Redefining a Process Engine as a Microservice Platform

In recent years, microservice architectures have emerged as an agile approach for scalable web applications on cloud environments. As each microservice is developed and deployed independently, they can be developed in the platform and programming language that best suite their purposes, using a simple communication protocol, as REST APIs or asynchronous event-based collaborations, to compose them. In this paper, we argue that process engines provide an excellent platform to develop microservices whose business logic involves complex work flows or processes so that a Business Process language can be used as high level language to develop these services and a process engine to execute it. We identify the requirements for integrating a process engine in a microservice architecture and we propose how the communication and deployment in a microservice architecture can be handled by the process engine.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-70560-R (BELI)Junta de Andalucía P12-TIC-1867 (COPAS)Junta de Andalucía P10-TIC-590

FAST-SE: An Esb Based Framework for SLA Trading

SLA driven service transaction has been identified as a key challenge to take advantage of a SOA. FAST System provides a software framework for the automated creation of SLAs. in particular it have been developed as an extension to the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) paradigm to create a transparent SLA management layer that drives any service invocation. Our framework has been successfully applied in two different scenarios and provides an extensible architecture to address new domains

WS-Governance Tooling: SOA Governance Policies analysis and authoring

Governance is a capital issue in current Service Oriented Arcuitectures, and governance policies are at its base. The governance policies definition must be supported by proper languages and tools, allowing for comfortable and collaborative editing, consistency checking and the evaluation policy meeting. In this paper we present a policy analizer for WS-Governance (a governance policy definition language created by authors, described in [1]) together with an online editor and test suite with classical examples of WS-Governance Documents for consistency validation. Both the test model and the analysis tool prove the suitability of WS-Governance to define SOA governance policiesComisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT) SETI (TIN2009-07366)Junta de Andalucía TIC-2533Junta de Andalucía TIC-590

Towards the user-centric analysis of the availability in IaaS

Availability is a key property in computational services and, therefore, is guaranteed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) from the majority infrastructure services, such as virtualization (Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, Google Cloud, Joyent, Rackspace, ...) and storage (Ama zon S3, Google Cloud Storage, ...). These SLAs describe availability in natural language and there are important differences in the scope and penalties that each service provides. Furthermore, descriptions use spe cific domain terms so they are difficult to understand by service cus tomers. These circumstances make that availability analysis is a tedious, error-prone and time-consuming task. In this paper, we describe in de tail this problem and provide a first approach to deal with these SLAs supported on current SLA analysis techniques

The mediation of the environmental strategies in hotel financial performance in the context of Creating Shared Value

The tourism sector stakeholders in general, and the hotel companies stakeholders in particular, keep demanding more and more intensity the implementation and development of environmental policies that ensure sustainable tourist services, being the national and international large hotel chains the ones that make the biggest efforts in this area. There are numerous studies that value, in an unequal way, the cost and consequences of these environmental sustainability strategies on the performance of companies. For the hotel sector in particular, the scientific literature does not offer convincing enough conclusions in regards to the influence of these strategies on hotels performance. Some authors affirm that the clients are willing to pay higher rates when they recognise a high environmental component in the product. Other studies have concluded that when clients detect the proper implementation of energy saving, waste recycling or low emissions policies, they manifest very positive opinions on social media and online review platforms, notably improving the company’s reputation. In addition, the Creating Shared Value strategies between companies and stakeholders supported by Porter, consider that the redefinition of the companies’ configuration of their chain of value is highly important, including the implementation of environmental policies that involve the whole company. The results obtained grant clarity about the stimulus that entails the application of hotel environmental policies (in a shared value strategy) and the improvement of reputation, in hotel performance.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

On the Calculation of Process Performance Indicators

Performance calculation is a key factor to match corporate goals between different partners in process execution. However, although, a number of standards protocols and languages have recently emerged to support business process services in the industry, there is no standard related to monitoring of performance indicators over processes in these systems. As a consequence, BPMS use propietary languages to define measures and calculate them over process execution. In this paper, we describe two different approaches to compute performance mea- sures on business process decoupled from specific Business Process Man- agement System (BPMS) with an existing BPMS-independent language (PPINOT) to define indicators over business processes. Finally, some optimization techniques are described to increase calculation performance based on computing aggregated measures incrementally.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2012–32273 (TAPAS)Junta de Andalucía TIC–5906 (THEOS)Junta de Andalucia COPAS (P12–TIC-1867)

Sustainable development through Corporative Social Responsability, Corporative Philanthropy and Creating Shared Value.

