David Aveiro

University of Madeira | UMA · Exact Sciences and Engineering Centre

Low-code platforms have gained attention in recent years as a visual and model-driven approach to application development. This approach uses drag-and-drop elements, model- driven logic, and graphical user interfaces to democratize devel- opment, making it possible for developers or business analysts of various skill levels to produce applications....

We consider current Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) Action Rules Specification to be unnecessarily complex and ambiguous. Even while using a “structured English” syntax similar to the one used in Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR), such specifications are: incomplete while not containing enough on...

The production of self-executing computational agreements in the form of smart contracts remains a manual coding endeavour that hinders the widespread adoption of solutions that run on top of a distributed ledger technology such as blockchain. We explore the automatic generation of smart contracts based on a visual composition of reusable action ru...

The Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) comprises a set of models and diagrams to represent an organization. A proposal for a new Process Diagram and a Transaction Description Table fuses part of the contents of DEMO's Process, Cooperation, and Action models. It claims to have achieved a more agile and comprehensive solution...

DEMO's Way of Modeling comprises a set of models and diagrams to represent an organization. They are interconnected, representing the organizational reality in a coherent and platform-independent way; however, it has been argued that the syntax and semantics of DEMO's Fact Model are too complex and cluttered, being difficult to interpret by laypeop...

The Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) comprises a set of models and diagrams to represent an organization. While applying DEMO on a project in collaboration with the town council of the city of Funchal, we saw a need for improvements in the Process Model. Thus, in this paper we propose improvements to the current body of k...

This paper reports the findings and insights obtained from the application of a DEMO-based methodology in a collaboration project with the town council of Funchal, city of Madeira Island, on the subject of the Portuguese Building Code of law. As agreed with the council, one of the goals of this project was to model the universe of discourse of thei...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 10th Enterprise Engineering Working Conference, EEWC 2020, which was planned to take place in Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, and had to change to an online event due to the COVID 19 pandemic. The online event took place on September 28, 2020, October 19, 2020, and November 9–10, 2020. EEWC aims at addressing the...

We consider current Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) Action Rules Specification to be unnecessarily complex and ambiguous. Even while using a “structured English” syntax similar to the one used in SBVR, such specifications are: incomplete while not containing enough ontological information to derive a functional implement...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 9th Enterprise Engineering Working Conference, EEWC 2019, held in Lisbon, Portugal, May 2019. EEWC aims at addressing the challenges that modern and complex enterprises are facing in a rapidly changing world. The participants of the working conference share a belief that dealing with these challenges req...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, IC3K 2018, held in Seville, Spain, in September 2018. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions. The papers are organized in topical...

This book constitutes the revised selected papers of the 11th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, IC3K 2019, held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2019. The 25 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 220 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sectio...

In a previous version of this publication, the affiliation of the second editor was incomplete. This has now been corrected.

This works proposes a colored Petri-Net for implementing DEMO/PSI Transactions. It is based on previous works by the community and on requirement clarifications that happened on a working session on 2017 Enterprise Engineering Working Conference. The solution was designed taking into consideration an asynchronous and distributed system. It also int...

In this paper we use Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) to formally describe the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (2016/679) which entries into force and application on May 25, 2018. This law introduces a paradigm shift in information systems by requiring by design and by default much more control on person...

Enterprises are dynamic systems that struggle to adapt to the constant changes in their environment. The complexity of these systems frequently originates inefficiencies that turn into the loss of resources and might even compromise organizations’ viability. Control and G.O.D. (sub)organizations allow enterprises to specify measures and viability n...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, IC3K 2016, held in Porto, Portugal, in November 2016. The 18 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 186 submissions. The papers are organized in topical...

In this paper we use Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) to formally describe the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (2016/679) which entries into force and application on May 25, 2018. This law introduces a paradigm shift in information systems by requiring by design and by default much more control on person...

This works proposes a colored Petri-Net for implementing DEMO/PSI Transactions. It is based on previous works by the community and on requirement clarifications that happened on a working session on 2017 Enterprise Engineering Working Conference. The solution was designed taking into consideration an asynchronous and distributed system. It also int...

