[CfP] Special Issue of Springer's journal on Model-Based Systems Engineering for Next Generation Enterprise Information Systems

Information Systems and e-Business Management Journal (Springer)
Impact Factor (2013): 0.348
http://www.springer.com/business+%26+management/business+information+systems/journal/10257

Special Issue on Model-Based Systems Engineering for Next Generation
Enterprise Information Systems (
http://static.springer.com/sgw/documents/1483012/application/pdf/10257_CfP_Model-Based+Systems+Engineering_2014.pdf
)
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Submission deadline: June 15th, 2015
Submission procedure:
The full papers will be subjected to a double blind review (or to a second
round of review if necessary). The full paper version shall follow the
Journal author’s guidelines and will be submitted to the to the journal
website (http://www.editorialmanager.com/iseb/default.aspx) indicating the
following article type: “S.I. : Model-based engineering for next-generation
EIS”.

Guest editors
---------------

dr Milan ZDRAVKOVIĆ, Laboratory for Intelligent Production Systems,
University of Niš, Serbia,
Email: milan.zdravkovic@masfak.ni.ac.rs
Prof. dr Hervé PANETTO, Research Centre for Automatic Control, University
of Lorraine, CNRS. School of Engineering in Information Technology, France
Email: Herve.Panetto@univ-lorraine.fr

Background and Motivation
----------------------------

Transformation of the environment in which Enterprise Information Systems
(EIS) are operating today is posing the new challenges to their modeling,
design, implementation and use. One of the crucial circumstances of this
transformation is removal of their traditional boundaries. The challenges
arising from the increased requirements for flexibility in enterprise
collaboration put a lot of pressure to the research on EIS integration and
interoperability; they also urge for tools and approaches for rapid and
active adaption of those EISs to the changing environment . The research
and development of multi-agent systems paradigm are enabling EISs with
multiple identities which are now representing enterprises in the digital
space. The development of the Cyber-physical networks and the Internet of
Things expanded the EIS scope, by introducing sensing and
location-awareness aspects. The advances in cloud-based computing clearly
established the distribution of the EISs’ functional and storage
capabilities as the default approach to their designs. In a recently
submitted position paper, based on the above circumstances, the Technical
committee for Enterprise Integration and Networking of the International
Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC TC5.3) proposed the concept of the
Next Generation EIS (NG EIS), which is federated, omnipresent,
model-driven, open, reconfigurable and aware. All these properties imply
that the future NG EIS is inherently, natively interoperable.

Goals and Topics
------------------

One of the important effects of the foreseen properties, as EISs are
becoming more complex, the gap between the problem-level software
abstractions of the EIS aspects on one side and their implementations, on
another, will significantly increase. This increase will put a lot of
pressure on the traditional model-based system engineering (MBSE) theory
and practice. In attempt to anticipate the directions for their future
development, the special issue aims at addressing the implications arising
from the foreseen evolution towards NG EIS. Some of the open problems are
described, as it follows:

- Runtime models. Runtime models can facilitate removing complexity from
EIS architecture. Hence, in the future, EIS may in fact become core
execution platforms which only interpret and execute different models. Is
this vision far from reality?
- Context models. The context models can specify the surrounding
environment of one EIS, including its behavior and interfaces. They
facilitate context-aware applications, capable to respond to the
environment’s stimuli and then, to adapt themselves and thus diminish the
environmental impact to the running system.
- Formal models. Lack of ontological commitment is one of the main
obstacles for validation of the designs modeled by the today’s system
modeling languages and notations. However, despite the strong foundation
defined in nineties, ontology languages are not yet used as the tools for
system modeling.
- Ontology-driven systems. To which extent current Semantic Web languages
are mature to facilitate ontologydriven systems? Are there reasoning
performance issues, especially for formal ontologies, or other issues? Are
there ontology engineering methodologies to overcome these issues?
- Design-for-interoperability. Interoperability is often defined as “a
property of a product or system, whose interfaces are completely
understood, to work with other products or systems, present or future,
without any restricted access or implementation”. Being the inherent
property of NG EIS, the interoperability will significantly affect its
design and architecture. Which are these effects?
- Models validation. Typically, the models of EISs are extensively large
and it is very difficult to query or browse them. More important, in
general, there exist no tools for their analysis, e.g. in terms of
consistency checking, dependability and completeness.
- Formal models of the business logic. Formal modeling languages are
successfully used to model the information artifacts of one EIS. However,
there exist very few works which deal with formal modeling of business
logic.
- Formal Specification Techniques (FST) (e.g. Z, B, Alloy) are used in the
past to address some aspects of the above problem, but with limited
integration with widely used formalisms (such as UML, SysUML) and hence,
limited impact.
- Model-to-model transformations. Despite many works in the topic, the
foundation for specifying model-to-model transformations is not yet built.
The model transformations are one of the main facilitators of the systems
interoperability - the inherent property of the NG EIS, thus extremely
important.
Model-to-model mapping. Model-to-model mapping deals with semantics
representation and knowledge engineering, with a constraint dealt by the
inherently multi-disciplinary vision of the design of an information
system. The models mapping are one of the important pillars of the systems
interoperability.
- CPS and IoT applications models. Cyber Physical Systems and IoT
applications introduced new abstractions to EIS modeling and design. How
these abstractions work with the existing system modeling and engineering
tools and techniques?
- Demonstration of MBSE approaches in specific domains.  Are there
evidences of the successful domain or crossdomain applications of the MBSE
approaches for information systems that exhibit some of the properties of
NG EIS?

Besides the specific topics listed above, the Special issue will also
consider other papers of the high quality, with contributions that are
moving forward the boundaries of knowledge of the Model-Based System
Engineering area.