GRIDCC - Providing a real-time grid for distributed instrumentation

The GRIDCC project is extending the use of Grid computing to include access to and control of distributed instrumentation. Access to the instruments will be via an interface to a Virtual Instrument Grid Service (VIGS). VIGS is a new concept and its design and implementation, together with middleware that can provide the appropriate Quality of Service (QoS), is a key part of the GRIDCC development plan. An overall architecture for GRIDCC has been defined and some of the application areas, which include distributed power systems, remote control of an accelerator and the remote monitoring of a large particle physics experiment, are briefly discussed.E

Personalizing Situated Workflows for Pervasive Healthcare Applications

In this paper, we present an approach where a workflow system is combined with a policy-based framework for the specification and enforcement of policies for healthcare applications. In our approach, workflows are used to capture entitiespsila responsibilities and to assist entities in fulfilling them. The policy-based framework allows us to express authorisation policies to define the rights that entities have in the system, and event-condition-action (ECA) policies that are used to adapt the system to the actual situation. Authorisations will often depend on the context in which patientspsila care takes place, and our policies support predicates that reflect the environment. ECA policies capture events that reflect the current state of the environment and can perform actions to accordingly adapt the workflow execution. We show how the approach can be used for the Edema treatment and how fine-grained authorisation and ECA policies are expressed and used

A Constrained Object Model for Configuration Based Workflow Composition

Automatic or assisted workflow composition is a field of intense research for applications to the world wide web or to business process modeling. Workflow composition is traditionally addressed in various ways, generally via theorem proving techniques. Recent research observed that building a composite workflow bears strong relationships with finite model search, and that some workflow languages can be defined as constrained object metamodels . This lead to consider the viability of applying configuration techniques to this problem, which was proven feasible. Constrained based configuration expects a constrained object model as input. The purpose of this document is to formally specify the constrained object model involved in ongoing experiments and research using the Z specification language.Comment: This is an extended version of the article published at BPM'05, Third International Conference on Business Process Management, Nancy Franc

CombiS-BP Editor: Combining Declarative and Imperative Languages in BP Modelling, Demonstration paper

Business Process models allow business experts to describe the activities that must be performed to achieve a defined goal. Several imperative standard languages have been created to describe both control-flow and data-flow perspectives. Unfortunately, the imperative specification may be very difficult, complex and even inefficient to any kind of models, particularly, when these models depend on input data of each specific process instance. On the other hand, although business experts are able to define a declarative specification, they may be unaware of translating it into an imperative process model by using the existing standard languages. As a solution, we present CombiS-BP Editor, a tool that enables combined modelling of the two aforementioned specifications: (i) allows an imperative specification when experts know the execution order of the activities in the model and; (ii) enables a declarative specification when the experts know what has to be done instead of how it has to be done.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2009-1371

Workflow resource pattern modelling and visualization

Workflow patterns have been recognized as the theoretical basis to modeling recurring problems in workflow systems. A form of workflow patterns, known as the resource patterns, characterise the behaviour of resources in workflow systems. Despite the fact that many resource patterns have been discovered, people still preclude them from many workflow system implementations. One of reasons could be obscurityin the behaviour of and interaction between resources and a workflow management system. Thus, we provide a modelling and visualization approach for the resource patterns, enabling a resource behaviour modeller to intuitively see the specific resource patterns involved in the lifecycle of a workitem. We believe this research can be extended to benefit not only workflow modelling, but also other applications, such as model validation, human resource behaviour modelling, and workflow model visualization

GRIDCC: Real-time workflow system

The Grid is a concept which allows the sharing of resources between distributed communities, allowing each to progress towards potentially different goals. As adoption of the Grid increases so are the activities that people wish to conduct through it. The GRIDCC project is a European Union funded project addressing the issues of integrating instruments into the Grid. This increases the requirement of workflows and Quality of Service upon these workflows as many of these instruments have real-time requirements. In this paper we present the workflow management service within the GRIDCC project which is tasked with optimising the workflows and ensuring that they meet the pre-defined QoS requirements specified upon them

D-XMAN:A Platform For Total Compositionality in Service-Oriented Architectures

Current software platforms for service composition are based on orchestration, choreography or hierarchical orchestration. However, such approaches for service composition only support partial compositionality; thereby, increasing the complexity of SOA development. In this paper, we propose DX-MAN, a platform that supports total compositionality. We describe the main concepts of DX-MAN with the help of a case study based on the popular MusicCorp

DEFINITION AND FORMAL REPRESENTATION OF THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT PROCESSES

Project management information systems are used to support project management processes. The typical project management processes are defined by the project management methodologies, such as PMBOK. It is necessary to formalize representation of these processes to use them in modelling, analysis and implementation of the project management information systems. The purpose of the article is defined key processes of project management and to identify appropriate techniques and tools for their formal representation. In the article groups of the project management processes are listed and representation techniques such as UML, XPDL and YAWL are evaluated. The comparison of process representation techniques is shows that the most appropriate is XPDL. Guidelines for project management process definition using XPDL are formulated. These formalized processes further will be used in configuration of the project management information systems

Exogenous Connectors for Hierarchical Service Composition

Service composition is currently done by (hierarchical) orchestration and choreography. However, these approaches do not support explicit control flow and total compositionality, which are crucial for the scalability of service-oriented systems. In this paper, we propose exogenous connectors for service composition. These connectors support both explicit control flow and total compositionality in hierarchical service composition. To validate and evaluate our proposal, we present a case study based on the popular MusicCorp