5,527 research outputs found
Managing Evolving Business Workflows through the Capture of Descriptive Information
Business systems these days need to be agile to address the needs of a
changing world. In particular the discipline of Enterprise Application
Integration requires business process management to be highly reconfigurable
with the ability to support dynamic workflows, inter-application integration
and process reconfiguration. Basing EAI systems on model-resident or on a
so-called description-driven approach enables aspects of flexibility,
distribution, system evolution and integration to be addressed in a
domain-independent manner. Such a system called CRISTAL is described in this
paper with particular emphasis on its application to EAI problem domains. A
practical example of the CRISTAL technology in the domain of manufacturing
systems, called Agilium, is described to demonstrate the principles of
model-driven system evolution and integration. The approach is compared to
other model-driven development approaches such as the Model-Driven Architecture
of the OMG and so-called Adaptive Object Models.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. Presented at the eCOMO'2003 4th Int. Workshop on
Conceptual Modeling Approaches for e-Busines
Designing Traceability into Big Data Systems
Providing an appropriate level of accessibility and traceability to data or
process elements (so-called Items) in large volumes of data, often
Cloud-resident, is an essential requirement in the Big Data era.
Enterprise-wide data systems need to be designed from the outset to support
usage of such Items across the spectrum of business use rather than from any
specific application view. The design philosophy advocated in this paper is to
drive the design process using a so-called description-driven approach which
enriches models with meta-data and description and focuses the design process
on Item re-use, thereby promoting traceability. Details are given of the
description-driven design of big data systems at CERN, in health informatics
and in business process management. Evidence is presented that the approach
leads to design simplicity and consequent ease of management thanks to loose
typing and the adoption of a unified approach to Item management and usage.Comment: 10 pages; 6 figures in Proceedings of the 5th Annual International
Conference on ICT: Big Data, Cloud and Security (ICT-BDCS 2015), Singapore
July 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.5764,
arXiv:1402.575
The Deployment of an Enhanced Model-Driven Architecture for Business Process Management
Business systems these days need to be agile to address the needs of a
changing world. Business modelling requires business process management to be
highly adaptable with the ability to support dynamic workflows,
inter-application integration (potentially between businesses) and process
reconfiguration. Designing systems with the in-built ability to cater for
evolution is also becoming critical to their success. To handle change, systems
need the capability to adapt as and when necessary to changes in users
requirements. Allowing systems to be self-describing is one way to facilitate
this. Using our implementation of a self-describing system, a so-called
description-driven approach, new versions of data structures or processes can
be created alongside older versions providing a log of changes to the
underlying data schema and enabling the gathering of traceable (provenance)
data. The CRISTAL software, which originated at CERN for handling physics data,
uses versions of stored descriptions to define versions of data and workflows
which can be evolved over time and thereby to handle evolving system needs. It
has been customised for use in business applications as the Agilium-NG product.
This paper reports on how the Agilium-NG software has enabled the deployment of
an unique business process management solution that can be dynamically evolved
to cater for changing user requirement.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, 22nd International Database Engineering
& Applications Symposium (IDEAS 2018). arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1402.5764, arXiv:1402.5753, arXiv:1502.0154
Digital Curation at Work: Modeling Workflows for Digital Archival Materials
This paper describes and compares digital curation workflows from 12 cultural heritage institutions that vary in size, nature of digital collections, available resources, and level of development of digital curation activities. While the research and practice of digital curation continues to mature in the cultural heritage sector, relatively little empirical, comparative research on digital curation activities has been conducted to date. The present research aims to advance knowledge about digital curation as it is currently practiced in the field, principally by modeling digital curation workflows from different institutional contexts. This greater understanding can contribute to the advancement of digital curation software, practices, and technical skills. In particular, the project focuses on the role of open-source software systems, as these systems already have strong support in the cultural heritage sector and can readily be further developed through these existing communities. This research has surfaced similarities and differences in digital curation activities, as well as broader sociotechnical factors impacting digital curation work, including the degree of formalization of digital curation activities, the nature of collections being acquired, and the level of institutional support for various software environments
CRISTAL: A practical study in designing systems to cope with change
Software engineers frequently face the challenge of developing systems whose requirements are likely to change in order to adapt to organizational reconfigurations or other external pressures. Evolving requirements present difficulties, especially in environments in which business agility demands shorter development times and responsive prototyping. This paper uses a study from CERN in Geneva to address these research questions by employing a 'description-driven' approach that is responsive to changes in user requirements and that facilitates dynamic system reconfiguration. The study describes how handling descriptions of objects in practice alongside their instances (making the objects self-describing) can mediate the effects of evolving user requirements on system development. This paper reports on and draws lessons from the practical use of a description-driven system over time. It also identifies lessons that can be learned from adopting such a self-describing description-driven approach in future software development. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd
