Modeling Service Choreographies with Rule-enhanced Business Processes

The participation at EDOC 2010 was overwhelming in every positive sense, and I am very thankful to the committee for this award. Our presentation was received highly positive and triggered several questions. The questions were mainly about the relations of our work with the use of ontology and vocabulary representation languages, and our plans for developing executable models rather than generating code from models. In fact, this was already in line with our previous plans and research directions. Some of these discussions even continued during the following days. In particular, we had plans for two concrete collaborations. One is related to the development of a formal semantics of the rBPMN languages by using process algebra, that is, by using the mCRL2 language in particular. Moreover, we also created a common plan for integration of semi-structured English language for defining business rules and vocabularies. This will also allow us to have a more effective way to capture rules in rBPMN process models. Moreover, our presentation of the rBPMN editor, as an practical implementation tool for the work with the rBPMN language received a special attention, and several researchers have already approached us to establish research collaboration and/or to use our tool, which is now publically available. The overall experience was also extremely valuable. The program of the conference covered nearly all of the diverse topics in enterprise computing. That is, the selected papers cover engineering aspects in many phases of development life cycle of enterprise systems, especially those designed for distributed environments. I have also delivered a keynote at the VORTE 2010 workshop with the audience with was the largest of all workshop keynotes at the conference. The participants very positively received my insights. In a very interactive session, we discussed some of the main research challenges important for better integration of business rules and business process modeling languages.The research community has so far mainly focused on the problem of modeling of service orchestrations in the domain of service composition, while modeling of service choreographies has attracted less attention. The following challenges in choreography modeling are tackled in this paper: i) choreography models are not well-connected with the underlying business vocabulary models. ii) there is limited support for decoupling parts of business logic from complete choreography models. This reduces dynamic changes of choreographies; iii) choreography models contain redundant elements of shared business logic, which might lead to an inconsistent implementation and incompatible behavior. Our proposal – rBPMN – is an extension of a business process modeling language with rule and choreography modeling support. rBPMN is defined by weaving the metamodels of the Business Process Modeling Notation and REWERSE Rule Markup Language. To evaluate our proposal, we use service-interaction patterns and compare our approach with related solutions

Data perspective in process choreographies : modeling and execution

Process choreographies - communication between different organizations to exchange information - is part of daily business. While the correct ordering of exchanged messages can be modeled and enacted with current choreography techniques, no approach exists to describe the data perspective for a successful process choreography. In this paper, we describe an entirely model-driven approach for BPMN, the industry standard, to include the data perspective while maintaining control flow aspects by utilizing a recent concept to enact data dependencies in internal processes. This work provides a modeling guideline with the require artifacts and their operational semantics to allow automatic choreography enactment covering data retrieval, transformation, and correlation. We show applicability of our approach by an implementation for the Camunda BPM platform, a java-based process engine, and validate it with the service interaction patterns. Keywords: Process Modeling, Data Modeling, Process Choreographies, Process Enactment, BPMN, SQ

CBG-Framework: A bottom-up model-based approach for Collaborative Business Process Management

Nowadays most existing products and services are the result of the collaboration of a large number of companies that form a value chain known as Supply Chain (SC). Then individual Business Process Management (BPM) requires a holistic vision that incorporates an inter organizational view that supports SC decision making. This study proposes a novel idea trying to address collaborative BP modelling problem with a new perspective, a bottom-up approach, reusing process models that each organization may have created with a different modelling language. Collaborative Business Generation (CBG) Framework, following Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm, includes a meta model, a method, a set of model transformations and a support tool to create collaborative BP models from individual ones, maintaining privacy and autonomy in decision making. This paper presents main CBG-Framework elements as well as a real world case study for early validation.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-RMinisterio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Distribution pattern-driven development of service architectures

Distributed systems are being constructed by composing a number of discrete components. This practice is particularly prevalent within the Web service domain in the form of service process orchestration and choreography. Often, enterprise systems are built from many existing discrete applications such as legacy applications exposed using Web service interfaces. There are a number of architectural configurations or distribution patterns, which express how a composed system is to be deployed in a distributed environment. However, the amount of code required to realise these distribution patterns is considerable. In this paper, we propose a distribution pattern-driven approach to service composition and architecting. We develop, based on a catalog of patterns, a UML-compliant framework, which takes existing Web service interfaces as its input and generates executable Web service compositions based on a distribution pattern chosen by the software architect

