Abstract
Information systems are a kind of service systems and they are throughout every element of a modern industrial and business system, much like blood in our body. Types of information systems are heterogeneous because of extreme uncertainty in changes in modern industrial and business systems. To effectively manage information systems, modelling of the work domain (or domain) of information systems is necessary. In this paper, a domain modelling framework for the service system is proposed and its application to the enterprise information system is outlined. The framework is defined based on application of a general domain modelling tool called function-context-behaviour-principle-state-structure (FCBPSS). The FCBPSS is based on a set of core concepts, namely: function, context, behaviour, principle, state and structure and system decomposition. Different from many other applications of FCBPSS in systems engineering, the FCBPSS is applied to both infrastructure and substance systems, which is novel and effective to modelling of service systems including enterprise information systems. It is to be noted that domain modelling of systems (e.g. enterprise information systems) is a key to integration of heterogeneous systems and to coping with unanticipated situations facing to systems.
Acknowledgements
The authors want to thank the financial support to this work by NSERC through a strategic project grant, and a grant of ECUST through a program of the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities to W.J. Zhang, and by NSFC (Grant No. 71001018, 61273031) of China to H.F. Wang and J.L. Ding. Our gratitude is also extended to the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (G-YK04).