A TOSCA-Based Conceptual Architecture to Support the Federation of Heterogeneous MSaaS Infrastructures †

Modeling and simulation (M&S) techniques are effectively used in many application domains to support various operational tasks ranging from system analyses to innovative training activities. Any (M&S) effort might strongly benefit from the adoption of service orientation and cloud computing to ease the development and provision of M&S applications. Such an emerging paradigm is commonly referred to as M&S-as-a-Service (MSaaS). The need for orchestrating M&S services provided by different partners in a heterogeneous cloud infrastructure introduces new challenges. In this respect, the adoption of an effective architectural approach might significantly help the design and development of MSaaS infrastructure implementations that cooperate in a federated environment. In this context, this work introduces a MSaaS reference architecture (RA) that aims to investigate innovative approaches to ease the building of inter-cloud MSaaS applications. Moreover, this work presents ArTIC-MS, a conceptual architecture that refines the proposed RA for introducing the TOSCA (topology and orchestration specification for cloud applications) standard. ArTIC-MS’s main objective is to enable effective portability and interoperability among M&S services provided by different partners in heterogeneous federations of cloud-based MSaaS infrastructure. To show the validity of the proposed architectural approach, the results of concrete experimentation are provided

A Model Based Framework for IoT-Aware Business Process Management

IoT-aware Business Processes (BPs) that exchange data with Internet of Things (IoT) devices, briefly referred to as IoT-aware BPs, are gaining momentum in the BPM field. Introducing IoT technologies from the early stages of the BP development process requires dealing with the complexity and heterogeneity of such technologies at design and analysis time. This paper analyzes widely used IoT frameworks and ontologies to introduce a BPMN extension that improves the expressiveness of relevant BP modeling notations and allows an appropriate representation of IoT devices from both an architectural and a behavioral perspective. In the BP management field, the use of simulation-based approaches is recognized as an effective technology for analyzing BPs. Simulation models need to be parameterized according to relevant properties of the process under study. Unfortunately, such parameters may change during the process operational life, thus making the simulation model invalid with respect to the actual process behavior. To ease the analysis of IoT-aware BPs, this paper introduces a model-driven method for the automated development of digital twins of actual business processes. The proposed method also exploits data retrieved by IoT sensors to automatically reconfigure the simulation model, to make the digital twin continuously coherent and compliant with its actual counterpart

E-MDAV: A Framework for Developing Data-Intensive Web Applications

The ever-increasing adoption of innovative technologies, such as big data and cloud computing, provides significant opportunities for organizations operating in the IT domain, but also introduces considerable challenges. Such innovations call for development processes that better align with stakeholders needs and expectations. In this respect, this paper introduces a development framework based on the OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) that aims to support the development lifecycle of data-intensive web applications. The proposed framework, named E-MDAV (Extended MDA-VIEW), defines a methodology that exploits a chain of model transformations to effectively cope with both forward- and reverse-engineering aspects. In addition, E-MDAV includes the specification of a reference architecture for driving the implementation of a tool that supports the various professional roles involved in the development and maintenance of data-intensive web applications. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed E-MDAV framework, a tool prototype has been developed. E-MDAV has then been applied to two different application scenarios and the obtained results have been compared with historical data related to the implementation of similar development projects, in order to measure and discuss the benefits of the proposed approach

A BPMN extension to support discrete-event simulation for healthcare applications:an explicit representation of queues, attributes and data-driven decision points

Stakeholder engagement in simulation projects is important, especially in healthcare where there is a plurality of stakeholder opinions, objectives and power. One promising approach for increasing engagement is facilitated modelling. Currently, the complexity of producing a simulation model means that the ‘model coding’ stage is performed without the involvement of stakeholders, interrupting the possibility of a fully-facilitated project. Early work demonstrated that with currently-available software tools we can represent a simple healthcare process using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and generate a simulation model automatically. However, for more complex processes, BPMN currently has a number of limitations, namely the ability to represent queues and data-driven decision points. To address these limitations, we propose a conceptual design for an extension to BPMN (BPMN4SIM) using Model Driven Architecture. Application to an elderly emergency care pathway in a UK hospital shows that BPMN4SIM is able to represent a more-complex business process

Patrones de actividad cotidiana en personas mayores: ¿es lo que dicen hacer lo que desearían hacer?