This work reports progress in the author's PhD program. The author aims at contributing to the evolution of Enterprise Engineering (EE) theory, more specifically on DEMO/PSI theory, namely: a) improving the transaction pattern so that it can be used in asynchronous and distributed systems; b) allowing more than two actor roles in the transaction pa...

Intervac Home Exchange is an international club, created in 1953, where members exchange their house during a limited period without money transfers between them. Both parties negotiate and establish an exchange agreement with specific terms of the exchange. This club requested our collaboration to improve their existing online exchange agreement,...

This work aims at reporting progress in the authors PhD program and planning the remaining steps. It starts by summarizing the contributions from previous work. Then states main problem, desired goal and research question. The desired goal is to create an executable artefact for organizations-and this work presents the proposed architecture to achi...

This work analyzes two sources of law and elicit its underlying transactions. Then tries to model them using DEMO/PSI theory and analyzes the assumptions mismatches between law and DEMO/PSI. Design Engineering and Modeling for Organizations (DEMO) is a general-purpose theory and method to model interactions in society (between individuals and/or or...

The domain of Knowledge Discovery (KD) and Data Mining (DM) is of growing importance in a time where more and more data is produced and knowledge is one of the most precious assets. Having explored both the existing underlying theory, the results of the ongoing research in academia and the industry practices in the domain of KD and DM, it was found...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th Enterprise Engineering Working Conference, EEWC 2017, held in Antwerp, Belgium, in May 2017. EEWC aims at addressing the challenges that modern and complex enterprises are facing in a rapidly changing world. The participants of the working conference share a belief that dealing with these challenges...

This paper introduces an ongoing research that seeks a combination between the Organizational Engineering (OE) approach and the Theory of Document Acts (D-Acts). The motivation for such research is the possibility of improvements in DEMO Method from the application of tenets formulated in Document Acts Theory and D-Act ontology. Even though DEMO is...

This work builds upon the FI [1] and MU [2] theories, that belong to the 2015 ensemble of theories from the discipline of enterprise engineering [3]. We critique several aspects of those theories and build upon them proposing a modelling ontology to represent the world, having an asynchronous network of actors, as a requirement. This modelling onto...

This work aims at contributing to the design of an Information System (IS) that adequately support human interactions in organizations in an message based asynchronous network. We move forward based on previous work [1], presented at the CIAO! 2015 Doctoral Consortium, where two protocols were given for DEMO Engines: PSI and Tell&Agree. In this wor...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, IC3K 2015, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in November 2015. The 25 full papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 280 submissions. The...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th Enterprise Engineering Working Conference (EEWC), held in Funchal, Madeira Island, Portugal, on May 30 - June 3, 2016. EEWC aims at addressing the challenges that modern and complex enterprises are facing in a rapidly changing world. The participants of the working conference share a belief that deal...

This paper has as its background, a practical enterprise change project where the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) was used in the initial stage as to give a neutral and concise but comprehensive view of the organization of a local government administration in the process of implementing an e-government project. The main...

We found difficulties in implementing a software artifact that was compliant with the DEMO theory/grammar. We analyzed two existing implementations of this pattern and found that they don't fully comply with theory/grammar, as the sequences of acts they accept do not fully match the DEMO grammar. This work presents two solutions: The first, is a th...

Organizations still struggle to maintain and develop their software patrimony, the tool that usually makes the difference in the organization's activity among its market competitors towards survival and consequent desired contribution to the society, something which nowadays is particularly important for those which activities' heavily rely on info...

This paper aims to introduce the field of enterprise ontology and enterprise engineering, as well as the related Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO). Several core concepts and benefits are introduced, followed by the presentation of a case study confirming some of these benefits. In this case study of a practical enterprise...

In this paper we present a novel conceptual model that systematizes the integrated management and adaptation of: (1) enterprise models, (2) their representations, (3) their underlying meta-models (i.e. their abstract syntax) and (4) the representation rules (i.e. concrete syntax for the respective models). All this for different modelling languages...

