Supporting a Bottom-Up Evolution of Microservice Compositions based on the Choreography of BPMN Fragments

Microservices need to be composed in order to provide their customers with valuable services. To do so, event-based choreographies are used many times since they help to maintain a lower coupling among microservices. In a previous work, we presented an approach that proposed creating the big picture of the composition in a BPMN model, splitting in into BPMN fragments and distributing these fragments among microservices. In this way, we implemented a microservice composition as an event-based choreography of BPMN fragments. Based on this approach, this work focuses on supporting the evolution of a microservice composition. We pay special attention to how a microservice composition can be evolved from the local perspective of a microservice, since changes performed locally can affect to the communication among microservices and as a result in the integrity of the whole composition. We present an evolution protocol that allows a microservice composition implemented as an event-based choreography of BPMN fragments to evolve from the local perspective of the composed microservices

Towards the Composition of Services by End-Users

Nowadays, we live surrounded by heterogeneous and distributed services that are available to people anytime and anywhere. Even though these services can be used individually, it is through their synchronized and combined usage that end-users are provided with added value. However, existing solutions to service composition are not targeted at ordinary end-users. In fact, these solutions require technical knowledge to deal with the technological heterogeneity in which they are offered to the market. To this end, the paper presents a tool-supported platform that is aided by: (1) EUCalipTool, an end-user mobile tool that implements a Domain Specific Visual Language, which has been specifically designed to compose services on mobile devices; (2) a Faceted Service Registry, which plays the role of gateway between service implementations and end-users, hiding technological issues from the latter when including services in a composition; and (3) a Generation Module, which transforms end-user descriptions into BPMN specification that are interpreted by an execution infrastructure developed for that purpose

Kind mobile notifications for healthcare professionals

[EN] The inclusion of the Internet of Things in healthcare is producing numerous automatic notifications for health professionals. These notifications must be delivered in the right moment and in the right way to be appropriately attended, and at the same time, ensuring no important task is interrupted. In this work, we have applied a human-centred design method to deal with this issue. By collaborating with health professionals in Belgium, we have designed and validated DELICATE, a conceptual framework that categorizes the different attention needs for each notification, and links them with the delivery mechanisms that are more appropriate for each particular context. As an aid for designers, we also define methodological guidelines to clearly determine how DELICATE can be used to develop a notification system. Finally, as a proof-of-concept validation of the framework, we have implemented it in an Android application and tested it using real scenarios. This validation has shown that DELICATE can be used to design a notification system that delivers kind healthcare notifications.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Pedro Valderas's work has been developed with the financial support of the Spanish State Research Agency under the project TIN2017-84094-R and co-financed with ERDF. Estefania Serral and Jan Derboven's work has been supported by IMEC funding.Serral, E.; Valderas, P.; Derboven, J. (2020). Kind mobile notifications for healthcare professionals. Health Informatics Journal. 26(3):1516-1537. https://doi.org/10.1177/1460458219884184S15161537263Sasangohar, F., Donmez, B., Trbovich, P., & Easty, A. C. (2012). Not All Interruptions are Created Equal: Positive Interruptions in Healthcare. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 56(1), 824-828. doi:10.1177/1071181312561172McFarlane DC. Interruption of people in human-computer interaction: a general unifying definition of human interruption and taxonomy. Technical report, Office of Naval Research, Arlington VA, 31 December 1997.Ross, D. T., & Schoman, K. E. (1977). Structured Analysis for Requirements Definition. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, SE-3(1), 6-15. doi:10.1109/tse.1977.229899Gulliksen, J., Göransson, B., Boivie, I., Blomkvist, S., Persson, J., & Cajander, Å. (2003). Key principles for user-centred systems design. Behaviour & Information Technology, 22(6), 397-409. doi:10.1080/01449290310001624329Beyer, H. R., & Holtzblatt, K. (1995). Apprenticing with the customer. Communications of the ACM, 38(5), 45-52. doi:10.1145/203356.203365Christel, M. G., & Kang, K. C. (1992). Issues in Requirements Elicitation. doi:10.21236/ada25893

