Agile Net-Centric Systems Using DEVS Unified Process

Abstract

Industry and government are spending extensively to transition their business processes and governance to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementations for efficient information reuse, integration, collaboration and cost-sharing. SOA enables orchestrating web services to execute such processes using Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is another method that outputs BPEL for deployment. As an example, the Department of Defenses (DoD) grand vision is the Global Information Grid that is founded on SOA infrastructure. The SOA infrastructure is to be based on a small set of capabilities known as Core Enterprise Services (CES) whose use is mandated to enable interoperability and increased information sharing within and across Mission Areas, such as the Warfighter domain, Business processes, Defense Intelligence, and so on. Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) is DoDs implementation of its Data Strategy over the GIG. However, composing/orchestrating web services in a process workflow (a.k.a Mission thread in the DoD domain) is currently bounded by the BPMN/BPEL technologies. With so much resting on SOA, their reliability and analysis must be rigorously considered. The BPMN/BPEL combination neither has any grounding in system theoretical principles nor can it be used in designing net-centric systems based on SOA in its current state. In this work we present a system theoretical framework using the DEVS Unified Process (DUNIP) that allows bifurcated model-continuity based life cycle process for simultaneous development of the executable system using web-services (including the model) and the automated generation of Test-suite for Verification and Validation. The entire net-centric system, which includes artifacts like the model, the simulation and the real system, is deployed on SOA. The simulation system is made possible on a recently developed DEVS-based service framework called DEVS/SOA. We will show the design of DEVS-agents based on WSDLs and how they are composed towards the systems specification. We will demonstrate how agility is an inherent characteristic of such a system founded on DUNIP. We will also present the case of Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) and how agility can be applied to the design and evaluation process. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.