24 research outputs found

    Web services choreography testing using semantic service description

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    Web services have become popular due to their ability to integrate with and to interoperate heterogeneous applications. Several web services can be combined into a single application to meet the needs of users. In the course of web services selection, a web candidate service needs to conform to the behaviour of its client, and one way of ensuring this conformity is by testing the interaction between the web service and its user. The existing web services test approaches mainly focus on syntax-based web services description, whilst the semantic-based solutions mostly address composite process flow testing. The aim of this research is to provide an automated testing approach to support service selection during automatic web services composition using Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). The research work began with understanding and analysing the existing test generation approaches for web services. Second, the weaknesses of the existing approaches were identified and addressed by utilizing the choreography transition rules of WSMO in an effort to generate a Finite State Machine (FSM). The FSM was then used to generate the working test cases. Third, a technique to generate an FSM from Abstract State Machine (ASM) was adapted to be used with WSMO. This thesis finally proposed a new testing model called the Choreography to Finite State Machine (C2FSM) to support the service selection of an automatic web service composition. It proposed new algorithms to automatically generate the test cases from the semantic description (WSMO choreography description). The proposed approach was then evaluated using the Amazon E-Commerce Web Service WSMO description. The quality of the test cases generated using the proposed approach was measured by assessing their mutation adequacy score. A total of 115 mutants were created based on 7 mutant operators. A mutation adequacy score of 0.713 was obtained. The experimental validation demonstrated a significant result in the sense that C2FSM provided an efficient and feasible solution. The result of this research could assist the service consumer agents in verifying the behaviour of the Web service in selecting appropriate services for web service composition

    A multi level approach for business process retrieval

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    Nowadays business process reuse is critical in companies that need to build flexible and service-based business solutions in order to react quic­kly and cost-effective to dynamic market-conditions. For this reason, many companies have implemented approaches to find relevant business processes to be reused to create new software solutions performing re­quired business functionalities. This paper presents a multilevel retrieval approach that detects linguistic, structural, and behavioral properties to increase the precision level in recovering those business processes stored in a repository.Actualmente reutilizar procesos de negocio es un procedimiento crítico especialmente para compañías que requieren construir soluciones flexibles y soportadas por servicios con el fin de afrontar de manera efectiva y a bajo costo las condiciones cambiantes del mercado. Por esta razón, muchas de ellas han implementado métodos para encontrar procesos de negocio relevantes que puedan ser reutilizados en la creación de nuevas soluciones software que cumplan con una determinada función de negocio. Este artí­culo presenta un método multinivel que detecta similitudes entre procesos de negocio, teniendo en cuenta propiedades lingüísticas, estructurales y de comportamiento, con el fin de incrementar el nivel de precisión en la recuperación de aquellos procesos existentes en un repositorio

    Un enfoque multinivel para la recuperación de procesos de negocio

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    Nowadays business process reuse is critical in companies that need to build flexible and service-based business solutions in order to react quic­kly and cost-effective to dynamic market-conditions. For this reason, many companies have implemented approaches to find relevant business processes to be reused to create new software solutions performing re­quired business functionalities. This paper presents a multilevel retrieval approach that detects linguistic, structural, and behavioral properties to increase the precision level in recovering those business processes stored in a repository.Actualmente reutilizar procesos de negocio es un procedimiento crítico especialmente para compañías que requieren construir soluciones flexibles y soportadas por servicios con el fin de afrontar de manera efectiva y a bajo costo las condiciones cambiantes del mercado. Por esta razón, muchas de ellas han implementado métodos para encontrar procesos de negocio relevantes que puedan ser reutilizados en la creación de nuevas soluciones software que cumplan con una determinada función de negocio. Este artí­culo presenta un método multinivel que detecta similitudes entre procesos de negocio, teniendo en cuenta propiedades lingüísticas, estructurales y de comportamiento, con el fin de incrementar el nivel de precisión en la recuperación de aquellos procesos existentes en un repositorio

