Towards Consistency Management for a Business-Driven Development of SOA

The usage of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) along with the Business Process Management has emerged as a valuable solution for the complex (business process driven) system engineering. With a Model Driven Engineering where the business process models drive the supporting service component architectures, less effort is gone into the Business/IT alignment during the initial development activities, and the IT developers can rapidly proceed with the SOA implementation. However, the difference between the design principles of the emerging domainspecific languages imposes serious challenges in the following re-design phases. Moreover, enabling evolutions on the business process models while keeping them synchronized with the underlying software architecture models is of high relevance to the key elements of any Business Driven Development (BDD). Given a business process update, this paper introduces an incremental model transformation approach that propagates this update to the related service component configurations. It, therefore, supports the change propagation among heterogenous domainspecific languages, e.g., the BPMN and the SCA. As a major contribution, our approach makes model transformation more tractable to reconfigure system architecture without disrupting its structural consistency. We propose a synchronizer that provides the BPMN-to-SCA model synchronization with the help of the conditional graph rewriting

Anorexia nervosa and nutritional assessment: contribution of body composition measurements

The psychiatric condition of patients suffering from anorexia nervosa (AN) is affected by their nutritional status. An optimal assessment of the nutritional status of patients is fundamental in understanding the relationship between malnutrition and the psychological symptoms. The present review evaluates some of the available methods for measuring body composition in patients with AN. We searched literature in Medline using several key terms relevant to the present review in order to identify papers. Only articles in English or French were reviewed. A brief description is provided for each body composition technique, with its applicability in AN as well as its limitation. All methods of measuring body composition are not yet validated and/or feasible in patients with AN. The present review article proposes a practical approach for selecting the most appropriate methods depending on the setting, (i.e. clinical v. research) and the goal of the assessment (initial v. follow-up) in order to have a more personalised treatment for patients suffering from A

Influence of site and stand factors on Hymenoscyphus fraxineus-induced basal lesions

Hymenoscyphus fraxineus is an invasive fungus in Europe and causes a severe decline affecting ash, which began in the late 1990s. One of the symptoms associated with the disease is lesions in the outer bark of the collar area. However, the aetiology of these basal lesions, and in particular the relative roles of H.fraxineus and Armillaria species, is still controversial; moreover, little is known about the influence of environmental factors on the disease epidemiology.This study therefore surveyed 42 plots located in northeastern France, in an area affected by ash decline since 2008, in order to determine which environmental factors condition the severity of lesions associated with H.fraxineus on ash collar. The spatial pattern that is a consequence of the invasive spread of the disease was taken into account in the analysis, using a spatial hierarchical Bayesian model fitted by integrated nested laplace approximation (INLA).Results show that while basal lesions are tightly associated with H.fraxineus, their severity is influenced by the Armillaria species present in the plot. Sites with vegetation indicating moist conditions, or more humid topographical positions, were associated with more developed basal lesions

Analysis of Composite Web Services using Logging Facilities

Web services are becoming more and more complex, involving numerous interacting business objects within considerable processes. In order to fully explore Web service business opportunities while ensuring a correct and reliable modelling and execution, analyzing and tracking Web services interactions will enable them to be well understood and controlled. Then, given the resulting event log we want to verify certain specified properties, to provide knowledge about the context of and the reasons for discrepancies between services'behaviours and related instances. This paper advocates a novel technique to log composite Web services and a formal approach, based on an algeabric specification of the discrete event calculus language DEC, to check behavioural properties of composite Web services regarding their execution log. An automated induction-based theorem prover SPIKE is used as verification back-end

Toward synchronization between decentralized orchestrations of Composite Web Services

International audienceWeb service paradigm and related technologies have provided favorable means for the realization of collaborative business processes. From both conceptual and implementation points of view, the business processes are based on a centralized management approach. Nevertheless, it is very well known that the enterprise-wide process management where processes may span multiple organizational units requires particular considerations on scalability, heterogeneity, availability and privacy issues, that in turn, require particular consideration on decentralization. In a previous work , we have described a flexible methodology for splitting a centralized process specification into a form that is amenable to a distributed execution. The approach is based on the computation of very basic dependencies between process elements. In this paper, we extend this approach to support advanced patterns such as Loops, Multiple instances and Discriminator, and incorporate the necessary synchronization between the different processing entities. We also detail our interconnection mechanism and explain how to handle control and data dependencies between activities of the different partitions through asynchronous message exchanges. The proposed methodology preserves semantics of the centralized process with a peer-to peer interactions among the derived decentralized processes

