Sérgio Guerreiro

As event-driven microservice architectures become more prevalent in modern software systems, especially those integrated with business processes, the issue of consistency across distributed components has emerged as a central challenge. Despite extensive adoption, there remains no clear consensus on what microservices are or how consistency should be defined and maintained across such systems. This paper addresses the fragmented understanding of consistency in microservice architectures, aiming to identify how it is conceptualized in the literature and what strategies are used to manage it effectively. The methodology follows the systematic review procedures originally proposed by Kitchenham [1]. The review revealed three dominant categories of consistency: data consistency, process consistency, and system evolution consistency. Each type involves distinct approaches that address specific challenges documented in the literature. These concerns are often addressed in isolation, resulting in a fragmented research landscape. The selection of digital libraries and the exclusion of gray literature may have limited the scope of the review. Future work could expand the dataset and further validate the proposed model. Other categories that are deemed relevant may also be added. Three main originality aspects are identified in this paper as follows: i) the categorization of consistency into the three types; ii) the organization of the main approaches used to address each type of consistency; and iii) the discussion of the relationship between consistency types and the selection of appropriate approaches to guarantee each type.

Proprietary workflow modeling languages such as Smart Forms & Smart Flow hamper interoperability and reuse because they lock process knowledge into closed formats. To address this vendor lock-in and ease migration to open standards, we introduce an ontology-driven model-to-model pipeline that systematically translates domain-specific workflow definitions to Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0. The pipeline comprises three phases: RML-based semantic lifting of JSON to RDF/OWL, ontology alignment and reasoning, and BPMN generation via the Camunda Model API. By externalizing mapping knowledge into ontologies and declarative rules rather than code, the approach supports reusability across vendor-specific formats and preserves semantic traceability between source definitions and target BPMN models. We instantiated the pipeline for Instituto Superior Técnico (IST)'s Smart Forms & Smart Flow and implemented a converter that produces standard-compliant BPMN diagrams. Evaluation on a corpus of 69 real-world workflows produced 92 BPMN diagrams with a 94.2% success rate. Failures (5.81%) stemmed from dynamic behaviors and time-based transitions not explicit in the static JSON. Interviews with support and development teams indicated that the resulting diagrams provide a top-down view that improves comprehension, diagnosis and onboarding by exposing implicit control flow and linking tasks and forms back to their sources. The pipeline is generalizable to other proprietary workflow languages by adapting the ontology and mappings, enabling interoperability and reducing vendor dependency while supporting continuous integration and long-term maintainability. The presented case study demonstrates that ontology-driven M2M transformation can systematically bridge domain-specific workflows and standard notations, offering quantifiable performance and qualitative benefits for stakeholders.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is defined as a set of principles, methods, and models that support the design of organizational structures, expressing the different concerns of a company and its IT landscape, including processes, services, applications, and data. One role of EA management is to automate modeling tasks and maintain up-to-date EA models while reality changes. However, EA modeling still relies primarily on manual methods. Contributing to EA modeling automation, EA Mining is an approach that uses data mining techniques for EA modeling and management. It automatically captures existing information in operational databases to generate architectural models and views. This paper presents an ontology for EA Mining that focuses on generating architectural models from API gateway log files. An ontology defines the concepts and relationships among them to uniquely describe a domain of interest and specify the meaning of the terms. API Gateways are information technology components that serve as a facade between information systems and enterprise business partners. The ontology development methodology followed the SABiO process, whereas the Unified Foundational Ontology provided the foundations of the ontology and OntoUML, the ontology modeling language. An experiment in an e-commerce application scenario was conducted to evaluate the theoretical feasibility and applicability of the ontology. Automatic semantic and syntactic validation tools and semi-structured expert interviews were used to confirm the desired ontology properties. This study aims to contribute to the evolution of the knowledge base of EA Management.

Association Rule Mining (ARM) is a field of data mining (DM) that attempts to identify correlations among database items. It has been applied in various domains to discover patterns, provide insight into different topics, and build understandable, descriptive, and predictive models. On the one hand, Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a coherent set of principles, methods, and models suitable for designing organizational structures. It uses viewpoints derived from EA models to express different concerns about a company and its IT landscape, such as organizational hierarchies, processes, services, applications, and data. EA mining is the use of DM techniques to obtain EA models. This paper presents a literature review to identify the newest and most cited ARM algorithms and techniques suitable for EA mining that focus on automating the creation of EA models from existent data in application systems and services. It systematically identifies and maps fourteen candidate algorithms into four categories useful for EA mining: (i) General Frequent Pattern Mining, (ii) High Utility Pattern Mining, (iii) Parallel Pattern Mining, and (iv) Distribute Pattern Mining. Based on that, it discusses some possibilities and presents an exemplification with a prototype hypothesizing an ARM application for EA mining.

Purpose: Testing business processes is crucial to assess the compliance of business process models with requirements. Automating this task optimizes testing efforts and reduces human error while also providing improvement insights for the business process modeling activity. The primary purposes of this paper are to conduct a literature review of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) testing and formal verification and to propose the Business Process Evaluation and Research Framework for Enhancement and Continuous Testing (bPERFECT) framework, which aims to guide business process testing (BPT) research and implementation. Secondary objectives include (1) eliciting the existing types of testing, (2) evaluating their impact on efficiency and (3) assessing the formal verification techniques that complement testing.Design/methodology/approach: The methodology used is based on Kitchenham's (2004) original procedures for conducting systematic literature reviews.Findings: Results of this study indicate that three distinct business process model testing types can be found in the literature: black/gray-box, regression and integration. Testing and verification approaches differ in aspects such as awareness of test data, coverage criteria and auxiliary representations used. However, most solutions pose notable hindrances, such as BPMN element limitations, that lead to limited practicality.Research limitations/implications: The databases selected in the review protocol may have excluded relevant studies on this topic. More databases and gray literature could also be considered for inclusion in this review.Originality/value: Three main originality aspects are identified in this study as follows: (1) the classification of process model testing types, (2) the future trends foreseen for BPMN model testing and verification and (3) the bPERFECT framework for testing business processes.