Generating eScience Workflows from Statistical Analysis of Prior Data

A number of workflow design tools have been developed specifically to enable easy graphical specification of workflows that ensure systematic scientific data capture and analysis and precise provenance information. We believe that an important component that is missing from these existing workflow specification and enactment systems is integration with tools that enable prior detailed analysis of the existing data - and in particular statistical analysis. By thoroughly analyzing the existing relevant datasets first, it is possible to determine precisely where the existing data is sparse or insufficient and what further experimentation is required. Introducing statistical analysis to experimental design will reduce duplication and costs associated with fruitless experimentation and maximize opportunities for scientific breakthroughs. In this paper we describe a workflow specification system that we have developed for a particular eScience application (fuel cell optimization). Experimental workflow instances are generated as a result of detailed statistical analysis and interactive exploration of the existing datasets. This is carried out through a graphical data exploration interface that integrates the widely-used open source statistical analysis software package, R, as a web service

Models of Interaction as a Grounding for Peer to Peer Knowledge Sharing

Most current attempts to achieve reliable knowledge sharing on a large scale have relied on pre-engineering of content and supply services. This, like traditional knowledge engineering, does not by itself scale to large, open, peer to peer systems because the cost of being precise about the absolute semantics of services and their knowledge rises rapidly as more services participate. We describe how to break out of this deadlock by focusing on semantics related to interaction and using this to avoid dependency on a priori semantic agreement; instead making semantic commitments incrementally at run time. Our method is based on interaction models that are mobile in the sense that they may be transferred to other components, this being a mechanism for service composition and for coalition formation. By shifting the emphasis to interaction (the details of which may be hidden from users) we can obtain knowledge sharing of sufficient quality for sustainable communities of practice without the barrier of complex meta-data provision prior to community formation

A programming system for process coordination in virtual organisations

PhD thesisDistributed business applications are increasingly being constructed by composing them from services provided by various online businesses. Typically, this leads to trading partners coming together to form virtual organizations (VOs). Each member of a VO maintains their autonomy, except with respect to their agreed goals. The structure of the Virtual Organisation may contain one dominant organisation who dictates the method of achieving the goals or the members may be considered peers of equal importance. The goals of VOs can be defined by the shared global business processes they contain. To be able to execute these business processes, VOs require a flexible enactment model as there may be no single ‘owner’ of the business process and therefore no natural place to enact the business processes. One solution is centralised enactment using a trusted third party, but in some cases this may not be acceptable (for instance because of security reasons). This thesis will present a programming system that allows centralised as well as distributed enactment where each organisation enacts part of the business process. To achieve distributed enactment we must address the problem of specifying the business process in a manner that is amenable to distribution. The first contribution of this thesis is the presentation of the Task Model, a set of languages and notations for describing workflows that can be enacted in a centralised or decentralised manner. The business processes that we specify will coordinate the services that each organisation owns. The second contribution of this thesis is the presentation of a method of describing the observable behaviour of these services. The language we present, SSDL, provides a flexible and extensible way of describing the messaging behaviour of Web Services. We present a method for checking that a set of services described in SSDL are compatible with each other and also that a workflow interacts with a service in the desired manner. The final contribution of this thesis is the presentation of an abstract architecture and prototype implementation of a decentralised workflow engine. The prototype is able to enact workflows described in the Task Model notation in either a centralised or decentralised scenario

Enterprise engineering using semantic technologies

Modern Enterprises are facing unprecedented challenges in every aspect of their businesses: from marketing research, invention of products, prototyping, production, sales to billing. Innovation is the key to enhancing enterprise performances and knowledge is the main driving force in creating innovation. The identification and effective management of valuable knowledge, however, remains an illusive topic. Knowledge management (KM) techniques, such as enterprise process modelling, have long been recognised for their value and practiced as part of normal business. There are plentiful of KM techniques. However, what is still lacking is a holistic KM approach that enables one to fully connect KM efforts with existing business knowledge and practices already in IT systems, such as organisational memories. To address this problem, we present an integrated three-dimensional KM approach that supports innovative semantics technologies. Its automated formal methods allow us to tap into modern business practices and capitalise on existing knowledge. It closes the knowledge management cycle with user feedback loops. Since we are making use of reliable existing knowledge and methods, new knowledge can be extracted with less effort comparing with another method where new information has to be created from scratch