Coopetitive Multi-Enterprises Process Modelling: Principles and Guidelines on Reports

7th Magrebian Conference on Computer Sciences . Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. internationale.International audienceIn the emergent domain of multi-enterprise applications, existing process modelling approaches need some accomodations. Enterprises involved in such applications require privacy and autonomy considerations. It is of first importance that the know-how of each partner is preserved as much as possible : their competitiveness depends on it. Based on some practical experiments in different domains, this paper discusse some pragmatic process modelling guidelines. Each guideline is explained and illustrated thanks to an example issued from the software process domain. A relationship between this work on process modelling and current research on flexible workflow models and enginers is briefly discussed

Cooperation Services for Widely Distributed Applications

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture.Due to the popularization of Internet, widely distributed cooperative applications are expected to become commonplace on the Web. Virtual enterprises and mobile computing are good examples of such distributed applications. They both involve several actors connected together and needing to co-operate by sharing some (possibly unstable) data. To ensure consistency of shared data, traditional distributed systems are based on a client/server architecture. However, this implies that client activities have to be connected to the server continuously. This paper describes our approach to build distributed cooperative applications using a peer-to-peer architecture. An activity is viewed as a self contained component which cooperates with other components by exchanging, during its execution, some results. To ensure consistency of shared data, two activities have to negotiate a cooperation pattern first, which purpose is to control subsequent exchanges of these data between these two activities

The COO operator to support and improve the flexibility of adaptive workflows

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture./http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/During the past few years, a lot of work has been done in the process modeling field. Process modeling is one of the major activity in domains like software engineering, design or creation. Research focused on how to express models and how to ensure that a given model is well followed by all the participants. Despite these proposals, there is a few work on how to ensure that a model is suitable for an organization and that the proposed model is really usable. With new technologies getting important and dedicated to the World Wide Web, people realize that some of the models are not fitting with the reality. Cooperation and collaboration aspects are often missing, and the models are not flexible enough to reflect the reality. All these problems are currently an important research field in two domains: software engineering processes and workflow management systems. The need for adaptive and flexible workflows is now well accepted, as the need for a higher level of cooperation. We present in this paper an approach, which uses techniques described by Rabiner (1989), Stolcke and Omohundro (1994), and by Herbst and Karagiannis (see Proceedings of the Ninth IEEE Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, 1998) and original techniques based on the coo operator. We also explain how this work is applied in a real AEC (architectural, engineering, construction) application context and the reason why we choose such a solution. Then, we discuss our current implementation wor

Resources allocation and scheduling approaches for business process applications in Cloud contexts

International audienceIn the last years, the Cloud computing environment has emerged as new execution support of business process. However, despite the proven benefits of using Cloud to run business process, users lack guidance for choosing between multiple offerings while taking into account several objectives, which are often conflicting. On the other side, elastic computing, such as Amazon EC2, allows users to allocate and release compute resources (virtual machines) on-demand and pay only for what they use. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the number of virtual machines is infinite. This feature of Clouds has been called "illusion of infinite resources''. Moreover, including human resources in the business process execution process make the automated execution of workflow difficult, due to the fact that the number of human resources is finite. In this paper, we develop an allocation strategy for Cloud computing platform taking into account the above characteristics. More precisely, we propose three complementary bi-criterion approaches for resources allocation and scheduling of business process on distributed Cloud resources

Multi-objective resources allocation approaches for workflow applications in Cloud environments

International audienceResources allocation and scheduling has been recognised as an important topic for business process execution. However, despite the proven benefits of using Cloud to run business process, users lack guid- ance for choosing between multiple offering while taking into account several objectives which are often conflicting. Moreover, when running business processes it is difficult to automate all tasks. In this paper, we propose three complementary approaches for Cloud computing platform taking into account these specifications