A constraint specification approach to building flexible workflows
Process support systems, such as workflows, are being used in a variety of domains. However, most areas of application have focused on traditional production-style processes, which are characterised by predictability and repetitiveness. Application in non-traditional domains with highly flexible process is still largely unexplored. Such flexible processes are characterised by lack of ability to completely predefine and/or an explosive number of alternatives. Accordingly we define flexibility as the ability of the process to execute on the basis of a partially defined model where the full specification is made at runtime and may be unique to each instance. In this paper, we will present an approach to building workflow models for such processes. We will present our approach in the context of a non-traditional domain for workflow, deployment, which is, degree programs in tertiary institutes. The primary motivation behind our approach is to provide the ability to model flexible processes without introducing non-standard modelling constructs. This ensures that the correctness and verification of the language is preserved. We propose to build workflow schemas from a standard set of modelling constructs and given process constraints. We identify the fundamental requirements for constraint specification and classify them into selection, termination and build constraints. We will detail the specification of these constraints in a relational model. Finally, we will demonstrate the dynamic building of instance specific workflow models on the basis of these constraints
A Description Driven Approach for Flexible Metadata Tracking
Evolving user requirements presents a considerable software engineering
challenge, all the more so in an environment where data will be stored for a
very long time, and must remain usable as the system specification evolves
around it. Capturing the description of the system addresses this issue since a
description-driven approach enables new versions of data structures and
processes to be created alongside the old, thereby providing a history of
changes to the underlying data models and enabling the capture of provenance
data. This description-driven approach is advocated in this paper in which a
system called CRISTAL is presented. CRISTAL is based on description-driven
principles; it can use previous versions of stored descriptions to define
various versions of data which can be stored in various forms. To demonstrate
the efficacy of this approach the history of the project at CERN is presented
where CRISTAL was used to track data and process definitions and their
associated provenance data in the construction of the CMS ECAL detector, how it
was applied to handle analysis tracking and data index provenance in the
neuGRID and N4U projects, and how it will be matured further in the CRISTAL-ISE
project. We believe that the CRISTAL approach could be invaluable in handling
the evolution, indexing and tracking of large datasets, and are keen to apply
it further in this direction.Comment: 10 pages and 3 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1402.5753, arXiv:1402.576
Provenance for computational tasks: a survey
Journal ArticleThe problem of systematically capturing and managing provenance for computational tasks has recently received significant attention because of its relevance to a wide range of domains and applications. The authors give an overview of important concepts related to provenance management, so that potential users can make informed decisions when selecting or designing a provenance solution
A novel workflow management system for handling dynamic process adaptation and compliance
Modern enterprise organisations rely on dynamic processes. Generally these processes cannot be modelled once and executed repeatedly without change. Enterprise processes may evolve unpredictably according to situations that cannot always be prescribed. However, no mechanism exists to ensure an updated process does not violate any compliance requirements.
Typical workflow processes may follow a process definition and execute several thousand instances using a workflow engine without any changes. This is suitable for routine business processes. However, when business processes need flexibility, adaptive features are needed. Updating processes may violate compliance requirements so automatic verification of compliance checking is necessary. The research work presented in this Thesis investigates the problem of current workflow technology in defining, managing and ensuring the specification and execution of business processes that are dynamic in nature, combined with policy standards throughout the process lifycle.
The findings from the literature review and the system requirements are used to design the proposed system architecture. Since a two-tier reference process model is not sufficient as a basis for the reference model for an adaptive and compliance workflow management system, a three-tier process model is proposed. The major components of the architecture consist of process models, business rules and plugin modules. This architecture exhibits the concept of user adaptation with structural checks and dynamic adaptation with data-driven checks.
A research prototype - Adaptive and Compliance Workflow Management System (ACWfMS) - was developed based on the proposed system architecture to implement core services of the system for testing and evaluation purposes. The ACWfMS enables the development of a workflow management tool to create or update the process models. It automatically validates compliance requirements and, in the case of violations, visual feedback is presented to the user. In addition, the architecture facilitates process migration to manage specific instances with modified definitions. A case study based on the postgraduate research process domain is discussed
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