Modelling Service Level Agreements for Business Process Outsourcing Services

Many proposals to model service level agreements (SLAs) have been elaborated in order to automate different stages of the service lifecycle such as monitoring, implementation or deployment. All of them have been designed for computational services and are not well–suited for other types of services such as business process outsourcing (BPO) services. However, BPO services suported by process–aware information systems could also benefit from modelling SLAs in tasks such as performance monitoring, human resource assignment or process configuration. In this paper, we identify the requirements for modelling such SLAs and detail how they can be faced by combining techniques used to model computational SLAs, business processes, and process performance indicators. Furthermore, our approach has been validated through the modelling of several real BPO SLAsMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2012-32273Junta de Andalucía TIC-5906Junta de Andalucía P12-TIC-186

Verification by Construction of Distributed Algorithms

International audienceThe verification of distributed algorithms is a challenge for formal techniques supported by tools, as model checkers and proof as- sistants. The difficulties, even for powerful tools, lie in the derivation of proofs of required properties, such as safety and eventuality, for dis- tributed algorithms. Verification by construction can be achieved by us- ing a formal framework in which models are constructed at different levels of abstraction; each level of abstraction is refined by the one below, and this refinement relationships is documented by an abstraction relation namely a gluing invariant. The highest levels of abstraction are used to express the required behavior in terms of the problem domain and the lowest level of abstraction corresponds to an implementation from which an efficient implementation can be derived automatically. In this paper, we describe a methodology based on the general concept of refinement and used for developing distributed algorithms satisfying a given list of safety and liveness properties. The modelling methodology is defined in the Event-B modelling language using the IDE Rodin

In vitro abrasion of resin-coated highly viscous glass ionomer cements: a confocal laser scanning microscopy study

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of resin coating on the wear depth of highly viscous glass ionomer cements (HVGICs) after 40,000 cycles, corresponding to over 8 years of tooth brushing