2,967 research outputs found
On Enabling Integrated Process Compliance with Semantic Constraints in Process Management Systems
Key to broad use of process management systems (PrMS) in practice is their ability to foster and ease the implementation, execution, monitoring, and adaptation of business processes while still being able to ensure robust and error-free process enactment.
To meet these demands a variety of mechanisms has been developed to prevent errors at the structural level (e.g., deadlocks).
In many application domains, however, processes often have to comply with business level rules and policies (i.e., semantic constraints) as well.
Hence, to ensure error-free executions at the semantic level, PrMS need certain control mechanisms for validating and ensuring the compliance with semantic constraints.
In this paper, we discuss fundamental requirements for a comprehensive support of semantic constraints in PrMS. Moreover, we provide a survey on existing approaches and discuss to what extent they are able to meet the requirements and which challenges still have to be tackled.
In order to tackle the particular challenge of providing integrated compliance support over the process lifecycle, we introduce the SeaFlows framework.
The framework introduces a behavioural level view on processes which serves a conceptual process representation for constraint specification approaches. Further, it provides general compliance criteria for static compliance validation but also for dealing with process changes.
Altogether, the SeaFlows framework can serve as formal basis for realizing integrated support of semantic constraints in PrMS
Device-Centric Monitoring for Mobile Device Management
The ubiquity of computing devices has led to an increased need to ensure not
only that the applications deployed on them are correct with respect to their
specifications, but also that the devices are used in an appropriate manner,
especially in situations where the device is provided by a party other than the
actual user. Much work which has been done on runtime verification for mobile
devices and operating systems is mostly application-centric, resulting in
global, device-centric properties (e.g. the user may not send more than 100
messages per day across all applications) being difficult or impossible to
verify. In this paper we present a device-centric approach to runtime verify
the device behaviour against a device policy with the different applications
acting as independent components contributing to the overall behaviour of the
device. We also present an implementation for Android devices, and evaluate it
on a number of device-centric policies, reporting the empirical results
obtained.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2016, arXiv:1603.0837
Collection and Elicitation of Business Process Compliance Patterns with Focus on Data Aspects
Business process compliance is one of the prevalent challenges for companies. Despite an abundance of research proposals, companies still struggle with manual compliance checks and the understanding of compliance violations in the light of missing root-cause explanations. Moreover, approaches have merely focused on the control flow perspective in compliance checking, neglecting other aspects such as the data perspective. This paper aims at analyzing the gap between existing academic work and compliance demands from practice with a focus on the data aspects. The latter emerges from a small set of regulatory documents from different domains. Patterns are assumed as the right level of abstraction for compliance specification due to their independence of (technical) implementation in (process-aware) information systems, potential for reuse, and understandability. A systematic literature review collects and assesses existing compliance patterns. A first analysis of ten regulatory documents from different domains specifically reveals data-oriented compliance constraints that are not yet reflected by existing compliance patterns. Accordingly, data-related compliance patterns are specified
Compliance of Semantic Constraints - A Requirements Analysis for Process Management Systems
Key to the use of process management systems (PrMS) in
practice is their ability to facilitate the implementation, execution, and adaptation of business processes while still being able to ensure error-free process executions. Mechanisms have been developed to prevent errors
at the syntactic level such as deadlocks. In many application domains, processes often have to comply with business level rules and policies (i.e., semantic constraints). Hence, in order to ensure error-free executions at the semantic level, PrMS need certain control mechanisms for validating and ensuring the compliance with semantic constraints throughout the process lifecycle. In this paper, we discuss fundamental requirements for
a comprehensive support of semantic constraints in PrMS. Moreover, we provide a survey on existing approaches and discuss to what extent they meet the requirements and which challenges still have to be tackled.
Finally, we show how the challenge of life time compliance can be dealt with by integrating design time and runtime process validation
Compliance validation and diagnosis of business data constraints in business processes at runtime
Business processes involve data that can be modified and updated by various activities at any
time. The data involved in a business process can be associated with flow elements or data
stored. These data must satisfy the business compliance rules associated with the process,
where business compliance rules are policies or statements that govern the behaviour of
a company. To improve and automate the validation and diagnosis of compliance rules
based on the description of data semantics (called Business Data Constraints), we
propose a framework where dataflow variables and stored data are analyzed. The
validation and diagnosis process is automated using Constraint Program-ming, to permit
the detection and identification of possibly unsatisfiable Business Data Constraints, even if
the data involved in these constraints are not all instantiated. This implies that the
potential errors can be determined in advance. Furthermore, a language to describe Business
Data Constraints is proposed, for the improvement of user-oriented aspects of the business
process description. This language allows a business expert to write Business Data
Constraints that will be automatically validated in run-time, without the support of an
information technology expert.Junta de AndalucĂa P08-TIC-04095Ministerio de Ciencia y TecnologĂa TIN2009-1371
A Systematic Approach to Constructing Families of Incremental Topology Control Algorithms Using Graph Transformation
In the communication systems domain, constructing and maintaining network
topologies via topology control (TC) algorithms is an important cross-cutting
research area. Network topologies are usually modeled using attributed graphs
whose nodes and edges represent the network nodes and their interconnecting
links. A key requirement of TC algorithms is to fulfill certain consistency and
optimization properties to ensure a high quality of service. Still, few
attempts have been made to constructively integrate these properties into the
development process of TC algorithms. Furthermore, even though many TC
algorithms share substantial parts (such as structural patterns or tie-breaking
strategies), few works constructively leverage these commonalities and
differences of TC algorithms systematically. In previous work, we addressed the
constructive integration of consistency properties into the development
process. We outlined a constructive, model-driven methodology for designing
individual TC algorithms. Valid and high-quality topologies are characterized
using declarative graph constraints; TC algorithms are specified using
programmed graph transformation. We applied a well-known static analysis
technique to refine a given TC algorithm in a way that the resulting algorithm
preserves the specified graph constraints.