El objetivo del presente artículo es explorar el patrón de actividades cotidianas y deseadas en una muestra de personas mayores, así como algunos factores que las condicionan y sus implicaciones para la satisfacción con la vida. Una muestra de 154 personas jubiladas de más de 60 años y que vivían en un entorno urbano participó en el estudio. Los datos sobre las actividades se recogieron mediante entrevistas individuales, mientras que para la satisfacción con la vida se utilizó la escala LSI. Nuestros resultados muestran que el patrón de actividades manifestadas para el día de ayer es muy similar al que se realizaría en un día ideal, aunque en éste se desearía pasar mucho más tiempo en compañía de otras personas. Factores como el sexo y el nivel educativo y económico afectan a las actividades realizadas, especialmente a las instrumentales y al tiempo dedicado al ocio. La diferencia entre el día de ayer y el día ideal se relacionó negativamente y de manera significativa, aunque modesta, con la satisfacción con la vida

A Model-driven approach to describe and predict the performance of composite services

Distributed applications are rapidly converging towards the adoption of a computing paradigm based on service-oriented architectures (SOA), according to which an application results from the composition of a set of services in execution on networked server hosts. In a SOA context, service providers are strategically interested both to describe the performance characteristics of offered services, to better qualify their offer and gain a significant advantage in the global marketplace, and to predict the level of performance that can be offered to service consumers when building composite web services that make use of services managed by various service providers. This paper introduces a model-driven approach for integrating performance prediction into service composition processes carried out by use of BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services). The proposed approach is founded on P-WSDL (Performance-enabled WSDL), a performance-oriented extension of WSDL, the language for describing the information about service capabilities and invocation mechanisms. P-WSDL is a lightweight WSDL extension for the description of performance characteristics of a web service. The approach is illustrated by use of an example application to a composite web service for travel planning

A Measurement framework for the parameterization of performance models of SOA-based systems

Distributed applications are rapidly converging towards the adoption of a computing paradigm based on service-oriented architectures, according to which an application can be seen as a composite web service that is built by assembling a set of existing services, executed on internetworked server hosts. In such a context, service providers are strategically interested both to describe the performance characteristics of offered services, to better qualify their offer and gain a significant advantage in the global marketplace; and to predict the level of performance that can be offered to service consumers. To this purpose, the paper introduces a framework for the management of performance parameters, defining the architecture that enables service providers to measure and make available performance information about the offered services. On the other hand the proposed approach allows the service consumers to automatically retrieve the performance data and then use such data to apply model-driven approaches for the performance analysis of composite web services

On the elasto-plastic behavior of continuous steel beams reinforced by bonded CFRP lamina

This paper is focused on the flexural behavior of steel beams reinforced with carbon fibers reinforced polymer materials (CFRPs). In order to fully exploit the potentialities of a CFRP reinforcement the beam has to be designed in the plastic regime. In fact in the linear elastic case the contribution of a thin CFRP lamina attached on the tension side are very limited both for the ultimate and serviceability limit states. However debonding of the CFRP lamina or failure of the carbon reinforcement may prevent the achievement of the full plastic flexural capacity of the section. Non-linear finite element models have been employed to compute the elasto-plastic response of the structure in terms of internal forces and stresses; however these models are often complicated, time consuming and not available for practitioners. In the present paper we propose a simple approach to compute the response of the reinforced beam up to the ultimate limit state, which can be easily implemented and exploited for design purposes. This method has been validated against results from literature and from ad hoc formulated finite element models and then adopted to study a continuous beam over three supports. Parametric studies have been performed in order to point out the influence on the main design reinforcement parameters on the elastoplastic response of the reinforced steel beam

Modeling-To-Simulation: Transformation Approaches to Boost Automation in Modeling & Simulation

The use of automated transformation approaches based on model-driven principles and standards promises to be a significant enablcr of time, effort and cost savings in the Modeling and Simulation (M&S) field. This paper specifically addresses the distributed simulation (DS) domain, which allows to naturally cope with the ever growing complexity and distributed nature of modern systems. Unfortunately, the use of DS in a system development lifecycle can be a challenging issue due to the fact that: i) the use of DS frameworks and standards requires significant and specific technical skills system engineers are usually not familiar with; ii) the development of a DS is an effort-, time- demanding and error-prone activity. In this respect, this paper shows the benefits of using a model-driven transformation approach to the development of DS systems. Specifically, the paper presents and compares two main approaches, namely the conventional approach, based on a standard model- driven process, and an innovative approach that exploits the SimArch layered architecture