Flexible coordination techniques for dynamic cloud service collaboration

The provision of individual, but also composed services is central in cloud service provisioning. We describe a framework for the coordination of cloud services, based on a tuple‐space architecture which uses an ontology to describe the services. Current techniques for service collaboration offer limited scope for flexibility. They are based on statically describing and compositing services. With the open nature of the web and cloud services, the need for a more flexible, dynamic approach to service coordination becomes evident. In order to support open communities of service providers, there should be the option for these providers to offer and withdraw their services to/from the community. For this to be realised, there needs to be a degree of self‐organisation. Our techniques for coordination and service matching aim to achieve this through matching goal‐oriented service requests with providers that advertise their offerings dynamically. Scalability of the solution is a particular concern that will be evaluated in detail

Automatic business process pattern matching for enterprise services design.

Designing the adequate scope and granularity of services is critical for their effective reuse. Patterns at business process level are abstractions of common and reusable designs to operate businesses. Business Process (BP) patterns can capture expert process design knowledge and greatly benefit the design of new enterprise services by guiding the definition of their scope and granularity. Identifying pattern instances in real and large documented business processes is a challenging task, requiring the analysis of the structure, semantics and behaviour associated to process descriptions. In this paper1 we present a solution to identify BP patterns based on a graph matching mechanism. Structural and semantics aspects, including natural language processing, are addressed. The approach moves one step further to increase automation during the design of process-centric enterprise services. We demonstrate the approach, discuss its limitations, novelty and practical benefits by using a case study based on the National Revenue Agency case at SOPOSE08

End User Grammar Extended for Business Processes - EUGEBP

El concepto proceso de negocio está estrechamente vinculado a la forma en la que una organización gestiona sus operaciones. Conocer y comprender las operaciones de una organización es un punto clave que se debe tener presente dentro del proceso de desarrollo de software. A su vez, el enfoque de desarrollo dirigido por modelos denominado MockupDD captura requerimientos usando prototipos de interfaz de usuario denominados Mockups. Los usuarios finales pueden comprender fácilmente dichos prototipos y realizar anotaciones sobre los mismos. Este enfoque se basa en ésta característica principal y a partir de la misma genera valiosos modelos conceptuales que luego pueden ser aprovechados por todos los integrantes de un equipo de desarrollo de software. Utilizar el lenguaje natural para realizar anotaciones sobre los Mockups es un aspecto clave que puede ser aprovechado. En éste último aspecto una rama de la inteligencia artificial denominada “Natural Language Processing – Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural” (NLP) viene realizando importantes aportes vinculados al uso y al aprovechamiento del lenguaje natural de las personas. El presente trabajo de tesis propone una nueva técnica denominada “End User Grammar Extended for Business Processes – Gramática de Usuario Final Extendida para Procesos de Negocios” (EUGEBP). La misma está compuesta por un conjunto de reglas de redacción diseñada para ser aplicada sobre Mockups, y por una serie de pasos que permiten procesar dichas anotaciones con el propósito derivar procesos de negocios desde las mismas. Esto se logra a través de la identificación de los elementos que componen los procesos de negocios y de las relaciones que existen entre ellos. En esencia el presente trabajo propone utilizar las anotaciones de usuario final realizadas sobre los Mockups en lenguaje natural y a partir de las mismas derivar procesos de negocio. Las anotaciones del usuario final tienen como objetivo ayudar a describir las interfaces de usuario, pero también pueden ayudarnos a identificar los procesos de negocio que el sistema debe soportar. Mientras en analista recopila información para el desarrollo de una aplicación, implícitamente también está describiendo los procesos de negocio de la organización.Facultad de Informátic

Graph-based Pattern Matching and Discovery for Process-centric Service Architecture Design and Integration

Process automation and applications integration initiatives are often complex and involve significant resources in large organisations. The increasing adoption of service-based architectures to solve integration problems and the widely accepted practice of utilising patterns as a medium to reuse design knowledge motivated the definition of this work. In this work a pattern-based framework and techniques providing automation and structure to address the process and application integration problem are proposed. The framework is a layered architecture providing modelling and traceability support to different abstraction layers of the integration problem. To define new services - building blocks of the integration solution - the framework includes techniques to identify process patterns in concrete process models. Graphs and graph morphisms provide a formal basis to represent patterns and their relation to models. A family of graph-based algorithms support automation during matching and discovery of patterns in layered process service models. The framework and techniques are demonstrated in a case study. The algorithms implementing the pattern matching and discovery techniques are investigated through a set of experiments from an empirical evaluation. Observations from conducted interviews to practitioners provide suggestions to enhance the proposed techniques and direct future work regarding analysis tasks in process integration initiatives

Ähnlichkeitsbasierte Suche in Geschäftsprozessmodelldatenbanken

Die Wiederverwendung von Prozessmodellen bietet sich zur Reduzierung des hohen Modellierungsaufwands an. Allerdings ist das Auffinden von ähnlichen Modellen in großen Modellsammlungen manuell nicht effizient möglich. Hilfreich sind daher Suchmöglichkeiten nach relevanten Modellen, die als Vorlage zur Modellierung genutzt werden können. In dieser Arbeit werden Ansätze beschrieben, um innerhalb von Prozessmodellbibliotheken nach ähnlichen Modellen und Aktivitäten zu suchen