Reactivity on the Web

Reactivity, the ability to detect simple and composite events and respond in a timely manner, is an essential requirement in many present-day information systems. With the emergence of new, dynamic Web applications, reactivity on the Web is receiving increasing attention. Reactive Web-based systems need to detect and react not only to simple events but also to complex, real-life situations. This paper introduces XChange, a language for programming reactive behaviour on the Web, emphasising the querying of event data and detection of composite events

Requirements and Tools for Variability Management

Explicit and software-supported Business Process Management has become the core infrastructure of any medium and large organization that has a need to be efficient and effective. The number of processes of a single organization can be very high, furthermore, they might be very similar, be in need of momentary change, or evolve frequently. If the ad-hoc adaptation and customization of processes is currently the dominant way, it clearly is not the best. In fact, providing tools for supporting the explicit management of variation in processes (due to customization or evolution needs) has a profound impact on the overall life-cycle of processes in organizations. Additionally, with the increasing adoption of Service-Oriented Architectures, the infrastructure to support automatic reconfiguration and adaptation of business process is solid. In this paper, after defining variability in business process management, we consider the requirements for explicit variation handling for (service based) business process systems. eGovernment serves as an illustrative example of reuse. In this case study, all local municipalities need to implement the same general legal process while adapting it to the local business practices and IT infrastructure needs. Finally, an evaluation of existing tools for explicit variability management is provided with respect to the requirements identified.

What Automated Planning Can Do for Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is a central element of today organizations. Despite over the years its main focus has been the support of processes in highly controlled domains, nowadays many domains of interest to the BPM community are characterized by ever-changing requirements, unpredictable environments and increasing amounts of data that influence the execution of process instances. Under such dynamic conditions, BPM systems must increase their level of automation to provide the reactivity and flexibility necessary for process management. On the other hand, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has concentrated its efforts on investigating dynamic domains that involve active control of computational entities and physical devices (e.g., robots, software agents, etc.). In this context, Automated Planning, which is one of the oldest areas in AI, is conceived as a model-based approach to synthesize autonomous behaviours in automated way from a model. In this paper, we discuss how automated planning techniques can be leveraged to enable new levels of automation and support for business processing, and we show some concrete examples of their successful application to the different stages of the BPM life cycle

MOSAIC: Unified Platform for Dynamic Overlay Selection and Composition

MOSAIC constructs new overlay networks with desired characteristics by composing existing overlays with subsets of those attributes. Thus, MOSAIC overcomes the problem of multiple network infrastructures that are partial solutions, while preserving deployability. Composition of control and/or data planes is possible in the system. MOSAIC overlays are specified in Mozlog, a declarative language that specifies overlay properties without binding them to a particular implementation or underlying network. This paper focuses on the runtime aspects of MOSAIC: how it enables interoperability between different overlay networks and how it implements switching between different overlay compositions, permitting dynamic compositions with both existing overlay networks and legacy applications. The system is validated experimentally using declarative overlay compositions concisely specified in Mozlog: an indirection overlay that supports mobility (i3), a resilient overlay (RON), and scalable lookups (Chord), all of which are combined to provide new functionality. MOSAIC provides the benefits of runtime composition to simultaneously deliver application-aware mobility, NAT traversal and reliability with low performance overhead, demonstrated by measurements on both a local cluster and PlanetLab

Developing front-end Web 2.0 technologies to access services, content and things in the future Internet

The future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable web services accessible from all over the web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user?service interaction is still an open issue. This paper states one vision with regard to next-generation front-end Web 2.0 technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the future Internet. In this paper, we illustrate how front-ends that wrap traditional services and resources can be tailored to the needs of end users, converting end users into prosumers (creators and consumers of service-based applications). To do this, we propose an architecture that end users without programming skills can use to create front-ends, consult catalogues of resources tailored to their needs, easily integrate and coordinate front-ends and create composite applications to orchestrate services in their back-end. The paper includes a case study illustrating that current user-centred web development tools are at a very early stage of evolution. We provide statistical data on how the proposed architecture improves these tools. This paper is based on research conducted by the Service Front End (SFE) Open Alliance initiative