uni of Tech

CSE Faculty

Enbedded Systems

Internet of Things

Software Engineering

Big Data

High Performance Computing

Privacy, Security

Computer Vision

Optimization

• software engineering, computer science, computer engineering, systems & networking, information systems

05 departments

• 60 involved in teaching & research

Total staff = 80

• 02 undergraduate programs, a few master’s programs, ~40 doctoral students

Education

• research groups in connection to partners in Europe, Japan, Singapore, USA

Research

ESP Research Group

http://esp-lab.net

Dr. Lam-Son Le (head)

Co-supervisors

Thai-Minh Truong (staff, Ph.D. student)

Trung-Viet Nguyen (Ph.D. student)

Long-Phuoc Ton (Ph.D. student)

ESP Research Group –

what do we research?

Business Processes

• Re-design

• Mining operational data

Enterprise Architecture

• Enterprise Modeling

• Service-Orientation

Domain-Specific Software

Engineering

• Code generation for IoT

• GUI source code

Publications

• Proceedings of leading conferences (CAiSE, EDOC, ER, ACOMP, FDSE)

• Journals (EIS, ISeB, Computer Standards & Interface)

Modeling

Business Services high-level services, representational

spectrum, 3x3x3 modeling grid

2

Representational Spectrum

SML GRL BSDL USDL BPMN OWL-S WSDL

BPEL4WS

Net work of web services

and their interaction Internet of generic

services Goal-oriented

requirements

Business services Business processes

Business strategy

<message

name="GetTr">

</message>

<wsag:Service

<usdl:Service

Description>

Semantic markup

for Web services

Notable Work on Business Services

▪Description of Service Capabilities and

Properties

(DSCP) http://service-description.com/

Capabilities

Non-functional Properties

Language (meta-)presented in ORM

▪USDL: service description language for the

internet of services

Towards a description

language for business

services

▪ Describe business services from multiple

perspectives

▪ Take into account penalty rules and delivery

▪ Motivation elements

goal, assumption, etc.

3 x 3 x 3 Modeling Grid

Received

Value Input

Output

Bundling

Unbundling

Composition

Decomposition

Capability

Strategy

Touchpoint

Service

Consumer

Service

Provider

Assumption

P3

P2

P6

P1

P9

P5

P8

P4

P7

Returned or

Co-created

Value

Service

Context

Conceptualization

Service Descriptors

Rent a Car as a service

▪ Service Goals ▫ to provide customers with secured procedures for picking up and returning rental cars

▫ to ensure customers who booked in advance will be able to pick up cars they selected

▫ to make sure that all cars are mechanically sound before handing them over tenants

▪ Assumption ▫ tenants must check (and top up if necessary) engine oil and other fluids of their rental car especially during long drives and

will be held liable for any breakdown caused by the insufficiency of oil and/or fluid

▪ Input/Output ▫ bank cards, vehicles

▪ Penalty Rules ▫ a car of the class booked by the customer must be handed in, otherwise an alternative car of a comparable class (i.e. either

the same class or a higher one than what was selected by the customer) shall be given to the customer. Otherwise, the

customer will be offer ed a discount.

Services in EA –

Are They in

Relation? generalization, aggregation, dependancy

3

Service Relationship

▪Services should be treated as the first citizen in

service-oriented methodologies

▪We need more insights into how business services

relate to one another in a service ecosystem

▪Substitutability

▪Aggregation

▪Dependability

Service Generalization /

Specialization

▪A business service can safely substitute for another if the following clauses hold ▫Either the former service possesses all the capabilities specified for the latter service plus additional capabilities, or the capabilities specified for the former entail those specified for the latter. Entailment between service capabilities are determined based on their preconditions and postconditions. Intuitively speaking, the postcondition of the entailing capability entails that of the entailed capability, and the precondition of the entailed capability entails that of the entailing capability. ▫The received values and co-created values experienced from the former include those experienced from the latter. ▫Either the former produces more output than the latter does, or the output produced by the latter subsumes the output produced by the former. ▫Either the former takes less input than the latter does, or the input taken by the former subsumes the input taken by the latter. ▫The former service assumes weaker norms than the latter one does. ▫The former service’s objectives entail the latter service’s objectives.

