Service Oriented Architectures - Enterprise Level

George Brown of INTEL Corporation chairs the newly-formed O³neida Working Group on Service Oriented Architectures.

This Working Group has two proposed streams of activity:

1. SoAs at the Enterprise Level, and
2. SoAs at the Device Level.

Several O³neida member firms and research organisations are active in the Service Oriented Architecture field including INTEL, EDF (France), Tampere University (Finland), etc.

The challenges for business today are growing because of increased complexity due to globalization and as our focus shifts to the End Customer, as well as, the many other factors presented here. Shorter product life cycles and the reduction in time to market plus a growing network of partners throughout the value chain are contributing to the rapid changes in business.

All of these factors are forcing us to transform business in order to respond more rapidly. The transformation of business is requiring that we enable more flexibility and agility in order to respond more rapidly to changing business needs. Flexibility and agility are also needed to be effective in utilizing resources across the global value chain. That rapid response to business change will also be needed to enable changes in our partnerships across the global value chain.

The best way to assure business agility is by sensing operational performance and market change in order to create business value manifested as increased agility, productivity, and scalability and drive market distinction

• address critical areas of need for becoming an Agile Enterprise
• provide the capability to manage greater complexity.
• access to relevant, real-time business insight and information
• enable the adoption and modification of key business processes
• deliver more quickly applications for competitive advantage

Business Agility thru BPM & SOA

To be effective in responding to business changes in the global environment, we need to think in terms of our Value Chain. Value Chain thinking can lead to benefits in working with our partners to realize value for all, have more control over processes and assets, make decisions more rapidly, increase coordination, be able to dynamically reconfigure our value chains as needed, and have rapid changes to our value chain in response to changing customer requirements.

Applying this line of thinking can enable collaboration, virtualization of resources, accuracy in rapid decision making, synchronization with our partners, as well as adaptability and agility. Given these challenges and needs, our Business Agility research agenda has a focus on enabling rapid change in business processes and creating business value. The creation of business value will result from increased agility, productivity, and scalability, as well as, improved management of complexity. These values can come from our work on enabling a transition to Service-Oriented Architecture through the coupling of Business Process Modeling or Management and SOA.

One opportunity already identified for interested collaborators is the MPOSE IMS project currently headed by George Brown. The objective of the MPOSE (Manufacturing business process Pattern Ontologies for the extended Service Oriented Enterprise) project is to advance manufacturing business process pattern ontologies that can promote SOE interoperability at a semantic process level, an SOA level and at the level of virtualized resources (Service Oriented Infrastructure – SOI).

A Service-Oriented Enterprise is an enterprise that implements and exposes its business processes through an SOA and that provides frameworks for managing its business processes across an SOA landscape. The goal of SOE is to "virtualize and compartmentalize servers in a way that multiple software operating systems and applications can run independently and all be managed from a “central point.”SOA and SOI need to seamlessly exchange service requests and resource requirements in order to properly source and optimally utilize all available SOI computing assets and to maintain service level agreements for the business process execution.

To facilitate service requests and resource requirements exchange between SOA and SOI, a comprehensive information model need to be developed that will be semantically reconciled between the SOA and SOI representations. Our focus needs to be on SOA and mapping resource requirements form SOA to SOI.

MPOSE IMS Project
George Brown of INTEL USA is partnered with the Arizona State University and the US National Institute for Standards. (NIST)

In summary, emerging standards in the manufacturing domain are sufficiently ripe to tackle realistic manufacturing issues. The mapping of SOA to SOI requires effort relevant to manufacturing as virtualized resources may actually include robots and other dynamically programmable devices. Research on the dynamic execution of SOE business processes is needed to address the types of issues that make inter-organizational process automation ‘messy’ and unpredictable. To that end, manufacturing business process patterns can be used to identify the types of difficulties that can arise, and an ontology of those patterns can give rise to the sharing of best remediation approaches both among organizations and between automated SOA process executions. Ontologies are also key to the glue that enables dynamic process execution: service level agreements (SLAs). Such SLAs must be synthesized in such a way that business process requirements are manifested in SLAs for choreographing SOA layer services, SOA layer services are provisioned in SOI according to SLAs that manifest both business process requirements and historical service performance, and this must all be done in an environment where commoditized processes, services and virtualized resources may be rented in an ad hoc, as needed and dynamic manner. That renting will likely require the use of formal SLAs that manifest properties of the existing needs at all enterprise architecture layers. The outcome must be seamlessly delivered manufacturing business services for the enterprise.

The MPOSE project consists of work packages for the provisioning of virtualized SOI resources for business process orchestration should parlay process context patterns, forecasted needs based on prior service executions and ontology-based request schema and grammars for expressing functional and non-functional requirements. While business processes are sourced with software services in SOA using approaches that take into account service level agreements (e.g., WS-Negotiation), SOI provisioning has not been addressed from such an “SLA-Aware” perspective. In our work, an SOA to SOI request schema is developed that embeds process scheduling parameters and service choreography structures. Historical service executions across choreographies are resolved with business process scheduling requirements. A resolved request schema serves as the initial bid from SOA to SOI for resources, and a subsequent negotiation protocol gives rise to dimensions upon which negotiation strategies can be further investigated. A major tenet of the negotiation process is that of ‘semantic matchmaking.’ A negotiation use case serves to demonstrate a novel extended enterprise SOI provisioning capability made possible through the SLA-aware approach. Next steps include engaging partners in researching SLA-aware SOI possibilities in the manufacturing arena through an ‘Intelligent Manufacturing Systems’ (IMS) grant proposal currently in abstract stage at IMS.

George W. Brown
Biographical Sketch

George W. Brown joined Intel in 1994 as Principal Software Scientist within Corporate Information Technology. Currently a Senior Program Manager within ISTG Research group responsible for working with senior management of Intel business units and application groups to define business strategy, architecture of business applications, and strategies for applying information technology to improve Intel competitiveness. He identifies opportunities to apply information technology in innovative ways to solve business problems and improve Intel business processes.

Special focus has been given to methods and tools to ensure Intel reaches its goals in Supply Chain Management. He served three terms on the Supply Chain Council Board of Directors, having been Chair of the Council in 2002-2003 and the SCC R&D Strategy Committee. George is currently on the Board of Directors for the Value Chain Group. Before joining Intel worked as a Senior Staff Specialist and Software Architect at GDE Systems, inc., a Senior Program Manager at SAIC and a Principal Software Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation. George has advanced degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.