Towards Compliance of Cross-Organizational Processes and their Changes

Businesses require the ability to rapidly implement new processes and to quickly adapt existing ones to environmental changes including the optimization of their interactions with partners and customers. However, changes of either intra- or cross-organizational processes must not be done in an uncontrolled manner. In particular, processes are increasingly subject to compliance rules that usually stem from security constraints, corporate guidelines, standards, and laws. These compliance rules have to be considered when modeling business processes and changing existing ones. While change and compliance have been extensively discussed for intra-organizational business processes, albeit only in an isolated manner, their combination in the context of cross-organizational processes remains an open issue. In this paper, we discuss requirements and challenges to be tackled in order to ensure that changes of cross-organizational business processes preserve compliance with imposed regulations, standards and laws

Realizability is controllability

Abstract. A choreography describes the interaction between services. It may be used for specification purposes, for instance serving as a contract in the design of an interorganizational business process. Typically, not all describable interactions make sense which motivates the study of the realizability problem for a given choreography. In this paper, we show that realizability can be traced back to the problem of controllability which askes whether a service has compatible partner processes. This way of thinking makes algorithms for controllability available for reasoning about realizability. In addition, it suggests alternative definitions for realizability. We discuss several proposals for defining realizability which differ in the degree of coverage of the specified interaction.

In vivo correction of a Menkes disease model using antisense oligonucleotides

Although the molecular basis of many inherited metabolic diseases has been defined, the availability of effective therapies in such disorders remains problematic. Menkes disease is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder due to loss-of-function mutations in the ATP7A gene encoding a copper-transporting P-type Atpase. To develop therapeutic approaches in affected patients, we have identified a zebrafish model of Menkes disease termed calamity that results from splicing defects in the zebrafish orthologue of the ATP7A gene. Embryonic-recessive lethal mutants have impaired copper homeostasis that results in absent melanin pigmentation, impaired notochord formation, and hindbrain neurodegeneration. In this current study, we have attempted to rescue these striking phenotypic alterations by using a series of antisense morpholino oligonucleotides directed against the splice-site junctions of two mutant calamity alleles. Our findings reveal a robust and complete correction of the copper-deficient defects of calamity in association with the generation of the WT Menkes protein in all rescued mutants. Interestingly, a quantitative analysis of atp7a-specific transcripts suggests that competitive translational regulation may account for the synthesis of WT protein in these embryos. This in vivo correction of Menkes disease through the rescue of aberrant splicing may provide therapeutic options in this fatal disease and illustrates the potential for zebrafish models of human genetic disease in the development of treatments based on the principles of interactions of synthetic oligonucleotide analogues with mRNA

Let's Dance: A Language for Service Behavior Modeling

In Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), software systems\ud are decomposed into independent units, namely services, that interact\ud with one another through message exchanges. To promote reuse and\ud evolvability, these interactions are explicitly described right from the\ud early phases of the development lifecycle. Up to now, emphasis has been\ud placed on capturing structural aspects of service interactions. Gradually\ud though, the description of behavioral dependencies between service interactions\ud is gaining increasing attention as a means to push forward the\ud SOA vision. This paper deals with the description of these behavioral\ud dependencies during the analysis and design phases. The paper outlines\ud a set of requirements that a language for modeling service interactions at\ud this level should fulfill, and proposes a language whose design is driven\ud by these requirements

Requirements-driven collaborative choreography customization

Evolving business needs call for customizing choreographed interactions. However, conventional choreography description languages provide only a partial view of the interaction. Business goals of each participant and organizational dependencies motivating the interaction are not captured in the specification of messaging. Absence of this critical business knowledge makes it hard to reason if a particular customization satisfies the goals of participants. Furthermore, there is no systematic means to assess the impact of change in one participant’s process (local view) on the choreography (global view) as well as on other participants’ processes. To this end, we argue for the benefits of representing choreography at the level of requirements motivating the interaction. We propose a framework that allows participants to collaborate on customizing choreographed interactions, while reconciling their competing business needs. To bridge the worlds of messaging and requirements, we employ an automated technique for deriving a choreography description from the customized requirements

Disturbance compensation for servo-control applications using a discrete adaptive neural network feedforward method

10.1109/CDC.2007.4434253Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control5965-5972PCDC

Behavioral Consistency for B2B Process Integration

Abstract. Interacting services are at the center of attention in businessto-business (B2B) process integration scenarios. Global interaction models specify the interaction behavior of each service and serve as contractual basis for the collaboration. Consequently, service implementations have to be consistent with the specifications. Consistency checking ensures that an implemented service is compatible with other services, i.e. that it can interact successfully with them. This is important in order to avoid deadlocks and guarantee proper termination of a collaboration. Different notions of compatibility between interacting services and consistency between specification and implementation are available but they are typically discussed independently from each other. This paper presents a unifying framework for compatibility and consistency and shows how these two notions relate to one another. Criteria for an optimal consistency relation with respect to a given compatibility relation are presented. Based on these criteria weak bi-simulation is evaluated.