    Data Driven Adaptation of Heterogeneous Service-Oriented Processes

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    Η με βάση τα δεδομένα προσαρμογή διαδικασιών αποτελεί μια επέκταση της έννοιας των Δυναμικών και με βάση τα Δεδομένα Καθοδηγουμενων Συστήματων (DDDAS) όπως αυτά έχουν καθοριστεί από την Δαρεμά. Συγεκριμένα όπως και στα DDDAS συστήματα η προσέγγιση μας επιτρέπει την προσφορά προσαρμοζόμενων διαδικασιών χρησιμοποιώντας διαθέσιμες πληροφορίες και υπηρεσίες. H προσφορά προσαρμοζόμενων διαδικασιών περιλαμβάνει την αναγνώριση και χρήση πιθανών εναλλακτικών μονοπατιών εκτέλεσης (ή διαδρομών) για την επίτευξη των στόχων και υπό-στόχων της κάθε διαδικασίας. Τα εναλλακτικά μονοπάτια λαμβάνουν υπόψη και χρησιμοποιούν σχετικές πληροφορίες ή/και υπηρεσίες (ή συνθέσεις υπηρεσιών). Για την αναζήτηση των πιθανών εναλλακτικών χρησιμοποιούνται τεχνικές από το χώρο της Τεχνητής Νοημοσύνης Σχεδιασμού (AI Planning) και της υπολογιστικής Πλαισίου (Context-Aware computing) κατά τον χρόνο διάθεσης της διαδικασίας. Κατά τον υπολογισμό των πιθανών εναλλακτικών, στόχος της προσέγγισης μας είναι η μείωση των βημάτων εκτέλεσης, δλδ του πλήθους των εργασιών της διαδικασίας που έχουν οριστείIn principle the Data-Driven Process Adaptation (DDPA) approach is based on the concept of Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems (DDDAS) as this is stated by Darema in [8]. In accordance to the DDDAS notion such systems support the utilization of appropriate information at specific decision points so as to make real systems more efficient. In this regard, DDPA accommodates the provision of adaptable service processes by exploiting the use of information available to the process environment in addition to existing services. Adaptation in the context of our approach includes the identification and use of possible alternatives for the achievement of the goals and sub-goals defined in a process; alternatives include the utilization of available related information and/or services (or service chains). Data-Driven adaptation incorporates AI planning and Context-Aware Computing techniques to support the identification of possible alternatives at deployment time. When calculating the possible alternatives the goal of our approach is to reduce the number of steps, i.e. number of process tasks, defined in the original process

    Intelligent business processes composition based on mas, semantic and cloud integration (IPCASCI)

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    [EN]Component reuse is one of the techniques that most clearly contributes to the evolution of the software industry by providing efficient mechanisms to create quality software. Reuse increases both software reliability, due to the fact that it uses previously tested software components, and development productivity, and leads to a clear reduction in cost. Web services have become are an standard for application development on cloud computing environments and are essential in business process development. These services facilitate a software construction that is relatively fast and efficient, two aspects which can be improved by defining suitable models of reuse. This research work is intended to define a model which contains the construction requirements of new services from service composition. To this end, the composition is based on tested Web services and artificial intelligent tools at our disposal. It is believed that a multi-agent architecture based on virtual organizations is a suitable tool to facilitate the construction of cloud computing environments for business processes from other existing environments, and with help from ontological models as well as tools providing the standard BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). In the context of this proposal, we must generate a new business process from the available services in the platform, starting with the requirement specifications that the process should meet. These specifications will be composed of a semi-free description of requirements to describe the new service. The virtual organizations based on a multi-agent system will manage the tasks requiring intelligent behaviour. This system will analyse the input (textual description of the proposal) in order to deconstruct it into computable functionalities, which will be subsequently treated. Web services (or business processes) stored to be reused have been created from the perspective of SOA architectures and associated with an ontological component, which allows the multi-agent system (based on virtual organizations) to identify the services to complete the reuse process. The proposed model develops a service composition by applying a standard BPEL once the services that will compose the solution business process have been identified. This standard allows us to compose Web services in an easy way and provides the advantage of a direct mapping from Business Process Management Notation diagrams

