Characterising Enterprise Application Integration Solutions as Discrete-Event Systems

Abstract

It is not difficult to find an enterprise which has a software ecosystem composed of applications that were built using different technologies, data models, operating systems, and most often were not designed to exchange data and share functionalities. Enterprise Application Integration provides methodologies and tools to design and implement integration solutions. The state-of-the-art integration technologies provide a domain-specific language that enables the design of conceptual models for integration solutions. The analysis of integration solutions to predict their behaviour and find possible performance bottlenecks is an important activity that contributes to increase the quality of the delivered solutions, however, software engineers follow a costly, risky, and time-consuming approach. Integration solutions shall be understood as a discrete-event system. This chapter introduces a new approach based on simulation to take advantage of well-established techniques and tools for discrete-event simulation, cutting down cost, risk, and time to deliver better integration solutions.