A Model-driven Approach for Business Constraints Discovery

Business constraints restrict the enterprise structure, govern the business behavior and contribute to the business goals. Due to stuff turnover and lack of documentation the knowledge of what constraints exist and how they interact are often poorly defined. This can seriously hinder an organization to understand how the business behaves and operates and to seize new opportunities or improve the business performance. A model-driven discovery approach is proposed to help the user to uncover the business constraints from the enterprise documents. This approach proposes a meta-model to describe the ontological constructs of the business constraints enforcing environment, defines a set of formal templates to document the business constraints to facilitate communication, sharing and reuse, gives a verification algorithm to ensure the completeness and validness of the discovered business constraints, defines the interactions among business constraints and finally proposes an elicitation procedure to efficiently guide the business users to discover the business constraints. Moreover, an example is presented to demonstrate the discovery approach of the business constraints and their usage for decision-making.