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by multiple, possibly temporally related, events. In
SOA there is no notion of relating the invocation of
a single business process to a condition holding
between the data passed to a collection of calls on
one of the component's interfaces. Whilst a complex
event based approach to architectural design must
take efficiency concerns into account, the primary
concern is how to capture, represent and analyze
architectural information as an enterprise design.
This is especially useful in cases where it is had or
sometimes impossible to design business behaviour
in predefined sequence of activities, as most
environments are event driven and non-
deterministic. In multinational organisation, a single
dimension top town analysis of business activities is
unlikely to work due to the complexity of it
environment. It is also even harder for a start-up
company to identify and analyse services or business
activities that are necessary to implement it business.
Furthermore, services used from an application
or orchestration manager expose their interface
explicitly and will require changes to any services
that bind to them. Consequently, the services are
tightly linked, providing less agility and dynamic.
Business units such as component or service
consuming or producing event are by nature more
decoupled, providing the flexibility necessary to
adapt to changing circumstances.
Several efforts have been made to integrate SOA
to EA. For example, OMG published a language
specification called SoaML for SOA based business
modeling. It supports service modeling at business
level, integrating the modelled services with
business processes at IS/IT level by service
orchestration or choreography (Casanave, 2009). A
leading EA industry consortium, the Open Group,
has also published their effort on SOA driven
enterprise modeling, demonstrating fitness of their
TOGAF framework to service oriented modeling in
(The Open Group, 2011).
Very little work has been done to fully apply or
consider EDA in EA. In our view, the importance of
events has been overlooked and there is no
appropriate or standardized way to model business
and IT systems with EDA approach in a consistent
way. Our contribution in this paper is the proposal
for integrating Complex event modelling to EA
modelling.
In addition to the architectural support, event
driven thinking shows a more straightforward
solution to business modelling. For example, events
can be easily identified with specific business goals,
policies and constraints that they related to. For that
reason, the business process can be defined with the
focus on ‘what’ need to be done with the relevant
events rather than imposing the details of ‘how’. Our
approach has been inspired by VPEC-T, an approach
that applies event-driven thinking to enterprise
modeling by analyzing business with five core
concepts including event (Green and Bate, 2007). In
this paper, we illustrate our approach by a case
study, where complex event modelling is integrated
to business operating model.
The remainder of the paper is structured as
follows: Section 2 introduces our approach on event
driven enterprise architecture modeling. Section 3
presents the case study. Section 4 concludes and
gives an outlook to future work.
2 OUR APPROACH:
EVENT-DRIVEN EA
MODELING
Enterprise Architecture encompasses modelling both
business architecture and IT architecture, bridging
the gap between them. In this work we argue that
complex event modelling needs to be integrated not
only to IT systems but also to business modelling.
This will provide the consistency between EA
models.
It is essential for business modelling to capture
business needs rather than putting constraints due to
the technology. By adopting event driven modelling
in EA, we can identify and model events at
conceptual level without concern of the technical
architecture – how to recognize the events. The
model is then gradually detailed and
comprehensively refined in the logical and physical
level with added constraints for implementation.
Events in this approach are what trigger a chain
of actions in business, for instance, serving its
customers, collecting its income, managing its staff
and generally meeting its obligations. In addition to
triggering actions, it also includes notification of
changes that leads to check of constraints of
business goal. In (Clark et al., 2011), authors have
recognized the importance of events at analyzing
business goals. The component of UML has been
extended with event concept and event patterns
(templates). However, its application only targets
simulation of compliance and consistency checking.
A number of specialised modelling notations
have been proposed for EA modelling. In most cases
these notations provide a number of views or layers
that capture the enterprise from different
perspectives. These layers provide a good
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