Multi-level Autonomic Business Process Management

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38484-4_14Nowadays, business processes are becoming increasingly complex and heterogeneous. Autonomic Computing principles can reduce this complexity by autonomously managing the software systems and the running processes, their states and evolution. Business Processes that are able to be self-managed are referred to as Autonomic Business Processes (ABP). However, a key challenge is to keep the models of such ABP understandable and expressive in increasingly complex scenarios. This paper discusses the design aspects of an autonomic business process management system able to self-manage processes based on operational adaptation. The goal is to minimize human intervention during the process definition and execution phases. This novel approach, named MABUP, provides four well-defined levels of abstraction to express business and operational knowledge and to guide the management activity; namely, Organizational Level, Technological Level, Operational Level and Service Level. A real example is used to illustrate our proposal.Research supported by CAPES, CNPQ and Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.Oliveira, K.; Castro, J.; España Cubillo, S.; Pastor López, O. (2013). Multi-level Autonomic Business Process Management. En Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. Springer. 184-198. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-38484-4_14S184198España, S., González, A., Pastor, Ó.: Communication Analysis: A Requirements Engineering Method for Information Systems. In: van Eck, P., Gordijn, J., Wieringa, R. (eds.) CAiSE 2009. LNCS, vol. 5565, pp. 530–545. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)Ganek, A.G., Corbi, T.A.: The dawning of the autonomic computing era. IBM Systems Journal 42(1), 5–18 (2003)Gonzalez, A., et al.: Unity criteria for Business Process Modelling. In: Third International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science, RCIS 2009, pp. 155–164 (2009)Greenwood, D., Rimassa, G.: Autonomic Goal-Oriented Business Process Management. Management, 43 (2007)Haupt, T., et al.: Autonomic execution of computational workflows. In: 2011 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, FedCSIS, pp. 965–972 (2011)Kephart, J.O., Chess, D.M.: The vision of autonomic computing. IEEE (2003)Lee, K., et al.: Workflow adaptation as an autonomic computing problem. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science, New York, NY, USA, pp. 29–34 (2007)Mosincat, A., Binder, W.: Transparent Runtime Adaptability for BPEL Processes. In: Bouguettaya, A., Krueger, I., Margaria, T. (eds.) ICSOC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5364, pp. 241–255. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Oliveira, K., et al.: Towards Autonomic Business Process Models. In: International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge, SEKE 2012, San Francisco, California, USA (2012)Rahman, M., et al.: A taxonomy and survey on autonomic management of applications in grid computing environments. Concurr. Comput.: Pract. Exper. 23(16), 1990–2019 (2011)Reijers, H.A., Mendling, J.: Modularity in process models: Review and effects. In: Dumas, M., Reichert, M., Shan, M.-C. (eds.) BPM 2008. LNCS, vol. 5240, pp. 20–35. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Rodrigues Nt., J.A., Monteiro Jr., P.C.L., de O. Sampaio, J., de Souza, J.M., Zimbrão, G.: Autonomic Business Processes Scalable Architecture. In: ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Benatallah, B., Paik, H.-Y. (eds.) BPM Workshops 2007. LNCS, vol. 4928, pp. 78–83. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Strohmaier, M., Yu, E.: Towards autonomic workflow management systems. ACM Press (2006)Terres, L.D., et al.: Selection of Business Process for Autonomic Automation. In: 2010 14th IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, pp. 237–246 (October 2010)Tretola, G., Zimeo, E.: Autonomic internet-scale workflows. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Monitoring, Adaptation and Beyond, New York, NY, USA, pp. 48–56 (2010)Vedam, H., Venkatasubramanian, V.: A wavelet theory-based adaptive trend analysis system for process monitoring and diagnosis. In: Proceedings of the 1997 American Control Conference, vol. 1, pp. 309–313 (June 1997)Wang, Y., Mylopoulos, J.: Self-Repair through Reconfiguration: A Requirements Engineering Approach. In: 2009 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pp. 257–268 (November 2009)Yu, T., Lin, K.: Adaptive algorithms for finding replacement services in autonomic distributed business processes. In: Proceedings Autonomous Decentralized Systems, ISADS 2005, pp. 427–434 (2005

