A Smart Contract-based BPMN Choreography Execution for Management of Construction Processes

Construction management can be grouped into two different levels: strategic early planning, that provides the baseline for project monitoring, and short time initiatives, based on objectives and self-organization from actors who are involved in on-site processes. The latter can be considered as a complex system management issue since it presents emergent behaviors thus it can not be handled in a traditional way. The passage from project scheduling to on site operations management requires a change of perspective. On site short time planning is a process of forecasting future outcomes therefore it deals with uncertainty and indeterminacy. At present this is managed through the representation of many separate orchestrations and this does not allow to eliminate the inefficiencies that arise at the level of synchronization of the individual tasks performed by organizations with contractually separate management. Efficiency in construction management implies to take into consideration choreographies because they better reflect synchronization of different organizations management processes. On the other hand, information processed as a trigger for distributed activities on different management does not guarantee process traceability while smart contracts linked to single task execution assure both promptness and irreversible tracking at single task level. The actual execution of the processes depends both on what happens and on the information that flows between the subjects who actually carry out processes asynchronous to each other, so the only possibility to synchronize them is information. This research aims to describe a framework for applying BPMN choreographies to construction site processes in order to better modeling processes for smart contracts application. The choice of applying BPMN instead of CPM lays in the fact that it allows to model the information flows as well as the preparatory aspects and in addition it allows to represent decision-making moments. Every single activity in the baseline can be modelled as a choreography at a lower level. On the other hand, process performance monitoring can be performed thanks to blockchain tasks notarization. Concrete casting quality assessment process has been chosen as use case. BPMN choreography of this process has been modelled and blockchain application for tasks and information notarization has been development and tested on a construction site

Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems

As robotic systems are moved out of factory work cells into human-facing environments questions of choreography become central to their design, placement, and application. With a human viewer or counterpart present, a system will automatically be interpreted within context, style of movement, and form factor by human beings as animate elements of their environment. The interpretation by this human counterpart is critical to the success of the system's integration: knobs on the system need to make sense to a human counterpart; an artificial agent should have a way of notifying a human counterpart of a change in system state, possibly through motion profiles; and the motion of a human counterpart may have important contextual clues for task completion. Thus, professional choreographers, dance practitioners, and movement analysts are critical to research in robotics. They have design methods for movement that align with human audience perception, can identify simplified features of movement for human-robot interaction goals, and have detailed knowledge of the capacity of human movement. This article provides approaches employed by one research lab, specific impacts on technical and artistic projects within, and principles that may guide future such work. The background section reports on choreography, somatic perspectives, improvisation, the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System, and robotics. From this context methods including embodied exercises, writing prompts, and community building activities have been developed to facilitate interdisciplinary research. The results of this work is presented as an overview of a smattering of projects in areas like high-level motion planning, software development for rapid prototyping of movement, artistic output, and user studies that help understand how people interpret movement. Finally, guiding principles for other groups to adopt are posited.Comment: Under review at MDPI Arts Special Issue "The Machine as Artist (for the 21st Century)" http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/Machine_Artis

Automatic Choreography Repair

Choreography analysis is a crucial problem in concurrent and distributed system development. A choreography specifies the desired ordering of message exchanges among the components of a system. The realizability of a choreography amounts to determining the existence of components whose communication behavior conforms to the given choreography. Recently, the choreography realizability problem has been proved to be decidable. In this paper, we investigate the repairability of un- realizable choreographies, where the goal is to identify a set of changes to a given un-realizable choreography that will make it realizable. We present a technique for automatically repairing un-realizable choreographies and provide formal guarantees of correctness and termination. We show the viability of our technique by applying it successfully for several small but representative unrealizable choregraphies from the domain of Singulary OS contract and Web services

Communications semantics for WSBPEL Processes

ISBN : 978-0-7695-3310-0International audienceWSBPEL opens up the possibility of applying a range of formal techniques to the verification of Web service behaviors from two points of view: constraints between activities within the same process and dependencies between activities of different processes. In a previous work, we have described an approach for the verification of Web service compositions defined by a set of BPEL processes. The key aspect of such a verification task is the model adopted for representing the communications among the services participating to the composition. In this paper, we propose to extend this approach to handle dependencies between activities of different process orchestrations through message exchanges. Our aim is to enable supporting models of service choreography with multiple interacting Web services compositions, from the perspective of a collaborative distributed composition development environment. The process of behavior analysis moves from a single local process to that of modelling and analyzing the behavior of multiple processes across composition domains

Web Services Compositions Modelling and Choreographies Analysis

International audienceIn (Rouached, Godart and al. 2006; Rouached, Godart 2007), we have described the semantics of WSBPEL by way of mapping each of the WSBPEL (Arkin, Askary and al. 2004) constructs to the EC algebra and building a model of the process behaviour. With these mapping rules, we have described a modelling approach of a process defined for a single Web service composition. However, this modelling is limited to a local view and can only be used to model the behaviour of a single process. A series of compositions in Web service choreography need specific modelling activities that are not explicitly derived from an implementation. An elaboration of modelling is then required to represent the behaviour of interacting compositions across partnered processes. This elaboration provides a representation that enables us to perform analysis of service interaction for behaviour properties. The ability to perform verification and validation between execution and design, and within the process compositions themselves, is a key requirement of the Web services architecture specification. In this paper, we further the semantic mapping to include Web service composition interactions through modelling Web service conversations and their choreography. We describe this elaboration of models to support a view of interacting Web service compositions extending the mapping from WSBPEL to EC, and including Web service interfaces (WSDL) for use in modelling between services. The verification and validation techniques are also exposed. An automated induction-based theorem prover is used as verification back-end

Correctness of services and their composition

We study correctness of services and their composition and investigate how the design of correct service compositions can be systematically supported. We thereby focus on the communication protocol of the service and approach these questions using formal methods and make contributions to three scenarios of SOC.Wir studieren die Korrektheit von Services und Servicekompositionen und untersuchen, wie der Entwurf von korrekten Servicekompositionen systematisch unterstützt werden kann. Wir legen dabei den Fokus auf das Kommunikationsprotokoll der Services. Mithilfe von formalen Methoden tragen wir zu drei Szenarien von SOC bei

Distributed Web Service Coordination for Collaboration Applications and Biological Workflows

In this dissertation work, we have investigated the main research thrust of decentralized coordination of workflows over web services. To address distributed workflow coordination, first we have developed “Web Coordination Bonds” as a capable set of dependency modeling primitives that enable each web service to manage its own dependencies. Web bond primitives are as powerful as extended Petri nets and have sufficient modeling and expressive capabilities to model workflow dependencies. We have designed and prototyped our “Web Service Coordination Management Middleware” (WSCMM) system that enhances current web services infrastructure to accommodate web bond enabled web services. Finally, based on core concepts of web coordination bonds and WSCMM, we have developed the “BondFlow” system that allows easy configuration distributed coordination of workflows. The footprint of the BonFlow runtime is 24KB and the additional third party software packages, SOAP client and XML parser, account for 115KB

Correctness of services and their composition

We study correctness of services and their composition and investigate how the design of correct service compositions can be systematically supported. We thereby focus on the communication protocol of the service and approach these questions using formal methods and make contributions to three scenarios of SOC.Wir studieren die Korrektheit von Services und Servicekompositionen und untersuchen, wie der Entwurf von korrekten Servicekompositionen systematisch unterstützt werden kann. Wir legen dabei den Fokus auf das Kommunikationsprotokoll der Services. Mithilfe von formalen Methoden tragen wir zu drei Szenarien von SOC bei