Three Tier Approach for Hierarchical Business State Engineering Prasad M. Jayaweera, Jeewanie Jayasinghe Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of ruhuna, Sri Lanka {Prasad, jeewanie}@cc.ruh.ac.lk Abstract – State oriented modeling approaches are popular in designing of IT solutions. When developing eBusiness systems wide spectrum of stakeholder participation is critical for successful system delivery. However, most of the existing state based techniques encourage lower level implementation perspective resulting limitations in communication with non- technical business users. The paper proposes three tier unified framework and a methodology to reach final implementation systematically starting from higher level business design. It is based on well established speech acts theory for business communication modeling. I INTRODUCTION With the ever growing interest on internet business solutions for enterprises, new opportunities have been created not only for businesses but competitive prices for consumers as well. The technological advancement and ever changing business requirements have demanded already designed business solutions to re-invent themselves to meet these changes. In order to meet these challenges, eBusiness developers have to design and re-design business processes to meet changing user requirements. It has to be done within short development cycles to assure competitive advantage by delivering solutions in time. In eBusiness engineering, process oriented techniques are widely adapted with promising results. Among them state machine based approaches are very much popular for behavioral modeling of information systems. These state machine based approaches are very much popular among software systems designers in order to understand life cycles of different software components and sub-systems’ behaviors. But the existing state machine based techniques [4], [3] encourages a low level perspective where the modeling quickly focuses on software systems and their components states. Messaging parameters and signals exchanging between different components are the main triggers for transitioning among such states. However the workflow of engineering eBusiness solutions can be summarized into two high level phases. The initial phase is business modeling phase where high level views of economic concepts and value creation activities are taken into consideration. The next phase is process modeling phase where procedural realization aspect of business communication is focused on. In short, business modeling phase focuses on “What” aspect of the system’s design while process modeling phase deals with “How” aspect. A business modeling has a clearly declarative foundation and is expressed in terms that can be easily understood by none technical people such as business domain experts. Therefore the idea of business modeling phase is to support communication between such none technical people and technical systems designers. In contrast, a process modeling phase has a more procedural foundation and is expressed in technical terms that are not immediately comprehensive for business users. Furthermore, it is often difficult to understand why design decisions taken in a certain way at process modeling and what alternative designs decision would have taken with possible consequences. In order to overcome these limitations in traceability between business requirements and system design, we believe that process modeling should be complemented by and be based on a more declarative foundation, i.e. business modeling. Such a foundation would provide justifications expressible in business terms, for design decisions made in process modeling, thereby facilitating communication between systems designers and business users. In this paper, we propose three-tier approach for hierarchical business state engineering to start with higher level declarative foundation and then systematically to get to the completed procedural process design. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II briefs introduction to related works that have been carrying on state oriented systems designing approaches. In Section III we explain basis of our framework; three world how we propose to look at discourse of interest and then the hierarchical business state engineering approach discussed in Section IV. II RELATED RESEARCH The purpose of a software model is to represent and convey the most important requirements and design decisions of a software system. A good model should explain these concepts in an easy way and ignore all the unimportant details [7]. Many techniques have been proposed for the design and specification of behavioral modeling of information systems. Some of these are based on existing modeling techniques such as Petri nets and UML State-Charts. UML state machine diagrams, formerly called State-Chart diagrams in UML 1, depict the dynamic behavior of an entity based on its response to events, showing how the entity reacts to various events depending on the current state [8]. Furthermore State-Chart diagrams focus on the