In this paper, we analyze relevant state of the art in the areas of Service Science, Business Modeling and Enterprise Engineering in specifying service systems. The main shortcoming identified essentially resides in the lack of capability to model the purpose and value of a given service system in a structured way to guide current and future develo...

One outstanding issue in modern information systems development is the Return of Investment (ROI) of supporting Business Processes (BPs) through in-house development and/or integration of business modules from component-based development. Software solutions to solve this problem will usually be based in internal software development processes where...

In this paper, we analyze relevant state of the art in the areas of Service Science, Business Modeling and Enterprise Engineering in specifying service systems. The main shortcoming identified essentially resides in the lack of capability to model the purpose and value of a given service system in a structured way to guide current and future develo...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th Enterprise Engineering Working Conference, EEWC 2015, held in Prague, Czech Republic, during May 15–19, 2015. EEWC aims at addressing the challenges that modern and complex enterprises face in a rapidly changing world. The participants of the working conference share a belief that dealing with these...

In this paper, we present a match between two ontologies, DEMO and e3Value, with the aim of bridging the gap between Business Modelling and Enterprise Engineering. The goal is to provide an objective set of concepts for integrating the teleological and ontological perspectives of a system. DEMO contributes to the constructability of a business mode...

The current way of specifying Action Rules in the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) is ambiguous and leads to incomplete specifications that do not contain enough ontological information so that we can more systematically convert DEMO models to comprehensive Business Process Management and Notation (BPMN). With our proposa...

In this paper we provide a model for the bonding of systems in a value network. Our main contributions are: 1) a structural model of the chains and their viewpoints, and 2) a specification of how to use that structure within a process that supports the formalization of the rationale behind system development decisions. To provide a solution to this...

Enterprise engineering (EE) is a growing scientific discipline that takes the increasingly needed construction-oriented point of view, and aims to provide synthetic knowledge for letting enterprises more effectively and continuously adapt to threats and challenges. In this paper we present the τ-theory, being developed to support EE and consisting...

This case study paper presents DEMO models of a very complex process of urban construction licensing from a city hall. From our practical experience in this project, we elicit some guidelines and process patterns that may be useful to other similar projects and also guide DEMO modelers in similar scenarios of process complexity. From the metrics we...

This chapter aims at clarifying the notion of organization se If-awareness (OSA) as the state of a collective awareness of the enterprise system. We examine how such awareness arises from the collective action of the enterprise’s agents, while applying principles and methods of enterprise engineering and enterprise architecture. We find that value...

This paper reflects some useful outcomes of a practical enterprise change project where the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) was used in the initial stage as to give a neutral and concise but comprehensive view of the organization of a local government administration having the purpose to implement an e-government project...

More than ever, enterprises aim at assuring their structure and initiative portfolio are aligned and support value-creation. However, essential, explicit and cross-cutting models that allow keeping bottom-line in sight over the whole initiative lifecycle are generally absent. The role of IT Demand Management is instrumental in addressing this issue...

This paper reflects some useful outcomes of a practical enterprise change project where the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) was used in the initial stage as to give a neutral and concise but comprehensive view of the organization of a local government administration having the purpose to implement an e-government project...

Although significant progresses have been made in recent years regarding the goals of Enterprise Engineering, we find that the rationale behind every component of an organization is still not systematically and clearly specified. Indeed, state of the art approaches to enterprise development processes do not explicitly incorporate an essential dimen...

A century ago, Taylor published a landmark in the organisational sciences: his Principles of Scientific Management. Many researchers have elaborated on Taylors principles, or have been influenced otherwise. The authors of the current paper evaluate a century of enterprise development, and conclude that a paradigm shift is needed for dealing adequat...

Introduce the field of enterprise engineering, as well as the related Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) and shows how we can look at the concepts of information and technology with less ambiguity. Throughout the paper several fundamental concepts are introduced followed by a presentation of two case studies confirming some...