Towards an Interdisciplinary Development of IoT-Enhanced Business Processes

IoT-enhanced Business Processes make use of sensors and actuators to carry out the process tasks and achieve a specific goal. One of the most important difficulties in the development of IoT-enhanced BPs is the interdisciplinarity that is demanded by this type of project. Defining an interdisciplinary tool-supported development approach that facilitates the collaboration of different professionals, with a special focus on three main facets: business process requirements, interoperability between IoT devices and BPs, and low-level data processing. The study followed a Design Science Research methodology for information systems that consists of a 6-step process: (1) problem identification and motivation; (2) define the objectives for a solution; (3) design and development; (4) demonstration; (5) evaluation; and (6) communication. The paper presents an interdisciplinary development process to support the creation of IoT-enhanced BPs by applying the Separation of Concerns principle. A collaborative development environment is built to provide each professional with the tools required to accomplish her/his development responsibilities. The approach is successfully validated through a case-study evaluation. The evaluation allows to conclude that the proposed development process and the supporting development environment are effective to face the interdisciplinary nature of IoT-enhanced BPs

Supporting a Hybrid Composition of Microservices. The EUCalipTool Platform

[EN] To provide complex and elaborated functionalities, Microservices may cooperate with each other either by following a centralized (orchestration) or decentralized (choreography) approach. It seems that the decentralized nature of microservices makes the choreography approach more appropriate to achieve such cooperation, where lighter solutions based on events and message queues are used. However, orchestration through the usage of a process model facilitates the analysis of the composition when this is modified. To benefit from the goodness of these two approaches, this paper presents a hybrid solution based on the choreography of business process pieces that are obtained from a previously defined description of the complete microservice composition. To support this solution, the EUCalipTool platform is presented.This work has been developed with the financial support of the Spanish State Research Agency under the project TIN2017-84094-R and co-financed with ERDF.Valderas, P.; Torres Bosch, MV.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2020). Supporting a Hybrid Composition of Microservices. The EUCalipTool Platform. Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development. 8(1):1-14. https://doi.org/10.5753/jserd.2020.457S1148

A requirements engineering approach for the development of web applications

Uno de los problemas más importantes que se propuso solucionar cuando apareció la Ingeniería Web fue la carencia de técnicas para la especificación de requisitos de aplicaciones Web. Aunque se han presentado diversas propuestas que proporcionan soporte metodológico al desarrollo de aplicaciones Web, la mayoría de ellas se centran básicamente en definir modelos conceptuales que permiten representar de forma abstracta una aplicación Web; las actividades relacionadas con la especificación de requisitos son vagamente tratadas por estas propuestas. Además, las técnicas tradicionales para la especificación de requisitos no proporcionan un soporte adecuado para considerar características propias de las aplicaciones Web como la Navegación. En esta tesis, se presenta una aproximación de Ingeniería de Requisitos para especificar los requisitos de las aplicaciones Web. Esta aproximación incluye mecanismos basados en la metáfora de tarea para especificar no sólo los requisitos relacionados con aspectos estructurales y de comportamiento de una aplicación Web sino también los requisitos relacionados con aspectos navegacionales. Sin embargo, una especificación de requisitos es poco útil si no somos capaces de transformarla en los artefactos software adecuados. Este es un problema clásico que la comunidad de Ingeniería del Software ha tratado de resolver desde sus inicios: cómo pasar del espacio del problema (requisitos de usuario) al espacio de la solución (diseño e implementación) siguiendo una guía metodológica clara y precisa. En esta tesis, se presenta una estrategia que, basándose en transformaciones de grafos, y estando soportada por un conjunto de herramientas, nos permite realizar de forma automática transformaciones entre especificaciones de requisitos basadas en tareas y esquemas conceptuales Web. Además, esta estrategia se ha integrado con un método de Ingeniería Web con capacidades de generación automática de código. Esta integración nos permite proporcionar un mecanisValderas Aranda, PJ. (2008). A requirements engineering approach for the development of web applications [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/1997Palanci

A social network for supporting end-users in the composition of services: definition and proof of concept