Software Agent Architecture for Managing Inter-Organizational Collaborations

The growing importance of cooperation among organizations, as a result of globalization, current market opportunities and technological advances, encourages organizations to dynamically establish inter-organizational collaborations. These collaborations are carried out by executing collaborative business processes among the organizations. In this work we propose an agent-based software architecture for managing inter-organizational collaborations. Two types of agents are provided: the Collaboration Administrator Agent and the Process Administrator Agent. The former allows organizations setting up collaborations. The latter allows organizations executing collaborative business processes. A Colored Petri Net model specifying the role, which an organization fulfills in a collaborative process, is used to carry out the behavior of the Process Administrator Agent that represents the organization. Planning and execution of the actions of the Process Administrator Agents are driven by a Colored Petri Net machine embedded to them. Thus, Process Administrator Agents do not require to have defined at design-time the protocols they can support. In addition, we propose a model-driven development method for generating Colored Petri Net models from a collaborative process model defined as interaction protocol. Finally, an implementation of the agent-based software architecture and methods based on model-driven development are presented.La creciente importancia de la cooperación entre las organizaciones, como consecuencia de la globalización, las oportunidades actuales de mercado y los avances tecnológicos, alienta a las organizaciones a establecer en forma dinámica colaboraciones inter-organizacionales. Estas colaboraciones se llevan a cabo mediante la ejecución de procesos de negocio colaborativos entre las organizaciones. En este trabajo de investigación se propone una arquitectura basada en agentes de software para la gestión de colaboraciones inter-organizacionales. La arquitectura provee dos tipos de agentes: el Agente Administrador de Colaboraciones y el Agente Administrador de Proceso. El primer agente permite a las organizaciones a establecer colaboraciones. El segundo agente habilita a las organizaciones ejecutar procesos de negocio colaborativos. El rol que una organización desempeña en un proceso colaborativo es especificado mediante un modelo de redes de Petri coloreadas. Este modelo es usado para dirigir el comportamiento del Agente Administrador de Proceso, el cual representa a una organización. La ejecución de los planes y las acciones del Agente Administrador de Proceso son dirigidas mediante una máquina de redes de Petri coloreadas embebida en el agente. Entonces, los Agentes Administrador de Proceso no requieren tener definido en tiempo de diseño los protocolos que dan soporte a su comportamiento. Adicionalmente, se propone un método basado en el desarrollo dirigido por modelos para la generación en forma automática de modelos de redes de Petri coloreadas a partir de un modelo de procesos de negocio colaborativo definido como protocolo de interacción. Finalmente, la implementación de la arquitectura y los métodos basados en el desarrollo dirigido por modelos son presentados.Fil: Tello Leal, Edgar. Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas; MéxicoFil: Chiotti, Omar Juan Alfredo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño (i); ArgentinaFil: Villarreal, Pablo David. Universidad Tecnologica Nacional. Facultad Regional Santa Fe. Centro de Investigacion y Desarrollo de Ingenieria En Sistemas de Informacion; Argentin

Supporting adaptiveness of cyber-physical processes through action-based formalisms

Cyber Physical Processes (CPPs) refer to a new generation of business processes enacted in many application environments (e.g., emergency management, smart manufacturing, etc.), in which the presence of Internet-of-Things devices and embedded ICT systems (e.g., smartphones, sensors, actuators) strongly influences the coordination of the real-world entities (e.g., humans, robots, etc.) inhabitating such environments. A Process Management System (PMS) employed for executing CPPs is required to automatically adapt its running processes to anomalous situations and exogenous events by minimising any human intervention. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing an approach and an adaptive Cognitive PMS, called SmartPM, which combines process execution monitoring, unanticipated exception detection and automated resolution strategies leveraging on three well-established action-based formalisms developed for reasoning about actions in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including the situation calculus, IndiGolog and automated planning. Interestingly, the use of SmartPM does not require any expertise of the internal working of the AI tools involved in the system

