An Ontology-Based and Model-Driven Approach for Designing IT Service Management Systems

Currently, few projects applying a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach start from high-level requirements models defined exclusively in terms of domain knowledge and business logic. Ontology Engineering (OE) aims to formalize and make explicit the knowledge related to a particular domain. In this vein, this paper presents a modeling approach, formalized in ontological terms, for defining high-level requirements models of software systems that provide support for the implementation of Information Technology Service Management Systems (ITSMSs). This approach allows for: (1) formalizing the knowledge associated to the ITSM processes contained in an ITSMS; (2) modeling the semantics of the activities associated to these processes in terms of workflows; (3) automatically generating the high-level requirements models of the workflow-based software systems needed to support (part of) the ITSM processes; and (4) from the latter, obtaining lower-level models (and eventually code) by means of automated model transformations. A real case study describing the use of this proposal to model an Incident Management System is also included to demonstrate the feasibility and the benefits of the proposed approach.