Example 1

▪Boarding service provided by an airlines company:

check-in and terminal boarding

▪Upgraded service

Check-in: use a machine or queue at counters

Boarding: use aircraft terminal or staircase at the rear

▪The upgraded service is a specialization of the

original service

Example 2

Service Aggregation

Example 3

(de-)Composition and

(un-)Bundling

Travel package

Flight as a service

Accommodation

service

Car rental

service Ticketing service

Boarding service

Aircraft service

Security screening

service

Baggage claim

service

Low-cost flight

Speedy boarding

Heavy luggage

check-in

Onboard meals

website and offices of a travel agency

website of

an airlines

company

Service Consumer’s perspective

Service Provider’s perspective - decomposition

bundling

unbundling

Service Dependency

▪Relationship between two business services one

of which exists because of the existence of the

other

▪Value-driven dependency A service that sells Blue-ray players

Another service that sells or leases movies formatted in Blue-ray

▪Stakeholder-driven dependency: a consumer of

one business service becomes the provider of

another service

Example 4

Meta-model

Applications Shared Services Agency in an Australian Govt’

A retailer of low-cost domestic airfare, Vietnam

4

Shared services agency in

an Australian Govt’

▪An agency is about to provide

a total of 29 business services

under the government body of

an Australian state

▪We model them using the 3 x

3 x 3 approach

▪~09 services added thought

service decomposition

A retailer of low-cost

domestic airfare in Vietnam

▪ A medium-sized company retailing lowcost

domestic airfare in Vietnam

▫sourced from Vietnam Airlines, Jetstar Pacific Airlines and VietJet Air

▪ The company has approximately 30 employees

divided into four departments, namely finance,

customer support, technical, marketing.

▪ Services provisioning: depicted in ArchiMate

ArchiMate

Further topics Service Contracts, Serviceability, Formalization,

Proximity

5

Serviceability

▪ Services as Contracts

a contract is serviceable given a set of services if

the set of services represent a valid decomposition of the

contract (which itself is viewed as a service)

Contractual Proximity

▪ (a) Given a set of service models, is a given

contract serviceable?

▪ (b) If the contract is not serviceable, what is

a minimally different set of service models that

will make it serviceable?

References Selected publications

6

Selected publications on

this topic

▪ Lê, L-S., Nguyen, T-V., Truong, T-M., Nguyen-An, K., Contractual Specifications of Business Services: Modeling,

Formalization and Proximity, Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, Volume 10140, pp

94-123, Springer Verlag

▪ Lê, L-S., Contractual Proximity of Business Services, In Proceedings of 2th International Conference on Future Data

and Security Engineering, pp. 183-197, Springer Verlag, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, November 2015

▪ Lê, L-S., Ghose, A-K., “Contracts + Goals = Roles”, proceedings of 31st International Conference on Conceptual

Modeling, pp. 252-266, Springer LNCS, Florence, Italy, October 2012

▪ Lê, L-S., Truong, H-L., Ghose, A-K., Dustdar, S., “On Elasticity and Constrainedness of Business Services

Provisioning”, proceedings of 8th International Conference on Services Computing, pp. 384-391, IEEE Computer

Society, Washington DC, USA, July 2012

▪ Lê, L-S., “Services for Business Processes in EA – Are They in Relation?”, proceedings of 22nd Australasian

Conference on Information Systems, AIS Electronic Library (AISeL), Sydney, Australia, December 2011

▪ Lê, L-S., Dam, K-H., Ghose, A-K., “On Business Services Representation – The 3 x 3 x 3 Approach”, proceedings of

21st Australasian Conference on Information Systems, AIS Electronic Library (AISeL), Brisbane, Australia, December

2010 [ Award for track paper with highest review score ]

▪ Lê, L-S., Ghose, A-K., Morrison, E., “Definition of a Description Language for Business Service Decomposition“,

proceedings of 1st International Conference on Exploring Services Sciences, pp. 96-110, Springer LNCS, Geneva,

Switzerland, February 2010.

THANKS FOR YOUR ATTENTION!

Any questions?