Implementation Model Simulation of Business Integration Solutions

The recent development of flow engines provides us with powerful capabilities for business integration solutions, typically comprising workflow applications, package applications, and legacy applications. This paper proposes a framework for simulating implementation model of business integration solutions using flow engines. The implementation model simulation refers to a simulation of a Platform-Specific Model for the solution development phase, and consists of real and simulated solution components. During the solution development phase, we often confront the situation where several solution components are ready, but others are still under development. Our simulation framework supports this phase, where there has not yet been any simulation conducted for functional and performance testing of a whole business integration solution. In the framework, a connection configuration lets a flow engine invoke a simulator instead of components still under development. The simulator waits for certain delay times based on the consumption of simulated resources, generates response messages, and sends them back to the flow engine. As new components become available, they can easily be included in the analysis by switching from the simulator to the real components. In addition, an acceleration method for compressing testing time is also proposed. The simulation framework lets us identify potential issues and defects in a business integration solution earlier, thereby helping to reduce costs and the time taken to complete an integration solution.

By: Makoto Kano, Akio Koide, Te-Kai Liu, and Bala Ramachandran

Published in: RT0587 in 2007

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