Business processes are increasingly distributed and open, making them prone to failure. Monitoring is, therefore, an important concern not only for the processes themselves but also for the services that comprise these processes. We present a framework for multilevel monitoring of these service systems. It formalizes interaction protocols, policies, and commitments that account for standard and extended effects following the language-action perspective, and allows specification of goals and monitors at varied abstraction levels. We demonstrate how the framework can be implemented and evaluate it with multiple scenarios that include specifying and monitoring open-service policy commitments.

Our group has taken a clinical approach to doing requirements engineering for a specific domain: delivering email tools to the cognitively impaired population. The clinical view suggests a process that first gathers an individual's goals, assesses the individual's abilities, delivers a tailored system, and finally, monitors usage over time to look for adaptation needs. One concept that has arisen from our project is the notion of a deferred requirement (or deferred goal). Professional clinicians ask an individual to think broadly of the goals they have, and think about not only goals that are achievable today, but ones that might be striven for and become achieved in the future. We discuss this idea of deferred requirements in terms of a longitudinal study working with nine participants over a two year period. We also report on initial attempts to build automated tools around deferred requirements, monitoring, and system adaptation.

Businesses that rely on Web services are vulnerable to the problems of those Web services. Service contracts and warranties can provide some assurances. However, they provide traditional recourse, rather than timely alerts of impending problems. While electronic commerce has increased the speed of online transactions, the technology of monitoring online transactions has lagged behind. To address the problem of Web service monitoring, we integrated methods of requirements analysis and software execution monitoring. The resulting system assists analysts in the development of Web service requirements monitors. We presented here builds on prior research by: (1) building on a goal-based method for obstacle discovery, (2) illustrating the derivation of assigned monitors from obstacles, and (3) automatically deriving Web service monitors from high-level requirements descriptions. The framework, and tool, provides an important contribution by demonstrating how distributed concurrent Web service transactions can be monitored at the requirements level.

With the growing popularity of object-oriented technology, specification by use cases has grown. Since use cases provide a bridge from the informal descriptions gathered from user interviews to the more formal software model, use cases are being considered a prominent part of software analysis. Yet, tools to assist the development of use cases are rare, especially, in practice. Our study aims to provide use case reuse, while relying only on the semantics of UML and the diagrams typically used by analysis. We present an automated technique that provides for the assisted reuse of use cases. A software analyst defines an initial description of a use case. An automated graph-based relational learner then retrieves a set of similar use cases from a database. The results of a preliminary application of our approach suggest that it can assist in the classification as well as retrieval of use cases.

Global and electronic markets are increasingly forcing manufacturing enterprises to become more competitive. As a result, many manufacturing enterprises are seeking to manage their supply chains more effectively. Product differentiation timing is one important factor in supply chain management. Under an early product differentiation process, finished products are manufactured and stored in a distribution center until delivery. Under a delayed product differentiation process, partially completed product components are manufactured and stored in a distribution center; later, based on demand information, finished products are completed from the product components. The difference in value between early product differentiation and delayed product differentiation is the value of postponement. Prior research has analytically shown that the value of postponement is affected by information precision in demand forecasts. In this article, we investigate whether adding a market-making electronic broker to a supply chain increases the value of postponement. We hypothesize that it may do so by providing greater accuracy in demand forecasting. We test this relationship by comparing the results of agent-based simulations that vary between early and late differentiation strategies and the use of an electronic broker. In each simulation, the effects of demand correlation, demand variability, and demand pooling are considered. The simulations show that an electronic broker increases inventory cost savings (compared to a non-broker) and increases the value of postponement in the face of increasing demand variability, increasing demand pooling, and decreasing demand correlation. Moreover, an electronic broker may, through its own actions, increase demand variability and demand pooling, while decreasing demand correlation, thereby creating the environment in which is best operates.

Managing the development of software requirements can be a complex and difficult task. The environment is often chaotic. As analysts and customers leave the project, they are replaced by others who drive development in new directions. As a result, inconsistencies arise. Newer requirements introduce inconsistencies with older requirements. The introduction of such requirements inconsistencies may violate stated goals of development. In this article, techniques are presented that manage requirements document inconsistency by managing inconsistencies that arise between requirement development goals and requirements development enactment. A specialized development model, called a requirements dialog meta-model, is presented. This meta-model defines a conceptual framework for dialog goal definition, monitoring, and in the case of goal failure, dialog goal reestablishment. The requirements dialog meta-model is supported in an automated multiuser World Wide Web environment, called DEALSCRIBE. An exploratory case study of its use is reported. This research supports the conclusions that: an automated tool that supports the dialog meta-model can automate the monitoring and reestablishment of formal development goals; development goal monitoring can be used to determine statements of a development dialog that fail to satisfy development goals; and development goal monitoring can be used to manage inconsistencies in a developing requirements document. The application of DEALSCRIBE demonstrates that a dialog meta-model can enable a powerful environment for managing development and document inconsistencies.

Requirements engineering necessitates the analysis of relationships among the requirements of system stakeholders.Poor analysis of these relationships has led to numerous failures.To improve such analysis, researchers have created models and methods for recording, analyzing, and modifying stakeholder requirements.However, the critical aspect of representing and reasoning about stakeholder interactions remains relatively implicit.Herein, we explicitly define: (1) a meta-model for capturing stakeholder requirements, and (2) methods for restructuring requirements.To validate the utility of our approach, we have applied it to the analysis of a distributed meeting scheduler.We conclude that the model and its automated methods do provide substantial support for analysis of stakeholder requirements interactions.