The Transaction Pattern through Automating TrAM in Education & Practice

Speaker: Dr Simon Polovina

Title: The Transaction Pattern through Automating TrAM in Education & Practice

Abstract: Transaction Agent Modelling (TrAM) has demonstrated how the early requirements of complex enterprise applications can be captured and described in a lucid yet rigorous way. Using Geerts and McCarthy’s REA (Resource-Events-Agents) model as its basis, TrAM describes an enterprise architecture that captures the underlying ‘qualitative’ dimensions of business concepts and processes structured upon a transaction model that is emerging to be a design pattern. Key to underpinning the value of this transaction pattern however, the TrAM process needs to include automated model-checking. This automation tests the usefulness of the transaction pattern for enterprise systems applications across differing business domains. By simulating industrial practice that includes this automation through an experimental design conducted in an educational setting, the effectiveness of the transaction pattern is evaluated as an enterprise application, which we envisage as a multi-agent system in order to reflect the dynamic world of business activity. The study, which is still in progress, therefore assesses the value of TrAM to industry and enterprise systems education centred on the transaction pattern.