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Event Details

Fritz Henglein

4:00 p.m
April 8, 2009
Ford ITW Auditorium

Fritz Henglein, Deptartment of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen (DIKU)
"Domain-specific languages for next-generation enterprise systems"
Abstract:
An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a complex software system based on a central database system. ERP systems have replaced many specialized applications in large and medium-sized companies that support the standard processes in a company: financial accounting, logistics, inventory management, trade, production planning, etc. With a global market in excess of $40 bio./yr --- and growing --- the ERP systems market is several times bigger than better known consumer software markets such as for computer games. The 3gERP Project (www.3gERP.org) is an industrial research project aimed at substantially reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) for ERP customers, respectively increase total value of ownership (TVO).

In this high-level talk I will give an overview of preliminary results and identified issues regarding software architecture and technology for next-generation ERP systems. A key part of our approach is the design of declarative domain-specific languages: for specifying processes, specifically contracts (commercial, not software) between multiple parties; for logically modeling relevant legal (and business) rules, specifically VAT legislation; and for reporting on business data, all of them integrated in a process-oriented event-driven architecture POETS (process-oriented enterprise transaction systems), a prototype of which, supporting core business functions, is under development. The domain-specific languages are intended to capture requirements in a domain-oriented fashion, function as executable specifications (motto: The requirements *are* the system.) and enable automatic analysis and transformation, such as automatic incrementalization of report functions for real-time reporting ("dashboarding").

This talk is based on work by the DIKU 3gERP-team.

Bio:
Fritz Henglein's research interests are in semantic, logical and algorithmic aspects of programming languages, specifically type inference, type-based program analysis, algorithmic functional programming and domain-specific languages, and the application of programming language technology, which is presently in enterprise systems (3gERP.org) and health care processes (trustcare.eu).

After undergraduate studies at Technische Universität München, he obtained his Ph.D. from Rutgers University and joined New York University, IBM Research, Utrecht University and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen (DIKU, diku.dk). After co-starting a company to keep the Y2K bug at bay (Hafnium ApS, hafnium.com) and a university (the IT University of Copenhagen, itu.dk/) to increase IT proficiency, he rejoined DIKU as professor with special duties in programming languages. He is now head of the programming languages and algorithms group at DIKU. His goal is to contribute to the development of software that comes with technical and legal guarantees of having no defects (which should be considered a very modest ambition indeed).
Northwestern University Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department