BUILDING RELIABLE AND ROBUST SERVICE-BASED SYSTEMS FOR AUTOMATED BUSINESS PROCESSES

An exciting trend in enterprise computing lies in the integration of applications across an organisation and even between organisations. This allows the provision of services by automated business processes that coordinate business activity among several collaborating organisations. The best successes in this type of integrated distributed system come through use of Web Services and Service-based Architecture, which allow interoperation between applications through open standards based on XML and SOAP. But still, there are unresolved issues when developers seek to build a reliable and robust system. An important goal for the designers of a loosely coupled distributed system is to maintain consistency for each long running business process in the presence of failures and concurrent activities. Our approach to assist the developers in this domain is to guide the developers with the key principles they must consider, and to provide programming models and protocols, which make it easier to detect and avoid consistency faults in service-based system. We start by defining a realistic e-procurement scenario to illustrate the common problems faced by the developers which prevent them from building a reliable and robust system. These problems make it hard to maintain the consistency of the data and state during the execution of a business process in the occurrence of failures and interference from concurrent activities. Through the analysis of the common problems, we identify key principles the developers must consider to avoid producing the common problems. Then based on the key principles, we provide a framework called GAT in the orchestration infrastructure. GAT allows developers to express all the necessary processing to handle deviations including those due to failures and concurrent activities. We discuss the GAT framework in detail with its structure and key features. Using an example taken from part of the e-procurement case study, we illustrate how developers can use the framework to design their business requirements. We also discuss how key features of the new framework help the developers to avoid producing consistency faults. We illustrate how systems based on our framework can be built using today’s proven technology. Finally, we provide a unified isolation mechanism called Promises that is not only applicable to our GAT framework, but also to any applications that run in the service-based world. We discuss the concept, how it works, and how it defines a protocol. We also provide a list of potential implementation techniques. Using some of the implementation techniques we mention, we provide a proof-of-concept prototype system

Engineering of service-oriented automation systems: a survey

The evolution of manufacturing systems and the emergence of decentralised control require flexibility at various levels of their lifecycle. New emerging methods, such as multi-agent and service-oriented systems are major research topics in the sense of revitalizing the traditional production procedures. This paper takes an overview of the serviceoriented approach in terms of platform and engineering tools, from the perspective of automation and production systems. From the basic foundation to the more complex interactions, service-oriented architectures and its implementation in form of web services provide diverse and quality proved features that are welcome to different states of the production systems’ life-cycle. Key elements are the concepts of modelling and collaboration, which enhance the automatic binding and synchronisation of individual low-value services to more complex and meaningful structures. Such interactions can be specified by Petri nets, a mathematically well founded tool with features that enhance towards the modelling of systems. The right application of different methodologies together should motivate the development of service-oriented manufacturing systems that embrace the vision of collaborative automation.The authors would like to thank the European Commission and the partners of Network of Excellence “Innovative Production Machines and Systems” (http://www.iproms.org/) and the SOCRADES project (http://www.socrades.eu) for their support.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Engineering of service-oriented automation systems: a survey

The evolution of manufacturing systems and the emergence of decentralised control require flexibility at various levels of their lifecycle. New emerging methods, such as multi-agent and service-oriented systems are major research topics in the sense of revitalizing the traditional production procedures. This paper takes an overview of the serviceoriented approach in terms of platform and engineering tools, from the perspective of automation and production systems. From the basic foundation to the more complex interactions, service-oriented architectures and its implementation in form of web services provide diverse and quality proved features that are welcome to different states of the production systems’ life-cycle. Key elements are the concepts of modelling and collaboration, which enhance the automatic binding and synchronisation of individual low-value services to more complex and meaningful structures. Such interactions can be specified by Petri nets, a mathematically well founded tool with features that enhance towards the modelling of systems. The right application of different methodologies together should motivate the development of service-oriented manufacturing systems that embrace the vision of collaborative automation.The authors would like to thank the European Commission and the partners of Network of Excellence “Innovative Production Machines and Systems” (http://www.iproms.org/) and the SOCRADES project (http://www.socrades.eu) for their support.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Data Integration: a Case Study in the Financial Services Industry

Current economic conditions result in banks participating in multiple mergers and acquisitions. This results in banks inheriting silo and heterogeneous systems. For banks to remain competitive, they must create a strategy to integrate data from these acquired systems in a dynamic, efficient, and consumable manner. This research considers a case study of a large financial services company that has successfully integrated data from different sources. In addition this research investigates endeavors that experts in the field have undertaken to develop architectures that address the problems with data integration and appropriate solutions

Digital cockpits and decision support systems : design of technics and tools to extract and process data from heterogeneous databases

Tableau d'honneur de la Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales, 2006-200