Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

Distributed aspect-oriented service composition for business compliance governance with public service processes

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers a technical foundation for Enterprise Application Integration and business collaboration through service-based business components. With increasing process outsourcing and cloud computing, enterprises need process-level integration and collaboration (process-oriented) to quickly launch new business processes for new customers and products. However, business processes that cross organisations’ compliance regulation boundaries are still unaddressed. We introduce a distributed aspect-oriented service composition approach, which enables multiple process clients hot-plugging their business compliance models (business rules, fault handling policy, and execution monitor) to BPEL business processes

An approach to relate business and application services using ISDL

This paper presents a service-oriented design approach that allows one to relate services modelled at different levels of granularity during a design process, such as business and application services. To relate these service models we claim that a 'concept gap' and an 'abstraction gap' need to be bridged. The concept gap represents the difference between the conceptual models used to construct service models by different stakeholders involved in the design process. The abstraction gap represents the difference in abstraction level at which service models are defined. Two techniques are presented that bridge these gaps. Both techniques are based on the Interaction System Design Language (ISDL). The paper illustrates the use of both techniques through an example

Investigation into an improved modular rule-based testing framework for business rules

Rule testing in scheduling applications is a complex and potentially costly business problem. This thesis reports the outcome of research undertaken to develop a system to describe and test scheduling rules against a set of scheduling data. The overall intention of the research was to reduce commercial scheduling costs by minimizing human domain expert interaction within the scheduling process. This thesis reports the outcome of research initiated following a consultancy project to develop a system to test driver schedules against the legal driving rules in force in the UK and the EU. One of the greatest challenges faced was interpreting the driving rules and translating them into the chosen programming language. This part of the project took considerable effort to complete the programming, testing and debugging processes. A potential problem then arises if the Department of Transport or the European Union alter or change the driving rules. Considerable software development is likely to be required to support the new rule set. The approach considered takes into account the need for a modular software component that can be used in not just transport scheduling systems which look at legal driving rules but may also be integrated into other systems that have the need to test temporal rules. The integration of the rule testing component into existing systems is key to making the proposed solution reusable. The research outcome proposes an alternative approach to rule definition, similar to that of RuleML, but with the addition of rule metadata to provide the ability of describing rules of a temporal nature. The rules can be serialised and deserialised between XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and objects within an object oriented environment (in this case .NET with C#), to provide a means of transmission of the rules over a communication infrastructure. The rule objects can then be compiled into an executable software library, allowing the rules to be tested more rapidly than traditional interpreted rules. Additional support functionality is also defined to provide a means of effectively integrating the rule testing engine into existing applications. Following the construction of a rule testing engine that has been designed to meet the given requirements, a series of tests were undertaken to determine the effectiveness of the proposed approach. This lead to the implementation of improvements in the caching of constructed work plans to further improve performance. Tests were also carried out into the application of the proposed solution within alternative scheduling domains and to analyse the difference in computational performance and memory usage across system architectures, software frameworks and operating systems, with the support of Mono. Future work that is expected to follow on from this thesis will likely reside in investigations into the development of graphical design tools for the creation of the rules, improvements in the work plan construction algorithm, parallelisation of elements of the process to take better advantage of multi-core processors and off-loading of the rule testing process onto dedicated or generic computational processors

Exploiting rules and processes for increasing flexibility in service composition

Recent trends in the use of service oriented architecture for designing, developing, managing, and using distributed applications have resulted in an increasing number of independently developed and physically distributed services. These services can be discovered, selected and composed to develop new applications and to meet emerging user requirements. Service composition is generally defined on the basis of business processes in which the underlying composition logic is guided by specifying control and data flows through Web service interfaces. User demands as well as the services themselves may change over time, which leads to replacing or adjusting the composition logic of previously defined processes. Coping with change is still one of the fundamental problems in current process based composition approaches. In this paper, we exploit declarative and imperative design styles to achieve better flexibility in service composition