Design of an autonomous software platform for future symbiotic service management

Nowadays, public as well as private communication infrastructures are all contending for the same limited amount of bandwidth. To optimally share network resources, symbiotic networks have been proposed, which cross logical and physical boundaries to improve the reliability, scalability, and energy efficiency of the network as a whole as well as its constituents. This paper focuses on software services in such symbiotic networks. We propose a platform for the intelligent composition of services provided by symbiotically connected parties, resulting in novel cooperation opportunities. The platform harvests Semantic Web technology to describe services in a highly expressive manner, and constructs service compositions using SeCoA, our tunable best-first search algorithm. The resulting compositions are then enacted via CaPI, a reconfigurable middleware infrastructure. By means of an illustrative scenario, we provide further insight into the platform's functioning

Web Services Support for Dynamic Business Process Outsourcing

Outsourcing of business processes is crucial for organizations to be effective, efficient and flexible. To meet fast-changing market conditions, dynamic outsourcing is required, in which business relationships are established and enacted on-the-fly in an adaptive, fine-grained way unrestricted by geographic distance. This requires automated means for both the establishment of outsourcing relationships and for the enactment of services performed in these relationships over electronic channels. Due to wide industry support and the underlying model of loose coupling of services, Web services increasingly become the mechanism of choice to connect organizations across organizational boundaries. This paper analyzes to which extent Web services support the dynamic process outsourcing paradigm. We discuss contract -based dynamic business process outsourcing to define requirements and then introduce the Web services framework. Based on this, we investigate the match between the two. We observe that the Web services framework requires further support for cross - organizational business processes and mechanisms for contracting, QoS management and process-based transaction support and suggest ways to fill those gaps

Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them. In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00

Web-based support for managing large collections of software artefacts

There has been a long history of CASE tool development, with an underlying software repository at the heart of most systems. Usually such tools, even the more recently web-based systems, are focused on supporting individual projects within an enterprise or across a number of distributed sites. Little support for maintaining large heterogeneous collections of software artefacts across a number of projects has been developed. Within the GENESIS project, this has been a key consideration in the development of the Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR). Its most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross project global views of large software collections as well as historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR is widely adopted and various steps to facilitate this are described

Modelling electronic service systems using UML

This paper presents a profile for modelling systems of electronic services using UML. Electronic services encapsulate business services, an organisational unit focused on delivering benefit to a consumer, to enhance communication, coordination and information management. Our profile is based on a formal, workflow-oriented description of electronic services that is abstracted from particular implementation technologies. Resulting models provide the basis for a formal analysis to verify behavioural properties of services. The models can also relate services to management components, including workflow managers and Electronic Service Management Systems (ESMSs), a novel concept drawn from experience of HP Service Composer and DySCo (Dynamic Service Composer), providing the starting point for integration and implementation tasks. Their UML basis and platform-independent nature is consistent with a Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) development strategy, appropriate to the challenge of developing electronic service systems using heterogeneous technology, and incorporating legacy systems

A conceptual architecture for semantic web services development and deployment

Several extensions of the Web Services Framework (WSF) have been proposed. The combination with Semantic Web technologies introduces a notion of semantics, which can enhance scalability through automation. Service composition to processes is an equally important issue. Ontology technology – the core of the Semantic Web – can be the central building block of an extension endeavour. We present a conceptual architecture for ontology-based Web service development and deployment. The development of service-based software systems within the WSF is gaining increasing importance. We show how ontologies can integrate models, languages, infrastructure, and activities within this architecture to support reuse and composition of semantic Web services