10,463 research outputs found
A Change Support Model for Distributed Collaborative Work
Distributed collaborative software development tends to make artifacts and
decisions inconsistent and uncertain. We try to solve this problem by providing
an information repository to reflect the state of works precisely, by managing
the states of artifacts/products made through collaborative work, and the
states of decisions made through communications. In this paper, we propose
models and a tool to construct the artifact-related part of the information
repository, and explain the way to use the repository to resolve
inconsistencies caused by concurrent changes of artifacts. We first show the
model and the tool to generate the dependency relationships among UML model
elements as content of the information repository. Next, we present the model
and the method to generate change support workflows from the information
repository. These workflows give us the way to efficiently modify the
change-related artifacts for each change request. Finally, we define
inconsistency patterns that enable us to be aware of the possibility of
inconsistency occurrences. By combining this mechanism with version control
systems, we can make changes safely. Our models and tool are useful in the
maintenance phase to perform changes safely and efficiently.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, 4 table
Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective
This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective
PLACES'10: The 3rd Workshop on Programmng Language Approaches to concurrency and Communication-Centric Software
Paphos, Cyprus. March 201
Static Analysis of Deterministic Negotiations
Negotiation diagrams are a model of concurrent computation akin to workflow
Petri nets. Deterministic negotiation diagrams, equivalent to the much studied
and used free-choice workflow Petri nets, are surprisingly amenable to
verification. Soundness (a property close to deadlock-freedom) can be decided
in PTIME. Further, other fundamental questions like computing summaries or the
expected cost, can also be solved in PTIME for sound deterministic negotiation
diagrams, while they are PSPACE-complete in the general case.
In this paper we generalize and explain these results. We extend the
classical "meet-over-all-paths" (MOP) formulation of static analysis problems
to our concurrent setting, and introduce Mazurkiewicz-invariant analysis
problems, which encompass the questions above and new ones. We show that any
Mazurkiewicz-invariant analysis problem can be solved in PTIME for sound
deterministic negotiations whenever it is in PTIME for sequential
flow-graphs---even though the flow-graph of a deterministic negotiation diagram
can be exponentially larger than the diagram itself. This gives a common
explanation to the low-complexity of all the analysis questions studied so far.
Finally, we show that classical gen/kill analyses are also an instance of our
framework, and obtain a PTIME algorithm for detecting anti-patterns in
free-choice workflow Petri nets.
Our result is based on a novel decomposition theorem, of independent
interest, showing that sound deterministic negotiation diagrams can be
hierarchically decomposed into (possibly overlapping) smaller sound diagrams.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of LICS 2017, IEEE Computer Societ
An Editorial Workflow Approach For Collaborative Ontology Development
The widespread use of ontologies in the last years has raised new challenges for their development and maintenance. Ontology development has transformed from a process normally performed by one ontology engineer into a process performed collaboratively by a team of ontology engineers, who may be geographically distributed and play different roles. For example, editors may propose changes, while authoritative users approve or reject them following a well defined process. This process, however, has only been partially addressed by existing ontology development methods, methodologies, and tool support. Furthermore, in a distributed environment where ontology editors may be working on local copies of the same ontology, strategies should be in place to ensure that changes in one copy are reflected in all of them. In this paper, we propose a workflow-based model for the collaborative development of ontologies in distributed environments and describe the components required to support them. We illustrate our model with a test case in the fishery domain from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)
Towards Collaborative Scientific Workflow Management System
The big data explosion phenomenon has impacted several domains, starting from research areas to divergent of business models in recent years. As this intensive amount of data opens up the possibilities of several interesting knowledge discoveries, over the past few years divergent of research domains have undergone the shift of trend towards analyzing those massive amount data. Scientific Workflow Management System (SWfMS) has gained much popularity in recent years in accelerating those data-intensive analyses, visualization, and discoveries of important information. Data-intensive tasks are often significantly time-consuming and complex in nature and hence SWfMSs are designed to efficiently support the specification, modification, execution, failure handling, and monitoring of the tasks in a scientific workflow. As far as the complexity, dimension, and volume of data are concerned, their effective analysis or management often become challenging for an individual and requires collaboration of multiple scientists instead. Hence, the notion of 'Collaborative SWfMS' was coined - which gained significant interest among researchers in recent years as none of the existing SWfMSs directly support real-time collaboration among scientists. In terms of collaborative SWfMSs, consistency management in the face of conflicting concurrent operations of the collaborators is a major challenge for its highly interconnected document structure among the computational modules - where any minor change in a part of the workflow can highly impact the other part of the collaborative workflow for the datalink relation among them. In addition to the consistency management, studies show several other challenges that need to be addressed towards a successful design of collaborative SWfMSs, such as sub-workflow composition and execution by different sub-groups, relationship between scientific workflows and collaboration models, sub-workflow monitoring, seamless integration and access control of the workflow components among collaborators and so on. In this thesis, we propose a locking scheme to facilitate consistency management in collaborative SWfMSs. The proposed method works by locking workflow components at a granular attribute level in addition to supporting locks on a targeted part of the collaborative workflow. We conducted several experiments to analyze the performance of the proposed method in comparison to related existing methods. Our studies show that the proposed method can reduce the average waiting time of a collaborator by up to 36% while increasing the average workflow update rate by up to 15% in comparison to existing descendent modular level locking techniques for collaborative SWfMSs. We also propose a role-based access control technique for the management of collaborative SWfMSs. We leverage the Collaborative Interactive Application Methodology (CIAM) for the investigation of role-based access control in the context of collaborative SWfMSs. We present our proposed method with a use-case of Plant Phenotyping and Genotyping research domain. Recent study shows that the collaborative SWfMSs often different sets of opportunities and challenges. From our investigations on existing research works towards collaborative SWfMSs and findings of our prior two studies, we propose an architecture of collaborative SWfMSs. We propose - SciWorCS - a Collaborative Scientific Workflow Management System as a proof of concept of the proposed architecture; which is the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge. We present several real-world use-cases of scientific workflows using SciWorCS. Finally, we conduct several user studies using SciWorCS comprising different real-world scientific workflows (i.e., from myExperiment) to understand the user behavior and styles of work in the context of collaborative SWfMSs. In addition to evaluating SciWorCS, the user studies reveal several interesting facts which can significantly contribute in the research domain, as none of the existing methods considered such empirical studies, and rather relied only on computer generated simulated studies for evaluation
A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing
With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and
engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process
large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources.
Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex
workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of
workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a
taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and
executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid
workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the
comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design
and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid
workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure
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