    A Semantically Enhanced Approach for Orchestration of Web Services in Factory Automation Systems

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    The Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm makes it possible to build systems from several independent components. Most typically, web services are chosen as the building blocks of such a system. A web service is essentially a passive software entity, which listens for request messages sent to it over the network, possibly reacts to the requests by performing some operations, and finally sends response messages to the request senders. The traditional application domain of web services belongs to the so-called IT domain. While opening new horizons in software development life-cycles, web services have been adopted in various new application domains, including the domain of factory automation (software development for factory automation). Indeed, recent research projects have experimented with controlling production system equipment through web service interfaces. When migrated from pure software to the physical realm involving industrial equipment, web services set additional demands for the application domains. For example, since the domains involve operations with physical effects, roll-back or application recovery procedures become challenging. This research work targets the orchestration of factory automation systems encapsulated as web services and presents various techniques for overcoming the difficulties. Orchestrating web services to accomplish a complicated production task can be difficult due to the transitoriness of both production equipment states and the set of available web services. Nevertheless, the selection of appropriate web services can be facilitated by augmenting each service with semantic information describing its conditions and effects. Web services augmented with such descriptions are termed semantic web services. While Web Ontology Language, OWL, is ideal for describing application domain concepts and property relationships, the OWL-S ontology, which is based on OWL, has been specifically developed for describing web services. Once the semantic service descriptions have been analyzed to find the appropriate web services, the selected services can be invoked using their syntactic WSDL descriptions. In addition to automated web service selection, semantic descriptions allow the composition of web services to achieve production tasks. Service composition involves first analyzing the descriptions to determine the appropriate service invocation process for achieving the desired goal and then executing the process. This dissertation presents an approach in which the production equipment and their states are represented using an ontology, and the model is dynamically used in decision-making. In particular, the devices in the considered production systems provide web service interfaces through which they can be controlled, while semantic web service descriptions formulated in OWL-S make it possible to determine the conditions and effects of invoking the web services. The approach presented in this research work additionally involves a set of specialized web services that co-operate to achieve production goals using the domain web services. One of the services maintains a semantic model of the current system state, while another uses the model to compose the domain web services so that they jointly achieve the desired goals. The semantic model of the system is automatically updated based on event notifications sent by the domain services. Software agents controlling production devices must maintain an up-to-date view of the physical world state in order to efficiently reason and plan their actions. Especially in a factory automation system, the world state undergoes rapid evolution, and the world view must remain synchronized with the changes. This research discusses two approaches to updating the world view based on event notifications sent by web services representing production devices in a manufacturing system. One of the approaches is based on separately specified update rules, and one automatically uses semantic web service descriptions formulated in OWL-S. While all of the examples presented in this research work specifically focus on the factory automation domain, the presented approaches are applicable to all domains involving semantic web services. Semantic Web Service descriptions facilitate the automated discovery and composition of web services. Particularly in the production system domain, the service condition and effect descriptions are essential in selecting the appropriate service or service composition for a given task. OWL-S is one of the most popular semantic web service description languages, and due to its XML syntax, OWL-S can be effortlessly incorporated into service WSDL descriptions. However, developing OWL-S documents for each service instance is laborious. This dissertation presents an approach to automatically generating executable OWL-S descriptions from semantically annotated service WSDL files. Computing clouds facilitate rapid and effortless resource allocation. Cloud consumers can generally be ignorant of the physical computing resources used or their geographical location, as the resources are abstracted into a commodity that can be dynamically leased from the cloud provider. In particular, Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds allow clients to dynamically lease virtual machines that behave similarly to physical servers. However, executing an application by directly using computing cloud resources is complicated and typically involves similar steps as installing and executing an application on a physical machine. Moreover, starting numerous application instances on a single virtual machine may result in poor performance. Thus, this dissertation considers the development of a web service that facilitates the use of cloud resources by abstracting them. When the web service is used, an application can be effortlessly started in a computing cloud by invoking simple web service operations. Furthermore, when multiple applications are started, the workload can be automatically distributed between several virtual machines, resulting in higher performance. To conclude, the results presented in this research work demonstrate that semantic web service descriptions can indeed facilitate automatic web service composition and invocation. However, the effort of developing semantic web service descriptions can partly undermine the benefits achieved through their application. Therefore, new tools and methods should be developed to minimize the effort of developing such descriptions

