The architecture of discovery net : towards grid-based discovery services

Imperial Users onl

Compliance flow: an intelligent workflow management system to support engineering processes

This work is about extending the scope of current workflow management systems to support engineering processes. On the one hand engineering processes are relatively dynamic, and on the other their specification and performance are constrained by industry standards and guidelines for the sake of product acceptability, such as IEC 61508 for safety and ISO 9001 for quality. A number of technologies have been proposed to increase the adaptability of current workflow systems to deal with dynamic situations. A primary concern is how to support open-ended processes that cannot be completely specified in detail prior to their execution. A survey of adaptive workflow systems is given and the enabling technologies are discussed. Engineering processes are studied and their characteristics are identified and discussed. Current workflow systems have been successfully used in managing "administrative" processes for some time, but they lack the flexibility to support dynamic, unpredictable, collaborative, and highly interdependent engineering processes. [Continues.

A generic framework for process execution and secure multi-party transaction authorization

Process execution engines are not only an integral part of workflow and business process management systems but are increasingly used to build process-driven applications. In other words, they are potentially used in all kinds of software across all application domains. However, contemporary process engines and workflow systems are unsuitable for use in such diverse application scenarios for several reasons. The main shortcomings can be observed in the areas of interoperability, versatility, and programmability. Therefore, this thesis makes a step away from domain specific, monolithic workflow engines towards generic and versatile process runtime frameworks, which enable integration of process technology into all kinds of software. To achieve this, the idea and corresponding architecture of a generic and embeddable process virtual machine (ePVM), which supports defining process flows along the theoretical foundation of communicating extended finite state machines, are presented. The architecture focuses on the core process functionality such as control flow and state management, monitoring, persistence, and communication, while using JavaScript as a process definition language. This approach leads to a very generic yet easily programmable process framework. A fully functional prototype implementation of the proposed framework is provided along with multiple example applications. Despite the fact that business processes are increasingly automated and controlled by information systems, humans are still involved, directly or indirectly, in many of them. Thus, for process flows involving sensitive transactions, a highly secure authorization scheme supporting asynchronous multi-party transaction authorization must be available within process management systems. Therefore, along with the ePVM framework, this thesis presents a novel approach for secure remote multi-party transaction authentication - the zone trusted information channel (ZTIC). The ZTIC approach uniquely combines multiple desirable properties such as the highest level of security, ease-of-use, mobility, remote administration, and smooth integration with existing infrastructures into one device and method. Extensively evaluating both, the ePVM framework and the ZTIC, this thesis shows that ePVM in combination with the ZTIC approach represents a unique and very powerful framework for building workflow systems and process-driven applications including support for secure multi-party transaction authorization

A Proactive Adaptation Framework for Composite Web Services

Service orientation is a design paradigm consisting of a set of principles governed by a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to support the creation of software systems as a composition of interoperable services. The ability to effectively compose services is not a trivial task due to the dynamic nature of the execution environment of service compositions. In this context, dynamic service selection and composition is a critical requirement and one of the major research challenges for service-based systems. This research investigates the identification, detection and prediction of the need for adaptation as well as ways to autonomously reconfigure the service composition during its execution time in order to improve service reliability and conformance with systems requirements and policies. We propose a framework for proactive adaptation of service compositions that extends current approaches for dynamic service composition by proactively and individually identifying the need for adaptation for each parallel running instance of service composition while avoiding unnecessary changes and distributing load request among different service operations when necessary. Our framework has been tested and validated using different prototypes implemented in both simulated and real environments. The results were favourable with the research objectives and indicates a major gain in the use of the proposed proactive techniques in the execution and adaptation of web service compositions

Intelligent Business Process Optimization for the Service Industry

The company\u27s sustainable competitive advantage derives from its capacity to create value for customers and to adapt the operational practices to changing situations. Business processes are the heart of each company. Therefore process excellence has become a key issue. This book introduces a novel approach focusing on the autonomous optimization of business processes by applying sophisticated machine learning techniques such as Relational Reinforcement Learning and Particle Swarm Optimization

Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi)

This is a technical report including the papers presented at the Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi) that took place in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Pisa, Italy on November 13, 2012. The motivation for organizing the workshop was the wish to learn from past experience on Ambient Intelligence systems, and in particular, on the lessons learned on the system architecture of such systems. A significant number of European projects and other research have been performed, often with the goal of developing AmI technology to showcase AmI scenarios. We believe that for AmI to become further successfully accepted the system architecture is essential

Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi)

This is a technical report including the papers presented at the Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi) that took place in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Pisa, Italy on November 13, 2012. The motivation for organizing the workshop was the wish to learn from past experience on Ambient Intelligence systems, and in particular, on the lessons learned on the system architecture of such systems. A significant number of European projects and other research have been performed, often with the goal of developing AmI technology to showcase AmI scenarios. We believe that for AmI to become further successfully accepted the system architecture is essential

Intelligent monitoring of business processes using case-based reasoning

The work in this thesis presents an approach towards the effective monitoring of business processes using Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). The rationale behind this research was that business processes constitute a fundamental concept of the modern world and there is a constantly emerging need for their efficient control. They can be efficiently represented but not necessarily monitored and diagnosed effectively via an appropriate platform. Motivated by the above observation this research pursued to which extent there can be efficient monitoring, diagnosis and explanation of the workflows. Workflows and their effective representation in terms of CBR were investigated as well as how similarity measures among them could be established appropriately. The monitoring results and their following explanation to users were questioned as well as which should be an appropriate software architecture to allow monitoring of workflow executions. Throughout the progress of this research, several sets of experiments have been conducted using existing enterprise systems which are coordinated via a predefined workflow business process. Past data produced over several years have been used for the needs of the conducted experiments. Based on those the necessary knowledge repositories were built and used afterwards in order to evaluate the suggesting approach towards the effective monitoring and diagnosis of business processes. The produced results show to which extent a business process can be monitored and diagnosed effectively. The results also provide hints on possible changes that would maximize the accuracy of the actual monitoring, diagnosis and explanation. Moreover the presented approach can be generalised and expanded further to enterprise systems that have as common characteristics a possible workflow representation and the presence of uncertainty. Further work motivated by this thesis could investigate how the knowledge acquisition can be transferred over workflow systems and be of benefit to large-scale multidimensional enterprises. Additionally the temporal uncertainty could be investigated further, in an attempt to address it while reasoning. Finally the provenance of cases and their solutions could be explored further, identifying correlations with the process of reasoning