Evolution of Process Choreographies in DYCHOR

Process-aware information systems have to be frequently adapted due to business process changes. One important challenge not adequately addressed so far concerns the evolution of process choreographies, i.e., the change of interactions between partner processes in a cross-organizational setting. If respective modifications are applied in an uncontrolled manner, inconsistencies or errors might occur in the sequel. In particular, modifications of private processes performed by a single party may affect the implementation of the private processes of partners as well. In this paper we present the DYCHOR (DYnamic CHOReographies) framework which allows process engineers to detect how changes of private processes may affect related public views and - if so - how they can be propagated to the public and private processes of partners. In particular, DYCHOR exploits the semantics of the applied changes in order to automatically determine the adaptations necessary for the partner processes. Altogether our framework provides an important contribution towards the realization of adaptive, cross-organizational processes

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

Methods for Efficient and Accurate Discovery of Services

With an increasing number of services developed and offered in an enterprise setting or the Web, users can hardly verify their requirements manually in order to find appropriate services. In this thesis, we develop a method to discover semantically described services. We exploit comprehensive service and request descriptions such that a wide variety of use cases can be supported. In our discovery method, we compute the matchmaking decision by employing an efficient model checking technique

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

Design and Implementation of a Middleware for Uniform, Federated and Dynamic Event Processing

In recent years, real-time processing of massive event streams has become an important topic in the area of data analytics. It will become even more important in the future due to cheap sensors, a growing amount of devices and their ubiquitous inter-connection also known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Academia, industry and the open source community have developed several event processing (EP) systems that allow users to define, manage and execute continuous queries over event streams. They achieve a significantly better performance than the traditional store-then-process'' approach in which events are first stored and indexed in a database. Because EP systems have different roots and because of the lack of standardization, the system landscape became highly heterogenous. Today's EP systems differ in APIs, execution behaviors and query languages. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a novel middleware that abstracts from different EP systems and provides a uniform API, execution behavior and query language to users and developers. As a consequence, the presented middleware overcomes the problem of vendor lock-in and different EP systems are enabled to cooperate with each other. In practice, event streams differ dramatically in volume and velocity. We show therefore how the middleware can connect to not only different EP systems, but also database systems and a native implementation. Emerging applications such as the IoT raise novel challenges and require EP to be more dynamic. We present extensions to the middleware that enable self-adaptivity which is needed in context-sensitive applications and those that deal with constantly varying sets of event producers and consumers. Lastly, we extend the middleware to fully support the processing of events containing spatial data and to be able to run distributed in the form of a federation of heterogenous EP systems

A monitoring approach for runtime service discovery

Effective runtime service discovery requires identification of services based on different service characteristics such as structural, behavioural, quality, and contextual characteristics. However, current service registries guarantee services described in terms of structural and sometimes quality characteristics and, therefore, it is not always possible to assume that services in them will have all the characteristics required for effective service discovery. In this paper, we describe a monitor-based runtime service discovery framework called MoRSeD. The framework supports service discovery in both push and pull modes of query execution. The push mode of query execution is performed in parallel to the execution of a service-based system, in a proactive way. Both types of queries are specified in a query language called SerDiQueL that allows the representation of structural, behavioral, quality, and contextual conditions of services to be identified. The framework uses a monitor component to verify if behavioral and contextual conditions in the queries can be satisfied by services, based on translations of these conditions into properties represented in event calculus, and verification of the satisfiability of these properties against services. The monitor is also used to support identification that services participating in a service-based system are unavailable, and identification of changes in the behavioral and contextual characteristics of the services. A prototype implementation of the framework has been developed. The framework has been evaluated in terms of comparison of its performance when using and when not using the monitor component

Intelligent Learning Automata-based Strategies Applied to Personalized Service Provisioning in Pervasive Environments

Doktorgradsavhandling i informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi, Universitetet i Agder, Grimstad, 201

Operating guidelines for services

In the paradigm of service-oriented computing, companies organize their core competencies as services and may request other functionalities from services of other companies. Services provide high flexibility, platform independent loose coupling, and distributed execution. They may thus help to reduce the complexity of dynamically binding and integrating heterogenous processes within and across organizations. The vision of service-oriented architectures is to provide a framework for publishing new services, for on demand searching for and discovery of existing services, and for dynamically binding services to achieve common business goals. That way, each individual organization gains more flexibility to dynamically react on new challenges. As services may be created or modified, or collaborations may be restructured at any point in time, a new challenge arises in this setting—the challenge for deciding the compatibility of the composed services before their actual binding. Recent literature distinguishes four different aspects of service compatibility: syntactical, behavioral, semantical, and non-functional compatibility. In this thesis, we focus on behavioral compatibility and abstract from the other aspects. Potential behavioral incompatibilities between services include deadlocks (two services wait for a message of each other), livelocks (two services keep exchanging messages without progressing), and pending messages that have been sent but cannot be received anymore. For stateful services that interact via asynchronous message passing, deciding behavioral compatibility is far from trivial. Local changes to one service may introduce errors in some or even all other services of an interaction. The verification of behavioral compatibility suffers from state explosion problems and is restricted by privacy issues. That is, the parties of an interaction are essentially autonomous and may be competitors in other business fields. Consequently, they do not want to reveal the internals of their processes to the other participants in order to hide trade secrets. To systematically approach this challenge, we introduce a formal framework based on Petri nets and automata for service modeling and formalize behavioral compatibility as deadlock freedom of the composition of the services. The main contribution of this thesis is to introduce the concept of the operating guideline of a service. Operating guidelines provide a formal characterization of the set of all behaviorally compatible services R for a given service S. Usually, this set is infinite. However, the operating guideline OGS of a service S serves as a finite representation of this infinite set. Furthermore, the operating guideline of S reveals only internals that are inevitably necessary to decide behavioral compatibility with S. We provide a construction method of operating guidelines for finite-state services with bounded communication. Operating guidelines can be used in many applications in the context of serviceoriented computing. The most fundamental application is to support the discovery of behaviorally compatible services. To this end, we develop a matching procedure that efficiently decides whether a given service R is characterized by the operating guideline OGS of a service S. If R matches, then both services R and S are behaviorally compatible and can be bound together to interact with each other. If R does not match with OGS, then the services are behaviorally incompatible and may run into severe behavioral errors and not reach their common business goal. Operating guidelines can furthermore be applied in the novel research areas of service substitutability and the generation of adapter services, for instance. To this end, we develop methods to compare the sets of services characterized by the operating guidelines OGS and OGS0 . If OGS0 characterizes more services than OGS, then the service S can be substituted by the service S0 without loosing any behaviorally compatible interaction partner R. Furthermore, we show how to synthesize a service R from the operating guideline OGS such that R is behaviorally compatible to S by construction. All results presented in this thesis are implemented in our service analysis tool Fiona. Fiona may compute operating guidelines for services modeled as Petri nets. It may match a service with an operating guideline, compare operating guidelines for equivalence or an inclusion relation, and synthesize service adapters for behaviorally incompatible services. Together with the tool BPEL2oWFN— which translates web services specified in BPEL into Petri net models of the services—we can immediately apply our results to services that stem from practic