Política de acceso abierto tomada de: https://techniumscience.com/index.php/socialsciences/about (CC BY)This paper analyses the “strategic philanthropy” proposal, made by professors Porterand Kramer, according to which, a company’s social responsibility must lead to the agreement between social benefit and economic benefit. The company intentionally identifies the key areas in which the community and shareholders’ interests are related so they can take certain measures that improve each other’s conditions. With that in mind, companies should focus on those philanthropy activities that fortify their competitiveness, that is, those activities that equal a progress in the situation of the productive factors and requirements of demand. Drawing from this approach of creating social and economic value, we carried out a study of the main international corporations in which the public and the company’s interests are the same thus appearing new opportunities of creating shared value

Automated analysis of feature models: Quo vadis?

Feature models have been used since the 90's to describe software product lines as a way of reusing common parts in a family of software systems. In 2010, a systematic literature review was published summarizing the advances and settling the basis of the area of Automated Analysis of Feature Models (AAFM). From then on, different studies have applied the AAFM in different domains. In this paper, we provide an overview of the evolution of this field since 2010 by performing a systematic mapping study considering 423 primary sources. We found six different variability facets where the AAFM is being applied that define the tendencies: product configuration and derivation; testing and evolution; reverse engineering; multi-model variability-analysis; variability modelling and variability-intensive systems. We also confirmed that there is a lack of industrial evidence in most of the cases. Finally, we present where and when the papers have been published and who are the authors and institutions that are contributing to the field. We observed that the maturity is proven by the increment in the number of journals published along the years as well as the diversity of conferences and workshops where papers are published. We also suggest some synergies with other areas such as cloud or mobile computing among others that can motivate further research in the future.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-70560-RJunta de Andalucía TIC-186

!Agree Studio: a Platform to Edit and Validate Ws-Agreement Documents

The widespread use of SLA-regulated Cloud services, in which the violation of SLA terms may imply a penalty for the parties, have increased the importance and complexity of systems supporting the SLA lifecycle. Although these systems can be very different from each other, ranging from service monitoring platforms to auto-scaling solutions according to SLAs, they all share the need of having machine-processable and semantically valid SLAs. in this paper we present iAgree studio, the first application, up to our knowledge, that is able to edit and semantically validate agreement documents that are compliant with the WS–Agreement specification by checking properties such as its consistency, and the compliance between templates and agreement offers. in addition, it reports explanations when documents are not valid. Moreover, it allows users to combine the validation and explanation operations by means of a scenarios develope

Automated Validation of Compensable SLAs

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) regulates the provisioning of a service by defining a set of guarantees. Each guarantee sets a Service Level Objective (SLO) on some service metrics, and optionally a compensation that is applied when the SLO is unfulfilled or overfulfilled. Currently, there are software tools and research proposals that use the information about compensations to automate and optimise certain parts of the service management. However, they assume that compensations are well defined, which is too optimistic in some circumstances and can lead to undesirable situations. In this article we discuss about the notion of validity of guarantees with a compensation, which we refer to as compensable guarantees (CG). We describe an abstract model of CGs and we provide a technique that leverages constraint satisfaction problem solvers to automatically validate them. We also present a materialisation of the model of CGs in iAgree, a language to specify SLAs and a tooling support that implements our whole approach. An assessment over 319 CGs taken from 24 real-world SLAs suggests that the expressiveness and effectiveness of our proposal can pave the way for using CGs in a safer and more reliable way.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad BELI (TIN2015-70560-R)Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades TIN2016-81978-REDTJunta de Andalucía P12--TIC--186