BPM News - Folge 3

Die BPM-Kolumne des EMISA-Forums berichtet über aktuelle Themen, Projekte und Veranstaltungen aus dem BPM-Umfeld. Schwerpunkt der vorliegenden Kolumne bildet das Thema Standardisierung von Prozessbeschreibungssprachen und -notationen im Allgemeinen und BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) im Speziellen. Hierzu liefert Jan Mendling von der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien in aktuelles Schlagwort. Des weiteren erhalten Leser eine Zusammenfassung zweier im ersten Halbjahr 2006 veranstalteten Workshops zu den Themen „Flexibilität prozessorientierter Informationssysteme“ und „Kollaborative Prozesse“ sowie einen BPM Veranstaltungskalender für die 2. Jahreshälfte 2006

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

Industrial automation based on cyber-physical systems technologies: Prototype implementations and challenges

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is an emergent approach that focuses on the integration of computational applications with physical devices, being designed as a network of interacting cyber and physical elements. CPS control and monitor real-world physical infrastructures and thus is starting having a high impact in industrial automation. As such design, implementation and operation of CPS and management of the resulting automation infrastructure is of key importance for the industry. In this work, an overview of key aspects of industrial CPS, their technologies and emerging directions, as well as challenges for their implementation is presented. Based on the hands-on experiences gathered from four European innovation projects over the last decade (i.e. SOCRADES, IMC-AESOP, GRACE and ARUM), a key challenges have been identified and a prioritization and timeline are pointed out with the aim to increase Technology Readiness Levels and lead to their usage in industrial automation environments.The authors would like to thank for their support the European Commission, and the partners of the EU FP6 SOCRADES (www.socrades.net), EU FP7 GRACE (www.grace-project.org), EU FP7 IMC-AESOP (www.imc-aesop.eu) and EU FP7 ARUM (www.arum-project.eu) projects, for their fruitful support and discussions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Models, Techniques and Applications of e-Learning Personalization

In recent years Web has become mainstream medium for communication and information dissemination. This paper presents approaches and methods for adaptive learning implementation, which are used in some contemporary web-interfaced Learning Management Systems (LMSs). The problem is not how to create electronic learning materials, but how to locate and utilize the available information in personalized way. Different attitudes to personalization are briefly described in section 1. The real personalization requires a user profile containing information about preferences, aims, and educational history to be stored and used by the system. These issues are considered in section 2. A method for development and design of adaptive learning content in terms of learning strategy system support is represented in section 3. Section 4 includes a set of innovative personalization services that are suggested by several very important research projects (SeLeNe project, ELENA project, etc.) dated from the last few years. This section also describes a model for role- and competency-based learning customization that uses Web Services approach. The last part presents how personalization techniques are implemented in Learning Grid-driven applications

A Hybrid Framework for Automated and Adaptive E-Business Platforms

The automation of business transactions between corporations has been dominated by proprietary and inflexible EDI solutions for a long time. During the last years, novel XML-based standards emerged which have a wider scope than EDI but strongly differ with regard to granularity and industry-focus. Due to the abundance of many complex standards with limited diffusion among users and industries, especially small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have not yet managed to automate the execution of business transactions and to seamlessly interconnect their respective IT applications. In this work, we propose a novel approach which builds on a composite of existing standards and combines them towards a hybrid architecture facilitating electronic business transactions. The Web Service stack represents the technical foundation of this approach, while parts of the ebXML standard are leveraged to ensure a common understanding of business information and processes between trading partners. A central server acts as repository of formal agreements, common data and process modeling artifacts and allows for intermittent connectivity of the users. Decentral adapter components enable connecting heterogeneous legacy applications of the users to the central server. The resulting approach can thus be considered as hybrid regarding the degree of centralism involved and with respect to the combination of the Web services stack and the ebXML standard as an infrastructural foundation

Flexible coordination techniques for dynamic cloud service collaboration

The provision of individual, but also composed services is central in cloud service provisioning. We describe a framework for the coordination of cloud services, based on a tuple‐space architecture which uses an ontology to describe the services. Current techniques for service collaboration offer limited scope for flexibility. They are based on statically describing and compositing services. With the open nature of the web and cloud services, the need for a more flexible, dynamic approach to service coordination becomes evident. In order to support open communities of service providers, there should be the option for these providers to offer and withdraw their services to/from the community. For this to be realised, there needs to be a degree of self‐organisation. Our techniques for coordination and service matching aim to achieve this through matching goal‐oriented service requests with providers that advertise their offerings dynamically. Scalability of the solution is a particular concern that will be evaluated in detail