On Secure Workflow Decentralisation on the Internet

Decentralised workflow management systems are a new research area, where most work to-date has focused on the system's overall architecture. As little attention has been given to the security aspects in such systems, we follow a security driven approach, and consider, from the perspective of available security building blocks, how security can be implemented and what new opportunities are presented when empowering the decentralised environment with modern distributed security protocols. Our research is motivated by a more general question of how to combine the positive enablers that email exchange enjoys, with the general benefits of workflow systems, and more specifically with the benefits that can be introduced in a decentralised environment. This aims to equip email users with a set of tools to manage the semantics of a message exchange, contents, participants and their roles in the exchange in an environment that provides inherent assurances of security and privacy. This work is based on a survey of contemporary distributed security protocols, and considers how these protocols could be used in implementing a distributed workflow management system with decentralised control . We review a set of these protocols, focusing on the required message sequences in reviewing the protocols, and discuss how these security protocols provide the foundations for implementing core control-flow, data, and resource patterns in a distributed workflow environment

Orchestrating the spatial planning process: from Business Process Management to 2nd generation Planning Support Systems

Metaplanning can be considered as a necessary step for improving collaboration, transparency and accountability in sustainable and democratic spatial decision-making process. This paper reports current findings on the operational implementation of the metaplanning concept developed by the authors relying on Business Process Management methods and techniques. Two solutions are presented which implement spatial planning process workflows thanks to the development of original spatial data and processing services connectors to a Business Process Management suite. These results can be considered as a first step towards the development of 2nd generation Planning Support Systems

Implementing and Running a Workflow Application on Cloud Resources

Scientist need to run applications that are time and resource consuming, but, not all of them, have the requires knowledge to run this applications in a parallel manner, by using grid, cluster or cloud resources. In the past few years many workflow building frameworks were developed in order to help scientist take a better advantage of computing resources, by designing workflows based on their applications and executing them on heterogeneous resources. This paper presents a case study of implementing and running a workflow for an E-bay data retrieval application. The workflow was designed using Askalon framework and executed on the cloud resources. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how workflows and cloud resources can be used by scientists in order to achieve speedup for their application without the need of spending large amounts of money on computational resources.Workflow, Cloud Resource

Developing Resource Usage Service in WLCG

According to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) of the World-wide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) project, participating sites are required to provide resource usage or accounting data to the Grid Operational Centre (GOC) to enrich the understanding of how shared resources are used, and to provide information for improving the effectiveness of resource allocation. As a multi-grid environment, the accounting process of WLCG is currently enabled by four accounting systems, each of which was developed independently by constituent grid projects. These accounting systems were designed and implemented based on project-specific local understanding of requirements, and therefore lack interoperability. In order to automate the accounting process in WLCG, three transportation methods are being introduced for streaming accounting data metered by heterogeneous accounting systems into GOC at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK, where accounting data are aggregated and accumulated throughout the year. These transportation methods, however, were introduced on a per accounting-system basis, i.e. targeting at a particular accounting system, making them hard to reuse and customize to new requirements. This paper presents the design of WLCG-RUS system, a standards-compatible solution providing a consistent process for streaming resource usage data across various accounting systems, while ensuring interoperability, portability, and customization

Change Mining in Adaptive Process Management Systems

The wide-spread adoption of process-aware information systems has resulted in a bulk of computerized information about real-world processes. This data can be utilized for process performance analysis as well as for process improvement. In this context process mining offers promising perspectives. So far, existing mining techniques have been applied to operational processes, i.e., knowledge is extracted from execution logs (process discovery), or execution logs are compared with some a-priori process model (conformance checking). However, execution logs only constitute one kind of data gathered during process enactment. In particular, adaptive processes provide additional information about process changes (e.g., ad-hoc changes of single process instances) which can be used to enable organizational learning. In this paper we present an approach for mining change logs in adaptive process management systems. The change process discovered through process mining provides an aggregated overview of all changes that happened so far. This, in turn, can serve as basis for all kinds of process improvement actions, e.g., it may trigger process redesign or better control mechanisms

Cost reduction using process analysis in company PEGRES obuv s.r.o.

Firma PEGRES obuv s.r.o. se již delší dobu potýká se stagnací v oblasti plánování a řízení výroby. Některé podnikové procesy jsou nyní značně zastaralé a v aktuálních podmínkách již neefektivní. Cíl práce je snížení nákladů s využitím procesní analýzy. Pro dosažení tohoto cíle bude provedena analýza současného stavu zastaralých procesů a budou popsány vybrané metody řízení výroby, které jsou svou povahou relevantní pro výrobu obuvi. Výstupem práce je sada doporučení a návrhů na změny v existujících procesech. Vybrané návrhy budou v prostředí firmy implementovány a práce zahrne zhodnocení výsledků po zavedení těchto změn.Company PEGRES obuv s.r.o. has been long time struggling with stagnation in production planning and control. Some of the internal processes are now obsolete and in current conditions no longer effective. The goal of the paper is to reduce the costs using process analysis. To achieve this goal, analysis of the current state of outdated processes will be performed, followed by description of selected methods of production management, which by their nature are relevant to the production of the shoes. Output of the work is a set of recommendations and proposals for changes to existing processes. Selected proposals will be implemented in the company and paper will include evaluation of results after the implementation of these changes.

Supporting process reuse in PROMENADE

Process reuse (the ability to construct new processes by assembling already built ones) and process harvesting (the ability to build generic processes that may be further reused, from existing ones) are two crucial issues in process technology. Both activities involve defining a set of mechanisms, like abstraction, adaptation, composition, etc. which are appropriate to achieve their goals. In this report, we define a general framework to process reuse and harvesting that proposes a complete set of mechanisms to deal with both activities. This general framework is particularized to the context of a process modelling language to model software processes, called PROMENADE. A definition of the identified reuse and harvesting mecha-nisms is proposed in the context of PROMENADE. Finally, two process reuse case studies which composes various reuse mechanisms are presented.Postprint (published version

Comparison of Simple Graphical Process Models

Comparing the structure of graphical process models can reveal a number of process variations. Since most contemporary norms for process modelling rely on directed connectivity of objects in the model, connections between objects form sequences which can be translated into performing scenarios. Whereas sequences can be tested for completeness in performing process activities using simulation methods, the similarity or difference in static characteristics of sequences in different model variants are difficult to explore. The goal of the paper is to test the application of a method for comparison of graphical models by analyzing and comparing static characteristics of process models. Consequently, a metamodel for process models is developed followed by a comparison procedure conducted using a graphical model comparison algorithm

GRIDCC: Real-time workflow system

The Grid is a concept which allows the sharing of resources between distributed communities, allowing each to progress towards potentially different goals. As adoption of the Grid increases so are the activities that people wish to conduct through it. The GRIDCC project is a European Union funded project addressing the issues of integrating instruments into the Grid. This increases the requirement of workflows and Quality of Service upon these workflows as many of these instruments have real-time requirements. In this paper we present the workflow management service within the GRIDCC project which is tasked with optimising the workflows and ensuring that they meet the pre-defined QoS requirements specified upon them

Translating standard process models to BPEL

Standardisation of languages in the field of business process management has long been an elusive goal. Recently though, consensus has built around one process implementation language, namely BPEL, and two fundamentally similar process modelling notations, namely UML Activity Diagram (UML AD) and BPMN. This paper presents a technique for generating BPEL code from process models expressed in a core subset of BPMN and UML AD. This model-to-code translation is a necessary ingredient to the emergence of model-driven business process development environments based on these standards. The proposed translation has been implemented as an open source tool