    WS-BPEL extension for semantic web services (BPEL4SWS), version 1.0

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    The Web Services Business Process Execution Language, version 2.0 (WS-BPEL 2.0 or BPEL for brevity) introduces a model for business processes based on Web services. A BPEL process orchestrates interactions among different Web services. The language encompasses features needed to describe complex control flows, including error handling and compensation behavior. BPEL for Semantic Web Services (BPEL4SWS) uses Semantic Web Service Frameworks to define a communication channel between two partner services instead of using the partner link which is based on WSDL 1.1. It enables describing activity implementations in a much more flexible manner based on ontological descriptions of service requesters and providers

    MINERVA : Model drIveN and sErvice oRiented framework for the continuous improVement of business process & relAted tools

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    Organizations are facing several challenges nowadays, one of the most important ones being their ability to react quickly to changes either to their business process (BP) models or to the software implementing them. These changes can come from different sources: external requirements from partners or the market, or new internal requirements for the way that things are carried out by the defined BPs; they may also arise from improvement opportunities detected for the BPs defined, based on BPs execution monitoring and execution evaluation that is done by the organization, and/or its partners and customers. The increasing complexity of both BPs models and the software implementing them, requires the changes needed or the improvements to be carefully weighed against the impact their introduction will have; they ought also to be carried out in a systematic way to assure a successful development. Two key elements are to provide these requirements: the separation of BPs definition from their implementation to minimize the impact of changes in one to the other, and a process to introduce the changes or improvements in the existing BPs and/or software implementing them. Business Process Management (BPM) provides the means for guiding and supporting the modeling, implementation, deployment, execution and evaluation of BPs in an organization, based on the BP lifecycle. The realization of BPs by means of services provides the basis for separating their definition from the technologies implementing them and helps provide a better response to changes in either of the layers defined -definition and implementation of business processes- with minimum impact on the other. Modeling of both BP and services is a key aspect to support this vision, helping provide traceability between elements from one area to the other, so easing the analysis of the impact of changes, among other things. Models have proven to play an important role in the software development process, one of its key uses in the context of BP realization by means of services is that of designing services at a more abstract level than with specific technologies, also promoting reuse by separating services logic from its implementation. MINERVA: Model drIveN & sErvice oRiented framework for the continuous business process improVement & relAted tools is the framework that has been defined in this thesis work; it takes into account all the aspects mentioned, in which the SOC and MDD paradigms are applied to BPs focusing on their continuous improvement, extending an existing BP lifecycle with explicit execution measurement and improvement activities and elements. It is made up of three dimensions: i) conceptual, which defines the concepts that are managed throughout the framework. ii) methodological, which defines a methodology for service oriented development from BPs with automatic generation of SoaML service models from BPMN2 models, along with a continuous improvement process based on execution measurement of the occurrences of BPs in the organization to carry out the improvement effort. iii) tools support for the whole proposal based on several existing tools we have integrated, along with new ones we have developed. The proposals in MINERVA have been validated by means of an experiment and two case studies carried out in the context of real projects in two organizations, from which, as the main result of the applications performed, it can be concluded that MINERVA can be a useful and key guide for the continuous improvement of BPs realized by services and for the development of service oriented systems from BPs, with automatic generation of service models from BP models.Las organizaciones se