[EN] Nowadays, end users are surrounded by plenty of services that are somehow supporting their daily routines and activities. Involving end users into the process of service creation can allow end users to benefit from a cheaper, faster, and better service provisioning. Even though we can already find tools that face this challenge, they consider end users as isolate individuals. In this paper, we investigate how social networks can be used to improve the composition of services by end users. To do so, we propose a graph-based definition of a social structure, and analyse how social connections can be exploited to both facilitate end users to discover services through browsing these connections, and recommend services to end users during the composition activity. As proof of concept, we implement and evaluate the proposed social network in the context of EUCalipTool, a mobile end-user environment for composing services.This work has been developed with the financial support of the Spanish State Research Agency under the Project TIN2017-84094-R and co-financed with ERDF.Valderas, P.; Torres Bosch, MV.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2020). A social network for supporting end-users in the composition of services: definition and proof of concept. Computing. 102(8):1909-1940. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-020-00796-8S190919401028Yu J, Sheng QZ, Han J, Wu Y, Liu C (2012) A semantically enhanced service repository for user-centric service discovery and management. Data Knowl Eng 72:202–218Daniel F, Casati F, Benatallah B, Shan M-C (2009) Hosted universal composition: models, languages and infrastructure in mashart. In: International conference on conceptual modeling. 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Context-Adaptive Coordination of Pervasive Services by Interpreting Models during Runtime

[EN] One of the most important goals of pervasive systems is to help users in their daily life by automating their behaviour patterns. To achieve this, pervasive services must be dynamically coordinated, executed and adapted to context according to user behaviour patterns. In this work, we propose a model-driven solution to meet this challenge. We propose a task model and a context ontology to design context-adaptive coordination of services at a high level of abstraction. This design facilitates the coordination analysis at design time and is also reused at runtime. We propose a software architecture that interprets the models at runtime in order to coordinate the service execution that is required to support user behaviour patterns. This coordination is done in a context-adaptive way and decoupled from service implementation. This approach makes the models the only representation of service coordination, which facilitates the maintenance and evolution of the executed service coordination after deployment.This work has been developed with the support of (a) MICINN under the project EVERYWARE TIN2010-18011 and (b) MITYC under the project LIFEWEAR TSI-020400-2010-100 co-funded with ERDF.Serral Asensio, E.; Valderas Aranda, PJ.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2013). Context-Adaptive Coordination of Pervasive Services by Interpreting Models during Runtime. Computer Journal. 56(1):87-114. https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxs019S8711456

A Catalogue of Adaptation Rules to Support Local Changes in Microservice Compositions Implemented as Choreographies of BPMN Fragments

Microservices need to be composed in order to provide their customers with valuable services. To do so, event-based choreographies are used many times since they help to maintain a lower coupling among microservices. In previous works, we presented an approach that proposed creating the big picture of the composition in a BPMN model, splitting it into BPMN fragments and distributing these fragments among microservices. In this way, we implemented a microservice composition as an event-based choreography of BPMN fragments. Based on this approach, this work focuses on supporting the evolution of a microservice composition. We pay special attention to how a microservice composition can be evolved from the local perspective of a microservice since changes performed locally can affect the communication among microservices and as a result the integrity of the whole composition. In particular, we present a catalogue of compensation rules that characterize all the local changes that can be done in an event-based communication element of a BPMN fragment. We also analyse the generated inconsistencies and propose the required actions to adapt the affected participants and guarantee a functional composition.Ortiz Amaya, J.; Torres Bosch, MV.; Valderas Aranda, PJ. (2022). A Catalogue of Adaptation Rules to Support Local Changes in Microservice Compositions Implemented as Choreographies of BPMN Fragments. Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/18155

A Domain Specific Language for Enabling Doctors to Specify Biomechanical Protocols

“©2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.New technologies are entering medical practice at an astounding pace. However, these technologies often cause to doctors learn and use difficulties. Then, doctors require assistance of a biomedical engineer. This is currently happening in a local hospital that has new technology to analyze biomechanical protocols in patients. Protocols are used to measure performances and identify changes in human body movements and muscles. Doctors are neither familiar with the concepts nor tools used, so biomedical engineers carry out descriptions of protocols rather than doctors. In this paper, we present the design of a domainspecific language that enables doctors to specify biomechanical protocols by addressing learning barriers (using design patterns). We also make doctors’ descriptions compatible with the existing tools, and we also support legacy biomedical descriptions (combining meta-modeling and model transformations).This work has been developed with the support of Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN) under the project EVERYWARE TIN2010-18011 and cofinanced with European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).Pérez Pérez, MF.; Valderas Aranda, PJ.; Fons Cors, JJ. (2013). A Domain Specific Language for Enabling Doctors to Specify Biomechanical Protocols. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/VLHCC.2013.6645251