Colored Petri Net Based Modeling and Verification of Functional Requirement in Enterprise Resource Planning

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) is the basis for efficient software implementation and quality management. Tools and theories which support RE in general are numerous nowadays; however, the task of providing a tools and theories that specializes in Requirements engineering for Enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) has been addressed rarely. In this thesis we show that the critical success factors of ERP implementation from requirements engineering perspective. The thesis problem summarized into the ineffective textual representation of ERP functional requirement which leads to problem in stakeholder involvement and unclear and uncertain gab between ERP capabilities and organization’s needs The two main contribution of this thesis is modeling and verification of ERP functional requirements based on colored Petri nets (CPN). CPN considered one of powerful business process modeling techniques. In this thesis, we evaluate different business process modeling techniques to modeling ERP functional requirements by using analytical hierarchy process (AHP). The second contribution is implementing two types of modeling similarity which is semantic and structural similarity to find similarity between organization’s requirement modeled by CPN and auto generate CPN model for ready ERP (Odoo ERP package). We demonstrated the methodology by case study. Our finding indicate that the CPN help in helping major challenges of ERP requirements engineering which are stakeholder involvement, inadequate representation of organization’s business process and the implementation of business models similarity techniques helps to define the gap between organization’s requirement and ERP capabilities which define the customization details.