Environment Based Design Approach to Integrating Enterprise Applications

Abstract

Enterprises tend to depend on various legacy applications in supporting their business strategies and in achieving their goals. In order for an enterprise to be efficient and cost-effective, their legacy applications should be seamlessly integrated within and beyond the enterprise. Some research work in enterprise applications integrations (EAI) analyzed the problem, while others proposed solution models for the syntactic and semantic integration of business processes. In this paper, the EAI is considered as a design problem and is analyzed from design point of view. Environment based design (EBD) methodology is applied to handle the integration problem by analyzing and clarifying the design requirements to generate appropriate solutions. A framework is proposed for EAI problems based on the EBD approach. A case study is also provided to show how the approach can be applied within a company to generate satisfactory EAI solutions with low cost, high efficiency, and enhanced scalability.

Environment-Based Design (Ebd): Using Only Necessary Knowledge for Designer Creativity

“…The core of EBD is that products come from the environment, serve the environment, and change the environment (Zeng, 2004(Zeng, , 2012. EBD has been effectively applied in various fields, including generating design requirements in medical device design (Chen et al, 2005), developing a manual of quality management systems in the industry (Sun et al, 2011), solving enterprise applications integrations problem (Tan et al, 2012), developing a model for design chain management (Liu and Zeng, 2009), and analysing human factors (Mohammadi et al, 2022;Wen et al, 2022;Yang et al, 2021). It has also been applied in education (Ma et al, 2022;Ommi and Zeng, 2018;Su et al, 2022), organizational management (Wang et al, 2017), and health domain.…”

Supporting resilient conceptual design using functional decomposition and conflict resolution

“…Zeng eproposed and developed the EBD methodology [16,17], which was logically derived from the axiomatic theory of design modeling and was founded on the recursive logic of design [18,19]. Its advantage lies in finding out the key environment components, in which the product works, and the relationships between the environment components through environment analysis.…”