A Feasibility Study of the Ontology Driven Executable Systems Architecture Framework

Abstract

The paper presents a framework to manage consistency in the architecture of a large-scale system. The paper highlights the framework with the help of a case study that models academic business processes in higher education institutions. The presented framework improves the communication among different stakeholders and helps the system designer/modeller to eliminate discrepancies in the design phase. It automatically generates a Coloured Petri nets (CPN) (with Guard conditions and arcs inscription) model from OWL ontology (with SWRL rules embedded). The paper highlights the fact that the Guard conditions alone cannot always fulfil the requirements of operational rules mapping. It suggests mapping SWRL rules to arcs inscriptions in the CPN model. The enhanced framework, thus, provides strong support for mapping SWRL rule to Guard conditions as well as to arcs inscriptions. The overall transformation process helps in verifying a user's requirements, specified in SWRL rule, by simulating them in the corresponding automatically generated CPN model.