The potential use of service-oriented infrastructure framework to enable transparent vertical scalability of cloud computing infrastructure

Cloud computing technology has become familiar to most Internet users. Subsequently, there has been an increased growth in the use of cloud computing, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). To ensure that IaaS can easily meet the growing demand, IaaS providers usually increase the capacity of their facilities in a vertical IaaS increase capability and the capacity for local IaaS amenities such as increasing the number of servers, storage and network bandwidth. However, at the same time, horizontal scalability is sometimes not enough and requires additional strategies to ensure that the large number of IaaS service requests can be met. Therefore, strategies requiring horizontal scalability are more complex than the vertical scalability strategies because they involve the interaction of more than one facility at different service centers. To reduce the complexity of the implementation of the horizontal scalability of the IaaS infrastructures, the use of a technology service oriented infrastructure is recommended to ensure that the interaction between two or more different service centers can be done more simply and easily even though it is likely to involve a wide range of communication technologies and different cloud computing management. This is because the service oriented infrastructure acts as a middle man that translates and processes interactions and protocols of different cloud computing infrastructures without the modification of the complex to ensure horizontal scalability can be run easily and smoothly. This paper presents the potential of using a service-oriented infrastructure framework to enable transparent vertical scalability of cloud computing infrastructures by adapting three projects in this research: SLA@SOI consortium, Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI), and OpenStack

A generic self-repair approach for overlays

Self-repair is a key area of functionality in overlay networks, especially as overlays become increasingly widely deployed and relied upon. Today's common practice is for each overlay to implement its own self-repair mechanism. However, apart from leading to duplication of effort, this practice inhibits choice and flexibility in selecting from among multiple self-repair mechanisms that make different deployment-specific trade-offs between dependability and overhead. In this paper, we present an approach in which overlay networks provide functional behaviour only, and rely for their self-repair on a generic self-repair service. In our previously-published work in this area, we have focused on the distributed algorithms encapsulated within our self-repair service. In this paper we focus instead on API and integration issues. In particular, we show how overlay implementations can interact with our generic self-repair service using a small and simple API. We concretise the discussion by illustrating the use of this API from within an implementation of the popular Chord overlay. This involves minimal changes to the implementation while considerably increasing its available range of self-repair strategies

Behavior Monitoring in Self-healing Service-oriented Systems

Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) have become the de facto standard for designing distributed and loosely coupled applications. Many service-based applications demand for a mix of interactions between humans and Software-Based Services (SBS). An example is a process model comprising SBS and services provided by human actors. Such applications are difficult to manage due to changing interaction patterns, behavior, and faults resulting from varying conditions in the environment. To address these complexities, we introduce a self-healing approach enabling recovery mechanisms to avoid degraded or stalled systems. The presented work extends the notion of self-healing by consideringamixtureof human and service interactions observing their behavior patterns. We present the design and architecture of the VieCure framework supporting fundamental principles for autonomic self-healing strategies. We validate our self-healing approach through simulations

Intelligent dependability services for overlay networks

Application-level overlays have emerged as a useful means of offering network services that axe not supported by the underlying physical network. Most overlays employ proprietary dependability mechanisms to render them more resilient to node failure, but the use of proprietary approaches leads to duplication of effort during development and adds design complexity. In this paper we propose generic dependability services which simplify the design of overlays. Our services are fully decentralized and are configurable to take advantage of current network conditions, which can enable us to make better repairs following failures

Optimisation of laser-fired aluminium emitters for high efficiency n-Type Si solar cells

In order to investigate the local laser-fired aluminium emitters (LFE), a process recently developed at Fraunhofer ISE, high-efficiency n+np+ back junction solar cells with resistivities of 1, 10 and 100 ohm cm were fabricated. The laser-induced damage was analysed and modelled using a two-dimensional DESSIS simulation. The injection-dependent Shockley-Read-Hall recombination in the direct vicinity of the local back-junction is believed to strongly influence the cell erformance and cause large cell performance differences for different resistivity cells. Optimisation of the distance of laser-fired emitter points was performed. The importance of the annealing step following laser processing is shown. Effective excess carrier lifetimes of the 100 ohm cm FZ n-type Si up to 18 ms are reported