In this paper we present a novel conceptual model that systematizes the integrated management and adaptation of: (1) enterprise models, (2) their representations, (3) their underlying meta-models, i.e., their abstract syntax and (4) the representation rules, i.e., concrete syntax for the respective models. All this for different modeling languages...

In this paper we present a solution currently being developed to enable collaborative enterprise ontology model management using the Semantic MediaWiki as a base tool. This solution is solidly grounded on the theoretical foundations of Organizational Self-Awareness and φ-theory of enterprise ontology and is a valuable contribution to facilitate gen...

Enterprise Engineering is a means of applying engineering method to Enterprise Architecture, developing and evolving the mapping enterprise strategy to its resources. The potential benefits of service orientation have long been considered a driver for Enterprise Engineering. However, the service development discipline as a whole is still in it earl...

A certain state of an organization, in its strategic, tactical and operational components results from a combination of elements that makes it a very complex entity. Its components should co-exist in a dynamic and constant balance, whose configuration must have flexible and adaptable reaction mechanisms. As processes increase in complexity, it beco...

It is widely recognized that a large percentage of IT initiatives fail from a business perspective. This is attributed to many factors, namely system complexity and change pace. We believe that the system development process itself is a crucial aspect of this state of affairs and a paradigm shift is required. There is a lack a common set of concept...

Current Enterprise Engineering state of the art does not fully address concerns such as bootstrapping and reengineering a working organization from the business perspective. It is currently focused on ontology, the constructional vision, rather than the function. We argue that the function design deserves no less modeling effort, as the constructio...

Defining the purpose of a system is non-trivial as, by definition, it arises from the relation with its environment. In this paper, we analyze relevant state of the art in the areas of General Systems Theory, Enterprise Engineering, Value Modeling, Enterprise Architecture and Business Modeling. Their main shortcoming essentially resides in lack of...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Second Enterprise Engineering Working Conference (EEWC), held in Delft, The Netherlands, during May 7-8, 2012.EEWC aims at addressing the challenges that modern and complex enterprises are facing in a rapidly changing world. The participants of the working conference share a belief that dealing with thes...

In this paper we apply the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO), to specify an ontological model for the generic Control Organization that we argue that exists in every organization. With our proposal, DEMO is extended so that we can specify critical properties of an organization – that we call measures – whose value must res...

Much time is lost in organisations in handling unknown exceptions because organisational models are not current or coherent with reality, and there is a lack of concepts and methods in Organisational Engineering (OE) for a continuous and timely update of models of organisational reality. To address these problems, a renowned methodology for OE – De...

We propose an extension for the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations – DEMO – to support organization and model change dynamics: the ontological model of the generic G.O.D. organization, considered to exist in every organization and being responsible for the Generation, Operationalization and Discontinuation of organization artifact...

In this paper we draw on concepts from the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations, and also from its theoretical foundations, to discuss our notions of Organizational Self-Awareness and ontological meta model. These are deemed as central notions to understand and present, in a clear and precise manner, solutions for our main research...

Much time is lost, in organizations, in the handling of unknown exceptions because organizational models are not current or coherent with reality and there is a lack of concepts and methods in organizational engineering (OE), for a continuous and timely update of models of organizational reality. To address these problems, a renowned methodology fo...

This paper presents a basic set of modeling primitives with the purpose of enabling the construction of semantically rich and coherently integrated organizational models, in the context of enterprise engineering and architecture. This set, called "semantic bootstrap for organizational modeling", is being operationalized through the use of a semanti...

Process orientation is a major concern nowadays. For this reason there have been great advances in business process modelling as means to better understand and promote organizational operations and evolution. However, organizational functions such as logistics, quality, finance, etc. still exist and strongly influence aspects like change processes,...

Although there have been great advances in business process modeling as a means to better understand and control organizations and improve the development of information systems, the existence of functions - like IT, logistics, financial, etc. - is an inescapable reality in organizations, that strongly influences aspects like change processes, or t...