AeIMS

The Advanced Enterprise Information Management Systems (AeIMS)

Current research projects:

Moving Businesses Online
Key people: Ana Hol, Prof. Athula Ginige

Summary: The project studies how best small to medium business enterprises can meet the needs and demands of global markets. In particular, this project looks at how SMEs can eTransform by using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to meet the above needs. We have identified that SMES need to eTransform in different dimensions and in stages. We have also found that these changes can be broadly grouped into 4 stages. The project aims at identifying how best SMEs can be given guidance for a successful eTransformation. The research also explores how  gaps between ICT providers and SMEs requiring ICT help can be bridged.

The goals of this project are:

• To identify eTransformation dimensions and characteristics.
• To identify how to inform SMEs about their abilities and recommendations in terms of eTransformation.
• To identify how ICT SMEs can assist eTransforming SMEs.
• To identify what is required for SMEs to eTransform.
  

Development of an Online eTransformation Guide (eT Guide)
Key people: Ana Hol, Prof Athula Ginige

Summary: This project aims at developing an online system which SMEs will be able to use in order to guide, track and measure their eTransformation journey. The system is to guide SMEs and lead them to progress across eTransformation stages. The system is aimed at keeping SMEs past records and allowing them to monitor the progress made. In addition, the system will allow SMEs to create an electronic report that will give them summary details about their progress in terms of abilities. The report will describe what they can currently do with the resources they have as well as give them recommendations and suggest future actions.

The goals of this project are:

• To design a framework that can be used to guide eTransforming SMEs.
• To have the system implemented by eTransforming SMEs.
• For the system to be used by researchers to assess and analyse eTransforming SMEs.
  

Web Application Modelling
Key people: Athula Ginige, Danny Liang, Anupama Ginige, Buddhima De Silva

Summary: The aim of this research project is to study various types of Web Applications and identify the optimum way to model these with the view to rapidly develop web applications. These models need to be developed at 3 different levels; the Conceptual level for users to understand how the final application is going to look and what its capabilities going to be, the Logical Level for developers to understand how the conceptual model can be realised using logical building blocks and the Physical Level showing details of how to implement the logical building blocks.

The goals of this project are:

• To develop a way to create conceptual models of web applications.
• To develop a way to map these conceptual models to Logical Models.
• To investigate ways of auto generating code and databases from the conceptual model specifications for web applications.

Smart Business Objects (SBOs)
Key people: Danny Liang, Athula Ginige

Summary: At present, there is an emerging need to expedite web application development and to accommodate the constant evolution of web applications due to evolving business dynamics. This can be reflected by an increasing number of contemporary Web Application Frameworks with Object Relational Mapping (ORM) support and Model-Driven Development tools with powerful model-to-code generation capabilities. While business objects today can be generated from detailed, concrete UML class diagrams, there is still a mismatch between these current technologies and the essential support for high-level modelling and generation of web-enabled business objects required for extremely rapid web application development.

The need for a more abstract level of problem description has been long acknowledged in computer science . The goal of this research is to enable business objects in web applications to be modelled and generated at a higher-level of abstraction. There is, however, a greater semantic gap between the implementation and an abstract model than to a concrete model, which leads to the novel concept proposed in this research - Smart Business Object (SBO).

The goals of this project are:

• Enable business objects in web applications to be modelled and generated at a higher-level of abstraction.
• Create a business object modelling language.
• Create tools to convert the high-level specification of business objects into concrete implementations.
• Create a way to easily render interfaces to manipulate data in business objects within web applications.

Automating transformation of requirement specification to object models
Key people: Jamie Yang, Athula Ginige

Summary: The AeIMS research group has developed a framework called CBEADS, this framework supports a meta-design paradigm. This meta-model was based on three abstraction levels: Shell, Applications and Functions. A set of tools has been developed to facilitate the construction of applications using CBEADS. For instance, the SMART tools for generating Smart Business Objects (SBO), Workflow Engines (WFE), and tools for managing access control.

The project will systematically investigate the current issues and identify the gaps of turning concepts into realities with automation. More specifically, this research closely analyses the critical data abstractions, Functional abstraction and Object abstraction, and investigates effective approaches to automating the object simulation - assignment of business functions to objects. The automation mechanism will be eventually implemented under the CBEADS framework to enrich the CBEADS tool kit. The successful implementation of this project will alleviate laborious work like manually assigning behaviours to objects.

The goals of this project are:

• To deal with the challenging issues for bridging the gaps between requirements specification and system construction.
• To investigate effective transformation from case modeling to object modeling and to automate the object simulation and the assignment of business functions to objects. Its implementation to the CBEADS framework will enrich the CBEADS tool kit.
  

Investigating Process Modelling Mechanisms to Measure and Compute Carbon Emission of Organisational Processes
Key people: Anupama Ginige, Athula Ginige, Prem Samaranayake

Summary: This proposed project is the phase 1 of a long-term project. This initial phase aims to carryout a feasibility study in calculating Carbon Emission (CE) of organisational processes, by studying the CE factors and their linkage with process activities. The expected out come of this first-phase is to create a set of guidelines that will facilitate measuring, computing and evaluating CE at the organisational process level.

The goals of this project are:

• To indentify the factors that contribute to the CE and the methods associated in quantifying this.
• To investigate how organisational process elements be linked with the factors that contribute to CE in a manner that it can be quantified at the process level.
• Based on above findings to create a model to measure, compute and evaluate Carbon Emission (CE) using Process Modelling Techniques.