A Chemistry-Inspired Workflow Management System for a Decentralized Composite Service Execution

With the recent widespread adoption of service-oriented architecture, the dynamic composition of such services is now a crucial issue in the area of distributed computing. The coordination and execution of composite Web services are today typically conducted by heavyweight centralized workflow engines, leading to an increasing probability of processing and communication bottleneck and failures. In addition, centralization induces higher deployment costs, such as the computing infrastructure to support the workflow engine, which is not affordable for a large number of small businesses and end-users. Last but not least, central workflow engines leads to diverse inadequate consequences dealing with privacy or energy consumption. In a world where platforms are more and more dynamic and elastic as promised by cloud computing, decentralized and dynamic interaction schemes are required. Addressing the characteristics of such platforms, nature-inspired analogies recently regained attention to provide autonomous service coordination on top of dynamic large scale platforms. In this report, we propose a decentralized approach for the execution of composite Web services based on an unconventional programming paradigm that relies on the chemical metaphor. It provides a high-level execution model that allows executing composite services in a fully decentralized manner. Composed of services communicating through a persistent shared space containing control and data flows between services, our architecture allows to distribute the composition among nodes without the need for any centralized coordination. A proof of concept is given, through the deployment of a software prototype implementing these concepts, showing the viability of an autonomic vision of service composition.Suite à l'adoption grandissante des architectures orientées service, la composition dynamique de services est devenu un problème important de la construction de plates-formes de calcul distribué. La coordination et l'exécutiuon de Web Service composites sont aujourd'hui typiquement conduits par des moteurs de "workflows" (graphes de composition de services, formant un "service composite") centralisés, entrainant différents problèmes, et notamment une probabilité grandissante d'apparition d'échecs ou de goulots d'étranglement. Dans un monde où les plate-formes sont de plus en plus dynamiques (ou "élastiques", comme envisagé par les "clouds", de nouveaux mécanismes de coordination dynamiques sont requis. Dans ce contexte, des métaphores naturelles ont gagné une attention particulière récemment, car elles fournissent des abstractions pour la coordination autonome d'entités (commes les services.) Dans ce rapport, une approche décentralisée pour l'exécution de Web Services composites fondée sur la métaphore chimique, qui fournit un modèle d'exécution haut-niveau pour l'exécution décentralisée, est présentée. Dans cette architecture, les services communiquent à travers un espace virtuellement partagé persistant contenant l'information sur les flux de contrôle et de données, permettant une coordination décentralisée des services. Un prototype logiciel a été développé et expérimenté. Les résultats de ces expériences sont présentés à la fin de ce rapport

Rule-driven service coordination middleware for scientific applications

International audienceWith the proliferation of Web services, scientific applications are more and more designed as temporal compositions of services, commonly referred to as workflows. To address this paradigm shift, different workflow management systems have been proposed. While their efficiency has been established over centralized static systems, it is questionable over decentralized failure-prone platforms. Scientific applications recently started to be deployed over large distributed computing platforms, leading to new issues, like elasticity, i.e., the possibility to dynamically refine, at runtime, the amount of resources dedicated to an application. This raised again the demand for new programming models, able to express autonomic self-coordination of services in a dynamic platform. Nature-inspired, rule-based computing models recently gained a lot of attention in this context. They are able to naturally expressing parallelism, distribution, and autonomic adaptation. While their high expressiveness and adequacy for this context has been established, such models severely suffer from a lack of proof of concepts. In this paper, we concretely show how to leverage such models in this context. We focus on the design, the implementation and the experimental validation of a chemistry-inspired scientific workflow management system