Ontology-based composition and matching for dynamic cloud service coordination

Recent cross-organisational software service offerings, such as cloud computing, create higher integration needs. In particular, services are combined through brokers and mediators, solutions to allow individual services to collaborate and their interaction to be coordinated are required. The need to address dynamic management - caused by cloud and on-demand environments - can be addressed through service coordination based on ontology-based composition and matching techniques. Our solution to composition and matching utilises a service coordination space that acts as a passive infrastructure for collaboration where users submit requests that are then selected and taken on by providers. We discuss the information models and the coordination principles of such a collaboration environment in terms of an ontology and its underlying description logics. We provide ontology-based solutions for structural composition of descriptions and matching between requested and provided services

Towards a Smart Society through Personal Assistants Employing Executable Choreographies

With the increased use of Internet, governments and large companies store and share massive amounts of personal data in such a way that leaves no space for transparency. Large organizations and institutions are known to be ineffective in data safeguarding, so they can be stolen. The analysis of executable choreographies and their implementation in the real systems led us to the conclusion that it is possible to increase data privacy by using a different kind of automation made possible by the personal assistant of the future. A possible approach may be employing software systems integrated on a large scale, while the data control may be made by data owners. As it is very laborious to control this access manually, we argue in this paper that these assistants can become the real representatives of the people and the institutions that have legal access to private data management

Dealing with change in process choreographies: Design and implementation of propagation algorithms

Enabling process changes constitutes a major challenge for any process-aware information system. This not only holds for processes running within a single enterprise, but also for collaborative scenarios involving distributed and autonomous partners. In particular, if one partner adapts its private process, the change might affect the processes of the other partners as well. Accordingly, it might have to be propagated to concerned partners in a transitive way. A fundamental challenge in this context is to find ways of propagating the changes in a decentralized manner. Existing approaches are limited with respect to the change operations considered as well as their dependency on a particular process specification language. This paper presents a generic change propagation approach that is based on the Refined Process Structure Tree, i.e., the approach is independent of a specific process specification language. Further, it considers a comprehensive set of change patterns. For all these change patterns, it is shown that the provided change propagation algorithms preserve consistency and compatibility of the process choreography. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype of a change propagation framework for process choreographies is presented. Overall, comprehensive change support in process choreographies will foster the implementation and operational support of agile collaborative process scenarios

A Service Discovery Solution for Edge Choreography-Based Distributed Embedded Systems

[EN] This paper presents a solution to support service discovery for edge choreography based distributed embedded systems. The Internet of Things (IoT) edge architectural layer is composed of Raspberry Pi machines. Each machine hosts different services organized based on the choreography collaborative paradigm. The solution adds to the choreography middleware three messages passing models to be coherent and compatible with current IoT messaging protocols. It is aimed to support blind hot plugging of new machines and help with service load balance. The discovery mechanism is implemented as a broker service and supports regular expressions (Regex) in message scope to discern both publishing patterns offered by data providers and client services necessities. Results compare Control Process Unit (CPU) usage in a request¿response and datacentric configuration and analyze both regex interpreter latency times compared with a traditional message structure as well as its impact on CPU and memory consumption.The choreography engine was developed and supported by the SABIEN research group of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (http://www.sabien.upv.es/en/).Blanc Clavero, S.; Bayo-Monton, JL.; Palanca-Barrio, S.; Arreaga-Alvarado, NX. (2021). A Service Discovery Solution for Edge Choreography-Based Distributed Embedded Systems. Sensors. 21(2):1-19. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21020672S11921

Behavioral types in programming languages

A recent trend in programming language research is to use behav- ioral type theory to ensure various correctness properties of large- scale, communication-intensive systems. Behavioral types encompass concepts such as interfaces, communication protocols, contracts, and choreography. The successful application of behavioral types requires a solid understanding of several practical aspects, from their represen- tation in a concrete programming language, to their integration with other programming constructs such as methods and functions, to de- sign and monitoring methodologies that take behaviors into account. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art of these aspects, which we summarize as the pragmatics of behavioral types