TY - JOUR
T1 - Formal foundations for responsible application integration
AU - Ritter, Daniel
AU - Rinderle-Ma, Stefanie
AU - Montali, Marco
AU - Rivkin, Andrey
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The Author(s)
PY - 2021/11
Y1 - 2021/11
N2 - Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) constitutes the cornerstone in enterprise IT landscapes that are characterized by heterogeneity and distribution. Starting from established Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs) such as Content-based Router and Aggregator, EIP compositions are built to describe, implement, and execute integration scenarios. The EIPs and their compositions must be correct at design and runtime in order to avoid functional errors or incomplete functionalities. However, current EAI system vendors use many of the EIPs as part of their proprietary integration scenario modeling languages that are not grounded on any formalism. This renders correctness guarantees for EIPs and their composition impossible. Thus this work advocates responsible EAI based on the formalization, implementation, and correctness of EIPs. For this, requirements on an EIP formalization are collected and based on these requirements an extension of db-net, i.e., timed db-net, is proposed, fully equipped with execution semantics. It is shown how EIPs can be realized based on timed db-nets and how the correctness of these realizations can be shown. Moreover, the simulation of EIP realizations based on timed db-nets is enabled which is essential for later implementation. The concepts are evaluated in many ways, including a proof-of-concept implementation and case studies. The EIP formalization based on timed db-nets constitutes the first step towards responsible EAI.
AB - Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) constitutes the cornerstone in enterprise IT landscapes that are characterized by heterogeneity and distribution. Starting from established Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs) such as Content-based Router and Aggregator, EIP compositions are built to describe, implement, and execute integration scenarios. The EIPs and their compositions must be correct at design and runtime in order to avoid functional errors or incomplete functionalities. However, current EAI system vendors use many of the EIPs as part of their proprietary integration scenario modeling languages that are not grounded on any formalism. This renders correctness guarantees for EIPs and their composition impossible. Thus this work advocates responsible EAI based on the formalization, implementation, and correctness of EIPs. For this, requirements on an EIP formalization are collected and based on these requirements an extension of db-net, i.e., timed db-net, is proposed, fully equipped with execution semantics. It is shown how EIPs can be realized based on timed db-nets and how the correctness of these realizations can be shown. Moreover, the simulation of EIP realizations based on timed db-nets is enabled which is essential for later implementation. The concepts are evaluated in many ways, including a proof-of-concept implementation and case studies. The EIP formalization based on timed db-nets constitutes the first step towards responsible EAI.
KW - Enterprise application integration
KW - Enterprise integration patterns
KW - Petri nets
KW - Responsible programming
KW - Trustworthy application integration
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85073147011&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.is.2019.101439
DO - 10.1016/j.is.2019.101439
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85073147011
SN - 0306-4379
VL - 101
JO - Information Systems
JF - Information Systems
M1 - 101439
ER -