An Assessment of a Model for Error Processing in the CMS Data Acquisition System

The CMS Data Acquisition System consists of O(20000) interdependent services. A system providing exception and application-specific monitoring data is essential for the operation of such a cluster. Due to the number of involved services the amount of monitoring data is higher than a human operator can handle efficiently. Thus moving the expert-knowledge for error analysis from the operator to a dedicated system is a natural choice. This reduces the number of notifications to the operator for simpler visualization and provides meaningful error cause descriptions and suggestions for possible countermeasures. This paper discusses an architecture of a workflow-based hierarchical error analysis system based on Guardians for the CMS Data Acquisition System. Guardians provide a common interface for error analysis of a specific service or subsystem. To provide effective and complete error analysis, the requirements regarding information sources, monitoring and configuration, are analyzed. Formats for common notification types are defined and a generic Guardian based on Event-Condition-Action rules is presented as a proof-of-concept

Business rules based legacy system evolution towards service-oriented architecture.

Enterprises can be empowered to live up to the potential of becoming dynamic, agile and real-time. Service orientation is emerging from the amalgamation of a number of key business, technology and cultural developments. Three essential trends in particular are coming together to create a new revolutionary breed of enterprise, the service-oriented enterprise (SOE): (1) the continuous performance management of the enterprise; (2) the emergence of business process management; and (3) advances in the standards-based service-oriented infrastructures. This thesis focuses on this emerging three-layered architecture that builds on a service-oriented architecture framework, with a process layer that brings technology and business together, and a corporate performance layer that continually monitors and improves the performance indicators of global enterprises provides a novel framework for the business context in which to apply the important technical idea of service orientation and moves it from being an interesting tool for engineers to a vehicle for business managers to fundamentally improve their businesses

An Exploratory Case Study of the Benefits of Business Rules Management Systems

Business rules engines and business rule management systems (BRMS) are gaining popularity especially in large, complex, and real-time business environments. In essence, the business rules approach represents a new paradigm for compartmentalizing the formalization of business policies and rules as a separate component from application code. Given that this phenomenon has not yet been empirically investigated from a research perspective, we report on an exploratory case study undertaken to better understand the impacts of the business rules approach on activities throughout the software development lifecycle at a large Fortune 500 corporation. Our study integrates theoretical notions from the literature on knowledge reuse and systems theory with four constructs – centralization, standardization, externalization and structuration – to categorize the benefits arising from BRMS. Our results suggest that the application of the business rules approach has the potential to facilitate information systems development activities at all stages of the software development lifecycle

Reglas de negocio: un nuevo enfoque de sistemas informáticos para la gestión dinámica empresarial

El enfoque de reglas de negocio propone separar la lógica volátil de las aplicaciones principales para procesarla de manera independiente. Esto facilita la definición y cambio de las reglas y evita la costosa modificación de las aplicaciones legadas. Este artículo presenta un panorama del enfoque de reglas de negocio. Discute las razones por las que este enfoque está siendo adoptado por las empresas que manejan grandes cantidades de reglas volátiles. Muestra como el desarrollo investigativo y tecnológico soportan esta tendencia. También presenta un prototipo de motor de reglas de negocio, desarrollado como parte de los avances del proyecto de investigación en que está enmarcado este artículo

Leveraging service-oriented business applications to a rigorous rule-centric dynamic behavioural architecture.

