Event-Cloud Platform to Support Decision- Making in Emergency Management

The challenge of this paper is to underline the capability of an Event-Cloud Platform to support efficiently an emergency situation. We chose to focus on a nuclear crisis use case. The proposed approach consists in modeling the business processes of crisis response on the one hand, and in supporting the orchestration and execution of these processes by using an Event-Cloud Platform on the other hand. This paper shows how the use of Event-Cloud techniques can support crisis management stakeholders by automatizing non-value added tasks and by directing decision- makers on what really requires their capabilities of choice. If Event-Cloud technology is a very interesting and topical subject, very few research works have considered this to improve emergency management. This paper tries to fill this gap by considering and applying these technologies on a nuclear crisis use-case

An extensible manufacturing resource model for process integration

Driven by industrial needs and enabled by process technology and information technology, enterprise integration is rapidly shifting from information integration to process integration to improve overall performance of enterprises. Traditional resource models are established based on the needs of individual applications. They cannot effectively serve process integration which needs resources to be represented in a unified, comprehensive and flexible way to meet the needs of various applications for different business processes. This paper looks into this issue and presents a configurable and extensible resource model which can be rapidly reconfigured and extended to serve for different applications. To achieve generality, the presented resource model is established from macro level and micro level. A semantic representation method is developed to improve the flexibility and extensibility of the model

Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them. In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00

The Landscape of Salesforce for Nonprofits: A Report on the Current Marketplace for Apps

Do you use Salesforce as a Constituent Relationship Management database at your organization, or are you considering it? Since it launched in 1999, more than 20,000 nonprofits have employed the cloud-based system, which is made available to them for free through the philanthropic Salesforce Foundation. What's the catch? Making such a powerful system work for the particular needs of a nonprofit isn't always straightforward. This report can tell you everything you need to know.What's in it? To learn more about the benefits and drawbacks of Salesforce, we interviewed nine prominent consultants specializing in implementing Salesforce for nonprofits along with several members of the Salesforce.com Foundation about what the platform does well, and what you'll want to add to it to suit your needs. We evaluated some of the constituent management packages built on top of Salesforce, including the Salesforce Foundation's Nonprofit Starter Pack, which is aimed at turning the sales automation platform into a tool for nonprofits. We also took a look at the universe of add-ons to the base Salesforce platform -- called "apps" because of Salesforce's online marketplace, the App Exchange -- to find out which might be useful to support a nonprofit's processes.The goal for this report was to break down misconceptions about the tool and to collect disparate information in one place to help you make informed decisions. Whether you're already using Salesforce, are thinking about adopting it, or have yet to even consider it, there's information here for you.What's more, we've included a directory of consultants or firms with experience working with nonprofits to implement Salesforce and the additional App Exchange modules that we cover in this report to make it easier for you to find the help you'll need

Security and Privacy Issues of Big Data

This chapter revises the most important aspects in how computing infrastructures should be configured and intelligently managed to fulfill the most notably security aspects required by Big Data applications. One of them is privacy. It is a pertinent aspect to be addressed because users share more and more personal data and content through their devices and computers to social networks and public clouds. So, a secure framework to social networks is a very hot topic research. This last topic is addressed in one of the two sections of the current chapter with case studies. In addition, the traditional mechanisms to support security such as firewalls and demilitarized zones are not suitable to be applied in computing systems to support Big Data. SDN is an emergent management solution that could become a convenient mechanism to implement security in Big Data systems, as we show through a second case study at the end of the chapter. This also discusses current relevant work and identifies open issues.Comment: In book Handbook of Research on Trends and Future Directions in Big Data and Web Intelligence, IGI Global, 201