Teleo-Reactive policies for managing human-centric pervasive services.

Event-Condition-Action (ECA) policies are often used to manage various aspects of adaptation and execution of pervasive systems. Such policies are well suited for services where: 1) given actions are reliably executed when they are requested, 2) there is no priority ordering amongst multiple available actions, and 3) execution is instantaneous with respect to the validity of conditions under which they were initiated. However, for a pervasive service that integrates human agents and human activities, these assumptions do not generally hold. Humans may misbehave by postponing the execution of certain actions or ignoring them all together. Performing an action may take a long time so that the action is no longer needed or more important actions may need to be executed. Managing such behaviours through ECA policies is complex and difficult to implement. This paper introduces a new management policy type, called a Teleo-Reactive policy, whose semantics are based on continuous monitoring of the environment and prioritising available actions. The semantics result in more flexible and concise formulation of management policies for human-centric pervasive services. We demonstrate how these policies can be applied in a real-world use case scenario set in a nursing home and describe the underlying implementation based on the Androids Java platform. © 2010 IEEE

Abschlussbericht des Verbundprojekts Tools4BPEL

Unternehmensübergreifende Geschäftsprozesse werden zunehmend nach dem Paradigma der Services organisiert. Dabei stellen sich Fragen nach der Komponierbarkeit, Fehlerbehandlung, sowie der Rücksetzbarkeit (Kompensation) im Fehlerfall. In diesem Vorhaben werden Methoden und Werkzeuge zum Umgang mit solchen Fragen entwickelt und am Beispiel der Geschäftsprozess-Modellierungssprache BPEL und im Modellierungswerkzeug der Firma MEGA international erprobt. Es wurde zum einen der Übersetzer BPEL2oWFN entwickelt, der anhand einer Petrinetzsemantik für BPEL einen BPEL-Prozess in ein (offenes) Petrinetz transformiert. Zum anderen wurden Korrektheitskriterien (wie Bedienbarkeit und Verhaltenskompatibilität) für Services erarbeitet, Algorithmen zu ihrer Überprüfung entworfen und in Fiona implementiert. Die Algorithmen sind Petrinetz-basiert. Damit spielen Übersetzung und Analyse eng zusammen und ein vorhandener BPEL-Prozess kann auf bspw. Bedienbarkeit hin untersucht werden. In diesem Vorhaben wurden die Modellierungssprache BPEL4Chor, Choreographie-Erweiterungen für BPMN entwickelt, sowie die Transformation von BPMN nach BPEL angepasst, um den Weg von BPMN nach BPEL4Chor zu unterstützen. Weiterhin wurden Konzepte entwickelt, wie sich partner-übergreifende Fehlerbehandlung, Rücksetzbarkeit, sowie die Autonomie der Partner mittels BPEL4Chor darstellen lassen. BPEL4Chor kann als Standardsprache zur Spezifikation von Protokollen, die zwischen mehreren Partnern ablaufen, verwendet werden. Durch seine enge Verbindung mit BPEL kann BPEL4Chor sehr gut als Startpunkt für eine Webservice-Lösung verwendet werden

Implicit interaction design for pervasive workflows

The automatic identification capabilities of mobile devices enable the use of implicit interactions to connect the physical world with digital services. For example, users can be provided with information and services just by approaching to them or pointing to them with a mobile device. This kind of interactions can improve business processes by reducing the gap between physical and digital spaces. This work presents Parkour, a design method for workflows that make use of implicit interactions. Parkour allows designers to indicate how implicit interactions can be orchestrated to support a workflow. Furthermore, reconfiguration techniques have been applied to adapt at run-time the degree in which these interactions intrude the user's mind. Tool support has been developed to automate the validation of the workflow models and support the system reconfiguration. Finally, the proposal has been applied in the development of several workflows. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2011.This work has been developed with the support of MICINN under the project EVERYWARE (TIN2010-18011).Giner Blasco, P.; Cetina Englada, C.; Fons Cors, JJ.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2011). Implicit interaction design for pervasive workflows. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. 15(4):399-408. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-010-0360-2S399408154Cetina C, Giner P, Fons J, Pelechano V (2009) Autonomic computing through reuse of variability models at runtime: the case of smart homes. Computer 42(10):37–43Chakraborty D, Lei H (2004) Pervasive enablement of business processes. In: PerCom’04, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, p 87Chavira G, Bravo J, Nava-Díaz S, Rolón J (2010) Pictac: a model for perceiving touch interaction through tagging context. JUCS 16(12):1577–1591den Bergh JV, Coninx K (2005) Towards modeling context-sensitive interactive applications: the context-sensitive user interface profile (CUP). In: SoftVis’05. ACM Press, New York, pp 87–94Giner P, Cetina C, Fons J, Pelechano V (2010) Developing mobile workflow support in the internet of things. IEEE Pervasive Comput 9(2):18–26Horvitz E, Kadie C, Paek T, Hovel D (2003) Models of attention in computing and communication: from principles to applications. Commun ACM 46(3):52–59Ju W, Leifer L (2008) The design of implicit interactions: making interactive systems less obnoxious. Des Issues 24(3):72–84Rukzio E, Leichtenstern K, Callaghan V (2006) An experimental comparison of physical mobile interaction techniques: Touching, pointing and scanning. In: 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous. Computing, UbiComp 2006. Orange County, CaliforniaUrbanski S, Huber E, Wieland M, Leymann F, Nicklas D (2009) Perflows for the computers of the 21st century. Percom’09 0:1–6Vastenburg MH, Keyson DV, de Ridder H (2008) Considerate home notification systems: a field study of acceptability of notifications in the home. Pers Ubiquitous Comput 12(8):555–566Vuolle M, Tiainen M, Kallio T, Vainio T, Kulju M, Wigelius H (2008) Developing a questionnaire for measuring mobile business service experience. In: MobileHCI’08. ACM, New York, pp 53–62Weiser M (1991) The computer for the 21st century. Sci Am 265(3):66–7