Adaptive Process Management in Cyber-Physical Domains

The increasing application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging cyber-physical domains beyond business computing (e.g., personalized healthcare, emergency management, factories of the future, home automation, etc.) has led to reconsider the level of flexibility and support required to manage complex processes in such domains. A cyber-physical domain is characterized by the presence of a cyber-physical system coordinating heterogeneous ICT components (PCs, smartphones, sensors, actuators) and involving real world entities (humans, machines, agents, robots, etc.) that perform complex tasks in the “physical” real world to achieve a common goal. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable, and processes enacted in cyber-physical domains must be robust to unexpected conditions and adaptable to unanticipated exceptions. This demands a more flexible approach in process design and enactment, recognizing that in real-world environments it is not adequate to assume that all possible recovery activities can be predefined for dealing with the exceptions that can ensue. In this chapter, we tackle the above issue and we propose a general approach, a concrete framework and a process management system implementation, called SmartPM, for automatically adapting processes enacted in cyber-physical domains in case of unanticipated exceptions and exogenous events. The adaptation mechanism provided by SmartPM is based on declarative task specifications, execution monitoring for detecting failures and context changes at run-time, and automated planning techniques to self-repair the running process, without requiring to predefine any specific adaptation policy or exception handler at design-time

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

Architectural mismatch tolerance

The integrity of complex software systems built from existing components is becoming more dependent on the integrity of the mechanisms used to interconnect these components and, in particular, on the ability of these mechanisms to cope with architectural mismatches that might exist between components. There is a need to detect and handle (i.e. to tolerate) architectural mismatches during runtime because in the majority of practical situations it is impossible to localize and correct all such mismatches during development time. When developing complex software systems, the problem is not only to identify the appropriate components, but also to make sure that these components are interconnected in a way that allows mismatches to be tolerated. The resulting architectural solution should be a system based on the existing components, which are independent in their nature, but are able to interact in well-understood ways. To find such a solution we apply general principles of fault tolerance to dealing with arch itectural mismatche

Quality Program Provisions for Aeronautical and Space System Contractors

This publication sets forth quality program requirements for NASA aeronautical and space programs, systems, subsystems, and related services. These requirements provide for the effective operation of a quality program which ensures that quality criteria and requirements are recognized, definitized, and performed satisfactorily

Design Principles for Closed Loop Supply Chains

In this paper we study design principles for closed loop supply chains. Closed loop supply chains aim at closing material flows thereby limiting emission and residual waste, but also providing customer service at low cost. We study 'traditional' and 'new' design principles known in the literature. It appears that setting up closed loop supply chains requires some additional design principles because of sustainability requirements. At the same time however, we see that traditional principles also apply. Subsequently we look at a business situation at Honeywell. Here, only a subset of the relevant design principles is applied. The apparent low status of reverse logistics may provide an explanation for this. To some extent, the same mistakes are made again as were 20 years ago in, for instance, inbound logistics. Thus, obvious improvements can be made by applying traditional principles. Also new principles, which require a life cycle driven approach, need to be applied. This can be supported by advanced management tools such as LCA and LCC.reverse logistics;case-study;closed loop supply chains

Automatic Software Repair: a Bibliography

This article presents a survey on automatic software repair. Automatic software repair consists of automatically finding a solution to software bugs without human intervention. This article considers all kinds of repairs. First, it discusses behavioral repair where test suites, contracts, models, and crashing inputs are taken as oracle. Second, it discusses state repair, also known as runtime repair or runtime recovery, with techniques such as checkpoint and restart, reconfiguration, and invariant restoration. The uniqueness of this article is that it spans the research communities that contribute to this body of knowledge: software engineering, dependability, operating systems, programming languages, and security. It provides a novel and structured overview of the diversity of bug oracles and repair operators used in the literature

Software safety : a definition and some preliminary thoughts

Software safety is the subject of a research project in its initial stages at the University of California Irvine. This research deals with critical real-time software where the cost of an error is high, e.g. human life. In this paper software techniques having a bearing on safety are described and evaluated. Initial definitions of software safety concepts are presented along with some preliminary thoughts and research questions

Talos: Neutralizing Vulnerabilities with Security Workarounds for Rapid Response

Considerable delays often exist between the discovery of a vulnerability and the issue of a patch. One way to mitigate this window of vulnerability is to use a configuration workaround, which prevents the vulnerable code from being executed at the cost of some lost functionality -- but only if one is available. Since program configurations are not specifically designed to mitigate software vulnerabilities, we find that they only cover 25.2% of vulnerabilities. To minimize patch delay vulnerabilities and address the limitations of configuration workarounds, we propose Security Workarounds for Rapid Response (SWRRs), which are designed to neutralize security vulnerabilities in a timely, secure, and unobtrusive manner. Similar to configuration workarounds, SWRRs neutralize vulnerabilities by preventing vulnerable code from being executed at the cost of some lost functionality. However, the key difference is that SWRRs use existing error-handling code within programs, which enables them to be mechanically inserted with minimal knowledge of the program and minimal developer effort. This allows SWRRs to achieve high coverage while still being fast and easy to deploy. We have designed and implemented Talos, a system that mechanically instruments SWRRs into a given program, and evaluate it on five popular Linux server programs. We run exploits against 11 real-world software vulnerabilities and show that SWRRs neutralize the vulnerabilities in all cases. Quantitative measurements on 320 SWRRs indicate that SWRRs instrumented by Talos can neutralize 75.1% of all potential vulnerabilities and incur a loss of functionality similar to configuration workarounds in 71.3% of those cases. Our overall conclusion is that automatically generated SWRRs can safely mitigate 2.1x more vulnerabilities, while only incurring a loss of functionality comparable to that of traditional configuration workarounds.Comment: Published in Proceedings of the 37th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2016