Monitoring interactions across multi business processes with token carried data

The rapid development of web service provides many opportunities for companies to migrate their business processes to the Internet for wider accessibility and higher collaboration efficiency. However, the open, dynamic and ever-changing Internet also brings challenges in protecting these business processes. There are certain process monitoring methods and the recently proposed ones are based on state changes of process artifacts or places, however, they do not mention defending process interactions from outer tampering, where events could not be detected by process systems, or saving fault-handling time. In this paper, we propose a novel Token-based Interaction Monitoring framework based on token carried data to safeguard process collaboration and reduce problem solving time. Token is a more common data entity in processes than process artifacts and they cover all tasks’ executions. Comparing to detecting places’ state change, we set security checking points at both when tokens are just produced and to be consumed. This will ensure that even if data is tampered after being created it would be detected before being used

Behavioral types in programming languages

A recent trend in programming language research is to use behav- ioral type theory to ensure various correctness properties of large- scale, communication-intensive systems. Behavioral types encompass concepts such as interfaces, communication protocols, contracts, and choreography. The successful application of behavioral types requires a solid understanding of several practical aspects, from their represen- tation in a concrete programming language, to their integration with other programming constructs such as methods and functions, to de- sign and monitoring methodologies that take behaviors into account. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art of these aspects, which we summarize as the pragmatics of behavioral types

Component-based design and analysis: a case study

©2003 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.In this paper, we introduce a component-based design methodology and present a practical analysis approach that makes use of the modular nature of component-based designs to alleviate the state space explosion problem, a well-known obstacle to system verification. In addition, the approach is illustrated by application to a non-trivial case study: the production cell. It is shown that not only the basic consistency property, viz. the freedom from unexpected reception and deadlock, but also other important safety properties in the design can be proved.Yan Jin, Charles Lakos, Robert Esse

Costs of quality or quality costs

Costs of quality or quality costs do not mean the use of expensive or very highly quality materials to manufacture a product. The term refers to the costs that are incurred to prevent, detect and remove defects from products. There are four categories: internal failure costs (costs associated with defects found before the customer receives the product or service), external failure costs (costs associated with defects found after the customer receives the product or service), appraisal costs (costs incurred to determine the degree of conformance to quality requirements) and prevention costs (costs incurred to keep failure and appraisal costs to a minimum). Cost of quality is a methodology that allows an organization to determine the extent to which its resources are used for activities that prevent poor quality, that appraise the quality of the organization's products or services, and that result from internal and external failures. Having such information allows an organization to determine the potential savings to be gained by implementing process improvements.Web of Science5213

Specifying Multimedia Binding Objects in Z

The current standardisation activity of Open Distributed Processing (ODP) has attempted to incorporate multimedia flows of information into its architecture through the idea of stream interfaces. At present the reference model of ODP (ODP-RM) abstracts from the precise nature of the flows of information. As a consequence of this, the ODPRM only deals with syntactic aspects of stream interfaces and does not require them to satisfy any behavioural considerations. It is shown in this paper how the formal notation Z can be used to reason about these flows of information in a manner that enables behavioural as well as temporal aspects to be considered. The example given to highlight the approach is the ODP concept of a binding object

Monitoring Assumptions in Assume-Guarantee Contracts

Pre-deployment verification of software components with respect to behavioral specifications in the assume-guarantee form does not, in general, guarantee absence of errors at run time. This is because assumptions about the environment cannot be discharged until the environment is fixed. An intuitive approach is to complement pre-deployment verification of guarantees, up to the assumptions, with post-deployment monitoring of environment behavior to check that the assumptions are satisfied at run time. Such a monitor is typically implemented by instrumenting the application code of the component. An additional challenge for the monitoring step is that environment behaviors are typically obtained through an I/O library, which may alter the component’s view of the input format. This transformation requires us to introduce a second pre-deployment verification step to ensure that alarms raised by the monitor would indeed correspond to violations of the environment assumptions. In this paper, we describe an approach for constructing monitors and verifying them against the component assumption. We also discuss limitations of instrumentation-based monitoring and potential ways to overcome it