The structured phase of concurrency

This extended abstract summarizes the state-of-the-art solution to the structuring problem for models that describe existing real world or envisioned processes. Special attention is devoted to models that allow for the true concurrency semantics. Given a model of a process, the structuring problem deals with answering the question of whether there exists another model that describes the process and is solely composed of structured patterns, such as sequence, selection, option for simultaneous execution, and iteration. Methods and techniques for structuring developed by academia as well as products and standards proposed by industry are discussed. Expectations and recommendations on the future advancements of the structuring problem are suggested

Towards interoperability of i* models using iStarML

Goal-oriented and agent-oriented modelling provides an effective approach to the understanding of distributed information systems that need to operate in open, heterogeneous and evolving environments. Frameworks, firstly introduced more than ten years ago, have been extended along language variants, analysis methods and CASE tools, posing language semantics and tool interoperability issues. Among them, the i* framework is one the most widespread. We focus on i*-based modelling languages and tools and on the problem of supporting model exchange between them. In this paper, we introduce the i* interoperability problem and derive an XML interchange format, called iStarML, as a practical solution to this problem. We first discuss the main requirements for its definition, then we characterise the core concepts of i* and we detail the tags and options of the interchange format. We complete the presentation of iStarML showing some possible applications. Finally, a survey on the i* community perception about iStarML is included for assessment purposes.Preprin

The alignment of formal, structured and unstructured process descriptions

Nowadays organizations are experimenting a drift on the way processes are managed. On the one hand, formal notations like Petri nets or Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) enable the unambiguous reasoning and automation of designed processes. This way of eliciting processes by manual design, which stemmed decades ago, will still be an important actor in the future. On the other hand, regulations require organizations to store their process executions in structured representations, so that they are known and can be analyzed. Finally, due to the different nature of stakeholders within an organization (ranging from the most technical members, e.g., developers, to less technical), textual descriptions of processes are also maintained to enable that everyone in the organization understands their processes. In this paper I will describe techniques for facilitating the interconnection between these three process representations. This requires interdisciplinary research to connect several fields: business process management, formal methods, natural language processing and process mining.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

CAiSE Radar 2016

The CAiSE Radar is an experimental format, established for CAiSE 2016, to make CAiSE workshops livelier, exciting, stimulate discussions, and attract additional active participants by establishing an environment where not only well established and validated research is reported but research in infancy, new ideas, and potentially interesting research projects can be presented and discussed. So similarly to a radar, the idea is to enable researchers to look into the future of the field and identify upcoming trends early. The aim of such effort is on one hand to contribute to the building of research communities and promote the integration of young researchers into the community, and on the other hand to provide opportunities to discuss ideas early and to receive additional opinions on planned research

CAiSE Radar 2016

The CAiSE Radar is an experimental format, established for CAiSE 2016, to make CAiSE workshops livelier, exciting, stimulate discussions, and attract additional active participants by establishing an environment where not only well established and validated research is reported but research in infancy, new ideas, and potentially interesting research projects can be presented and discussed. So similarly to a radar, the idea is to enable researchers to look into the future of the field and identify upcoming trends early. The aim of such effort is on one hand to contribute to the building of research communities and promote the integration of young researchers into the community, and on the other hand to provide opportunities to discuss ideas early and to receive additional opinions on planned research

Adaptive Process Management in Cyber-Physical Domains

The increasing application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging cyber-physical domains beyond business computing (e.g., personalized healthcare, emergency management, factories of the future, home automation, etc.) has led to reconsider the level of flexibility and support required to manage complex processes in such domains. A cyber-physical domain is characterized by the presence of a cyber-physical system coordinating heterogeneous ICT components (PCs, smartphones, sensors, actuators) and involving real world entities (humans, machines, agents, robots, etc.) that perform complex tasks in the “physical” real world to achieve a common goal. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable, and processes enacted in cyber-physical domains must be robust to unexpected conditions and adaptable to unanticipated exceptions. This demands a more flexible approach in process design and enactment, recognizing that in real-world environments it is not adequate to assume that all possible recovery activities can be predefined for dealing with the exceptions that can ensue. In this chapter, we tackle the above issue and we propose a general approach, a concrete framework and a process management system implementation, called SmartPM, for automatically adapting processes enacted in cyber-physical domains in case of unanticipated exceptions and exogenous events. The adaptation mechanism provided by SmartPM is based on declarative task specifications, execution monitoring for detecting failures and context changes at run-time, and automated planning techniques to self-repair the running process, without requiring to predefine any specific adaptation policy or exception handler at design-time

Towards correct-by-construction product variants of a software product line: GFML, a formal language for feature modules

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a software engineering paradigm that focuses on reuse and variability. Although feature-oriented programming (FOP) can implement software product line efficiently, we still need a method to generate and prove correctness of all product variants more efficiently and automatically. In this context, we propose to manipulate feature modules which contain three kinds of artifacts: specification, code and correctness proof. We depict a methodology and a platform that help the user to automatically produce correct-by-construction product variants from the related feature modules. As a first step of this project, we begin by proposing a language, GFML, allowing the developer to write such feature modules. This language is designed so that the artifacts can be easily reused and composed. GFML files contain the different artifacts mentioned above.The idea is to compile them into FoCaLiZe, a language for specification, implementation and formal proof with some object-oriented flavor. In this paper, we define and illustrate this language. We also introduce a way to compose the feature modules on some examples.Comment: In Proceedings FMSPLE 2015, arXiv:1504.0301

25 Years of Model-Driven Web Engineering : What we achieved, what is missing

Model-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) approaches aim to improve the Web applications development process by focusing on modeling instead of coding, and deriving the running application by transformations from conceptual models to code. The emergence of the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) has been an important milestone in the evolution of Web modeling languages, indicating not only the maturity of the field but also a final convergence of languages. In this paper we explain the evolution of modeling and design approaches since the early years (the 90’s) detailing the forces which drove that evolution and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of some of those approaches. A brief presentation of IFML is accompanied with a thorough analysis of the most important achievements of the MDWE community as well as the problems and obstacles that hinder the dissemination of model-driven techniques in the Web engineering field.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada (LIFIA