enfrentan en la actualidad a varios retos, siendo uno de los más importantes su capacidad para reaccionar rápidamente a los cambios ya sea en sus modelos de procesos de negocio (PN) o en el software que los implementa. Estos cambios pueden provenir de distintas fuentes: requisitos externos de socios o del mercado, o nuevos requisitos internos para la forma en que las cosas se llevan a cabo por los PNs definidos; también pueden surgir de las oportunidades de mejora detectadas para los PNs definidos, en base al monitoreo y evaluación de la ejecución de los PNs llevada a cabo por la organización, y/o sus socios y clientes. La creciente complejidad de los modelos de PNs y del software que los implementa, requiere que los cambios o las mejoras sean sopesados cuidadosamente contra el impacto que su introducción tendrá; también deben llevarse a cabo de manera sistemática para asegurar un desarrollo exitoso. Dos elementos son clave para proveer estos requisitos: la separación de la definición de los PNs de su implementación, para minimizar el impacto de los cambios de uno en otro, y un proceso para introducir los cambios o mejoras en los PNs y/o en el software que los implementa. La Gestión de Procesos de Negocio (Business Process Management, BPM) proporciona los medios para guiar y apoyar el modelado, implementación, despliegue, ejecución y evaluación de PNs en una organización, basado en el ciclo de vida de PNs. La realización de PNs con servicios proporciona la base para la separación de su definición de las tecnologías para implementarlos, y ayuda a proporcionar una mejor respuesta a los cambios en cualquiera de las capas definidas -definición e implementación de procesos de negocio- con un impacto mínimo sobre la otra. El modelado de PNs y servicios es un aspecto clave para apoyar esta visión, ayudando a proveer trazabilidad entre los elementos de un área a la otra, por lo tanto facilitando el análisis del impacto de los cambios, entre otras cosas. Los modelos han demostrado jugar un papel importante en el proceso de desarrollo de software, uno de sus usos principales en el contexto de la realización de PNs con servicios es el de diseñar servicios a un nivel más abstracto que con tecnologías específicas, promoviendo la reutilización separando la lógica de los servicios de su implementacion. MINERVA: Model drIveN & sErvice oRiented framework for the continuous business process improVement & relAted tools es el marco que se ha definido en este trabajo de tesis, que toma en cuenta todos los aspectos mencionados, en el cual los paradigmas de Computación Orientada a Servicios (Service Oriented Computing, SOC) y Desarrollo Dirigido por Modelos (Model Driven Development, MDD) se aplican a los PNs con foco en su mejora continua, extendiendo un ciclo de vida PN existente con actividades y elementos explícitos para la medición de la ejecución y mejora de PNs. El marco se compone de tres dimensiones: i) conceptual, que define los conceptos que se manejan en todo el marco. ii) metodológica, que define una metodología para el desarrollo orientado a servicios desde PNs, con generación automática de modelos de servicio en SoaML desde modelos en BPMN2, junto con un proceso de mejora continua basado en la medición de la ejecución de las ocurrencias de los PNs en la organización para llevar a cabo el esfuerzo de mejora. iii) soporte de herramientas para la propuesta completa basado en la integracion de varias herramientas existentes, junto con otras nuevas que hemos desarrollado. Las propuestas de MINERVA han sido validadas por medio de un experimento y dos casos de estudio realizados en el marco de proyectos reales en dos organizaciones, de los cuales, como resultado principal de las aplicaciones realizadas, se puede concluir que MINERVA puede ser una guía útil y clave para la mejora continua de PNs realizados por servicios y para el desarrollo de sistemas orientados a servicios desde PNs, con generación automática de modelos de servicio a partir de modelos de PN

    A Classification of BPEL Extensions

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    The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has emerged as de-facto standard for business processes implementation. This language is designed to be extensible for including additional valuable features in a standardized manner. There are a number of BPEL extensions available. They are, however, neither classified nor evaluated with respect to their compliance to the BPEL standard. This article fills this gap by providing a framework for classifying BPEL extensions, a classification of existing extensions, and a guideline for designing BPEL extensions
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