Today’s market competitiveness and globalisation are putting pressure on organisations to join their efforts, to focus more on cooperation and interaction and to add value to their businesses. That is, most information systems supporting these cross-organisations are characterised as service-oriented business applications, where all the emphasis is put on inter-service interactions rather than intra-service computations. Unfortunately for the development of such inter-organisational service-oriented business systems, current service technology proposes only ad-hoc, manual and static standard web-service languages such as WSDL, BPEL and WS-CDL [3, 7]. The main objective of the work reported in this thesis is thus to leverage the development of service-oriented business applications towards more reliability and dynamic adaptability, placing emphasis on the use of business rules to govern activities, while composing services. The best available software-engineering techniques for adaptability, mainly aspect-oriented mechanisms, are also to be integrated with advanced formal techniques. More specifically, the proposed approach consists of the following incremental steps. First, it models any business activity behaviour governing any service-oriented business process as Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules. Then such informal rules are made more interaction-centric, using adapted architectural connectors. Third, still at the conceptual-level, with the aim of adapting such ECA-driven connectors, this approach borrows aspect-oriented ideas and mechanisms, and proposes to intercept events, select the properties required for interacting entities, explicitly and separately execute such ECA-driven behavioural interactions and finally dynamically weave the results into the entities involved. To ensure compliance and to preserve the implementation of this architectural conceptualisation, the work adopts the Maude language as an executable operational formalisation. For that purpose, Maude is first endowed with the notions of components and interfaces. Further, the concept of ECA-driven behavioural interactions are specified and implemented as aspects. Finally, capitalising on Maude reflection, the thesis demonstrates how to weave such interaction executions into associated services

Decision as a Service (DaaS):A service-oriented architecture approach for decisions in processes

Separating decision modelling from the processes modelling concern recently gained significant support in literature, as incorporating both concerns into a single model impairs the scalability, maintainability, flexibility and understandability of both processes and decisions. Most notably the introduction of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard by the Object Management Group provides a suitable solution for externalising decisions from processes and automating decision enactments for processes. This paper introduces a systematic way of tackling the separation of the decision modelling concern from process modelling by providing a Decision as a Service (DaaS) layered Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) which approaches decisions as automated and externalised services that processes need to invoke on demand to obtain the decision outcome. The DaaS mechanism is elucidated by a formalisation of DMN constructs and the relevant layer elements. Furthermore, DaaS is evaluated against the fundamental characteristics of the SOA paradigm, proving its contribution in terms of abstraction, reusability, loose coupling, and other pertinent SOA principles. Additionally, the benefits of the DaaS design on process-decision modelling and mining are discussed. Finally, the DaaS design is illustrated on a real-life event log of a bank loan application and approval process, and the SOA maturity of DaaS is assessed.status: Published onlin

Umsetzung eines Systems zur regelbasierten Analyse von Gesundheitsdaten

Für die Enhancing Chronic Patients’ Health Online (ECHO) Plattform wurde im Rahmen dieser Arbeit ein regelbasiertes Analysesystem für Gesundheitsdaten entwickelt. Das Analysesystem hat zum Ziel, die vorher im Quellcode der ECHO-Plattform integrierten Datenanalysen zu ersetzen und dem Anwender spezifische Analysen zu ermöglichen, die jederzeit erzeugt, geändert oder gelöscht werden können. Das Analysesystem soll der besseren Diagnose und Behandlung von chronisch obstruktiven Lungenerkrankungen dienen. Damit soll auch die Möglichkeit gegeben sein, über eine frühzeitige Erkennung von Exazerbationen die Lebensqualität der Patienten zu verbessern, indem der Patient rechtzeitig gewarnt werden kann. Die Früherkennung erfolgt durch die Verwendung von Data Mining-Verfahren. Zur Erstellung von regelbasierten Analysen verwendet das Analysesystem eine Analysatorvorlage, mit der Anwender die Regeln der Analyse bestimmen. Die Analysatorvorlage legt die Verwendung der Analyseoperatoren fest (wann die Analyse gestartet werden soll), und eine mögliche Aktion, die bei der Erfüllung der Analyseregeln ausgeführt wird. Das Analysesystem verwendet zur Ausführung der Analysatoren das Ausführungssystem Node-Red. Die Analysatorvorlage wird vom Analysesystem in einen Ablaufplan transformiert. Der Ablaufplan wird auf einem Ausführungssystem erzeugt und aktiviert. Mit der verwendeten Multi-Serverarchitektur kann das Analysesystem die Analysatoren auf unterschiedlichen Serversystemen aktivieren, um die Ausführungsgeschwindigkeit und Skalierung zu verbessern. Zur Kommunikation mit dem Analysesystem und dem Analysator wird das MQTT-Protokoll verwendet