Abstract

In the past decades, along with the rapid updating of computer technology and extremely expanded business competition, enterprises have begun relying more and more on different applications. However, the short life cycle of these applications and high updating cost make the integration of these applications and their business process a top priority for many enterprises. In such a context, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) has become a popular research field. EAI is the unrestricted sharing of data and business processes among any connected applications and data source in the enterprise. The goal of EAI is to integrate different applications and let them freely share the same business data and process. The benefits of EAI include cycle time reduction, cost reduction, and cost containment. EAI has attracted many developers and institutes to activity in this field. Many different enterprise application integration methods, tools, and technologies have been developed and introduced to the market; however, there is still no easy and straightforward way to solve EAI problems. The tasks of enterprise application integration are still very challenging. This thesis uses a different and effective approach, which takes the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) problem as a design problem, and uses the Environment-Based Design (EBD) theory to formulate this problem as well as to generate the final solutions. The advantage of EBD is that it ensures that most defective and imperfect concepts and solutions can be eliminated during the very first stage. The notion of Environment-Based Design methodology was first proposed by Dr. Yong Zeng, based on his Axiomatic theory of design modeling. EBD methodology includes three main stages: environment analysis, conflict identification, and concept generation. These three stages work together to generate and refine, progressively and simultaneously, the design requirements and design solutions. The EBD-EAI approach can help EAI developers to design a successful EAI application in functions with lower costs, and a shorter development time. A real EBD-EAI problem-solving process is described in this thesis to support this new and innovative EAI problem-solving approach