Towards Intent-Driven Systems

Context: Software supporting an enterprise’s business, also known as a business support system, needs to support the correlation of activities between actors as well as influence the activities based on knowledge about the value networks in which the enterprise acts. This can be supported with the help of intent-driven systems. The aim of intent-driven systems is to capture stakeholders’ intents and transform these into a form that enables computer processing of them. Only then are different machine actors able to negotiate with each other on behalf of their respective stakeholders and their intents, and suggest a mutually beneficial agreement. Objective: When building a business support system it is critical to separate the business model of the business support system itself from the business models used by the enterprise which is using the business support system. The core idea of intent-driven systems is the possibility to change behavior of the system itself, based on stakeholder intents. This requires a separation of concerns between the parts of the system used to execute the stakeholder business, and the parts which are used to design the business based on stakeholder intents. The business studio is a software that supports the realization of business models used by the enterprise by configuring the capabilities provided by the business support system. The aim is to find out how we can support the design of a business studio which is based on intent-driven systems. Method: We are using the design science framework as our research framework. During our design science study we have used the following research methods: systematic literature review, case study, quasi experiment, and action research. Results: We have produced two design artifacts as a start to be able to support the design of a business studio. These artifacts are the models and quasi-experiment in Chapter 3, and the action research in Chapter 4. The models found during the case study have proved to be a valuable artifact for the stakeholder. The