Flexible Service Choreography

Service-oriented architectures are a popular architectural paradigm for building software applications from a number of loosely coupled, distributed services. Through a set of procedural rules, workflow technologies define how groups of services coordinate with one another to achieve a shared task. A problem with workflow specifications is that often the patterns of interaction between the distributed services are too complicated to predict and analyse at design-time. In certain cases, the exact patterns of message exchange and the concrete services to call cannot be predicted in advance, due to factors such as fluctuating network load or the availability of services. It is a more realistic assumption to endow software components with the ability to make decisions about the nature and scope of their interactions at runtime. Multiagent systems offer a complementary paradigm: building software applications from a number of self interested, autonomous agents. This thesis presents an investigation into fusing the agency and service-oriented architecture paradigms, in order to facilitate flexible, workflow composition. Our approach offers an agent-based solution to service choreography and is founded on the concept of shared interaction protocols. By adopting an agent-based approach to service choreography, active autonomous agents can utilise the typically passive service-oriented architectures, found in Internet and Grid systems. In contrast with statically defined, centralised service orchestrations, decentralised agents can perform service choreography at runtime, allowing them to operate in scenarios where it is not possible to define the pattern of interaction in advance. Application to real scenarios is a driving factor behind this research. By working closely with a number of active Grid projects, namely AstroGrid and the Large-Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a concrete set of requirements for scientific workflow have been derived, based on realistic science problems. This research has resulted in the MultiAgent Service Choreography (MASC) language to express scientific workflow, methodology for system building and a software framework which performs agent based Web service choreography, in order to enact distributed e-Science experiments. Evaluation of this thesis is conducted through case study, applying the language, methodology and software framework to solve a motivating set of workflow scenarios

From Service Conversation Models to WS-CDL

Changing business environments are forcing organizations to develop flexible and adaptable enterprise systems. To accomplish this and to solve associated systems integration issues, many are moving towards web service technology. Two key ingredients of web services based solution are service composition and service choreography. While there has been lot of advancement in respect to service composition, service choreography rather largely remains an open problem. WS-CDL specification is considered to be a candidate standard for service choreography; however, consensus on support mechanisms to develop conversation models depicting peer-to-peer interactions are yet to be reached. In this paper, we develop an approach as well required heuristics for identifying service interaction patterns from business process models and using them to develop conversation models. We provide detailed discussion on heuristics, illustrate our approach through an example, as well as indicate how these conversation models can be used for generating WS-CDL specifications

Identifying web service integration challenges.

Web services technology promises well for the future of Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi). However, this technology is still in its infancy and the community is facing many challenges. In this paper we discuss some important B2Bi issues and look how web services could play their part in these. Currently, many web services related standards are being drawn up, but most of these are still immature and do not bring a real answer to the proposed challenges. Consequently, many topics for future research can be identified.Information; Requirements; Cognitive; Integration; Community;

On the Automated Synthesis of Enterprise Integration Patterns to Adapt Choreography-based Distributed Systems

The Future Internet is becoming a reality, providing a large-scale computing environments where a virtually infinite number of available services can be composed so to fit users' needs. Modern service-oriented applications will be more and more often built by reusing and assembling distributed services. A key enabler for this vision is then the ability to automatically compose and dynamically coordinate software services. Service choreographies are an emergent Service Engineering (SE) approach to compose together and coordinate services in a distributed way. When mismatching third-party services are to be composed, obtaining the distributed coordination and adaptation logic required to suitably realize a choreography is a non-trivial and error prone task. Automatic support is then needed. In this direction, this paper leverages previous work on the automatic synthesis of choreography-based systems, and describes our preliminary steps towards exploiting Enterprise Integration Patterns to deal with a form of choreography adaptation.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2015, arXiv:1512.0694

BPM News - Folge 3

Die BPM-Kolumne des EMISA-Forums berichtet über aktuelle Themen, Projekte und Veranstaltungen aus dem BPM-Umfeld. Schwerpunkt der vorliegenden Kolumne bildet das Thema Standardisierung von Prozessbeschreibungssprachen und -notationen im Allgemeinen und BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) im Speziellen. Hierzu liefert Jan Mendling von der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien in aktuelles Schlagwort. Des weiteren erhalten Leser eine Zusammenfassung zweier im ersten Halbjahr 2006 veranstalteten Workshops zu den Themen „Flexibilität prozessorientierter Informationssysteme“ und „Kollaborative Prozesse“ sowie einen BPM Veranstaltungskalender für die 2. Jahreshälfte 2006

PLACES'10: The 3rd Workshop on Programmng Language Approaches to concurrency and Communication-Centric Software

Paphos, Cyprus. March 201