Building Enterprise Systems with ODP: An Introduction to Open Distributed Processing

The Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) is an international standard that provides a solid basis for describing and building widely distributed systems and applications in a systematic way. It stresses the need to build these systems with evolution in mind by identifying the concerns of major stakeholders and then expressing the design as a series of linked viewpoints.

Although RM-ODP has been a standard for more than ten years, many practitioners are still unaware of it. Building Enterprise Systems with ODP: An Introduction to Open Distributed Processing offers a gentle pathway to the essential ideas that constitute ODP and shows how these ideas can be applied when designing and building challenging systems. It provides an accessible introduction to the design principles for software engineers and enterprise architects. The book also explains the benefits of using viewpoints to produce simpler and more flexible designs and how ODP can be applied to service engineering, open enterprise, and cloud computing.

The authors include guidelines for using the Unified Modeling Language™ (UML) notation and for structuring and writing system specifications. They elucidate how this fits into the model-driven engineering tool chain via approaches, such as Model-Driven Architecture® (MDA). They also demonstrate the power of RM-ODP for the design and organization of complex distributed IT systems in e-government, e-health, and energy and transportation industries.

All concepts and ideas in the book are illustrated through a single running example that describes the IT support needed by a medium-sized company as it grows and develops. Complete UML models and more are available at http://theodpbook.lcc.uma.es/

Peter F. Linington is Emeritus Professor of Computer Communication at the University of Kent. He has been involved in the standardization of the ODP Reference Model and its various supporting standards since the activity started. He has also co-chaired WODPEC, the main workshop in this area, since its inception.

Zoran Milosevic is a principal of Deontik Pty Ltd., a consulting and software company specializing in business processes, business policies, complex event processing, and enterprise architectures. He was the founder of IEEE’s EDOC conference and was involved in the standardization of the ODP Enterprise Language.

Akira Tanaka is a founder of view5 LLC, a consulting company that applies viewpoints and model-based approaches to software development. He has been involved in RM-ODP standardization from its early days.

Antonio Vallecillo is a Professor of Languages and Information Systems at the University of Málaga. His research interests include open distributed processing, model-based engineering, componentware, and software quality. He was co-editor of ITU-T Rec. X.906 | ISO/IEC 19793 (UML4ODP) and the revised versions of RM-ODP Parts 2 and 3 (ITU-T X.902-X.903 | ISO/IEC 10746-2/3).