In this paper, we extend our constructive methodology by generalizing it to
support the specification of families of TC algorithms. To show the feasibility
of our approach, we reneging six existing TC algorithms and develop e-kTC, a
novel energy-efficient variant of the TC algorithm kTC. Finally, we evaluate a
subset of the specified TC algorithms using a new tool integration of the graph
transformation tool eMoflon and the Simonstrator network simulation framework.Comment: Corresponds to the accepted manuscrip
A Role-Based Approach for Orchestrating Emergent Configurations in the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned as a global network of connected
things enabling ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. With
estimations of billions of sensors and devices to be connected in the coming
years, the IoT has been advocated as having a great potential to impact the way
we live, but also how we work. However, the connectivity aspect in itself only
accounts for the underlying M2M infrastructure. In order to properly support
engineering IoT systems and applications, it is key to orchestrate
heterogeneous 'things' in a seamless, adaptive and dynamic manner, such that
the system can exhibit a goal-directed behaviour and take appropriate actions.
Yet, this form of interaction between things needs to take a user-centric
approach and by no means elude the users' requirements. To this end,
contextualisation is an important feature of the system, allowing it to infer
user activities and prompt the user with relevant information and interactions
even in the absence of intentional commands. In this work we propose a
role-based model for emergent configurations of connected systems as a means to
model, manage, and reason about IoT systems including the user's interaction
with them. We put a special focus on integrating the user perspective in order
to guide the emergent configurations such that systems goals are aligned with
the users' intentions. We discuss related scientific and technical challenges
and provide several uses cases outlining the concept of emergent
configurations.Comment: In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on the Internet
of Agents @AAMAS201
Correct-by-Construction Development of Dynamic Topology Control Algorithms
Wireless devices are influencing our everyday lives today and will even more so in the future. A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of dozens to hundreds of small, cheap, battery-powered, resource-constrained sensor devices (motes) that cooperate to serve a common purpose. These networks are applied in safety- and security-critical areas (e.g., e-health, intrusion detection). The topology of such a system is an attributed graph consisting of nodes representing the devices and edges representing the communication links between devices. Topology control (TC) improves the energy consumption behavior of a WSN by blocking costly links. This allows a mote to reduce its transmission power. A TC algorithm must fulfill important consistency properties (e.g., that the resulting topology is connected). The traditional development process for TC algorithms only considers consistency properties during the initial specification phase. The actual implementation is carried out manually, which is error prone and time consuming. Thus, it is difficult to verify that the implementation fulfills the required consistency properties. The problem becomes even more severe if the development process is iterative. Additionally, many TC algorithms are batch algorithms, which process the entire topology, irrespective of the extent of the topology modifications since the last execution. Therefore, dynamic TC is desirable, which reacts to change events of the topology.
In this thesis, we propose a model-driven correct-by-construction methodology for developing dynamic TC algorithms. We model local consistency properties using graph constraints and global consistency properties using second-order logic. Graph transformation rules capture the different types of topology modifications. To specify the control flow of a TC algorithm, we employ the programmed graph transformation language story-driven modeling. We presume that local consistency properties jointly imply the global consistency properties. We ensure the fulfillment of the local consistency properties by synthesizing weakest preconditions for each rule. The synthesized preconditions prohibit the application of a rule if and only if the application would lead to a violation of a consistency property. Still, this restriction is infeasible for topology modifications that need to be executed in any case. Therefore, as a major contribution of this thesis, we propose the anticipation loop synthesis algorithm, which transforms the synthesized preconditions into routines that anticipate all violations of these preconditions. This algorithm also enables the correct-by-construction runtime reconfiguration of adaptive WSNs. We provide tooling for both common evaluation steps. Cobolt allows to evaluate the specified TC algorithms rapidly using the network simulator Simonstrator. cMoflon generates embedded C code for hardware testbeds that build on the sensor operating system Contiki
QoS-Aware Middleware for Web Services Composition
The paradigmatic shift from a Web of manual interactions to a Web of programmatic interactions driven by Web services is creating unprecedented opportunities for the formation of online Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations. In particular, the creation of value-added services by composition of existing ones is gaining a significant momentum. Since many available Web services provide overlapping or identical functionality, albeit with different Quality of Service (QoS), a choice needs to be made to determine which services are to participate in a given composite service. This paper presents a middleware platform which addresses the issue of selecting Web services for the purpose of their composition in a way that maximizes user satisfaction expressed as utility functions over QoS attributes, while satisfying the constraints set by the user and by the structure of the composite service. Two selection approaches are described and compared: one based on local (task-level) selection of services and the other based on global allocation of tasks to services using integer programming
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