Facing uncertainty in web service compositions

© 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[EN] Web service compositions run in complex computing infrastructures where arising events may affect the quality of the system. However, crucial Web service compositions cannot be stopped to apply changes to deal with problematic events. Therefore, the trend is moving towards context-aware Web service compositions, which use context information as a basis for autonomic changes. Under the closed-world assumption, the context and possible adaptations are fully known at design time. Nevertheless, it is difficult to foresee all the possible situations arising in uncertain contexts. In this paper, we leverage models at runtime to guide the dynamic evolution of context-aware Web service compositions to deal with unexpected events in the open world. In order to manage uncertainty, a model that abstracts the Web service composition, self-evolves to preserve requirements. The evolved model guides changes in the underlying WS-BPEL composition schema. A prototype and an evaluation demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.This work has been developed with the support of MICINN under the project everyWare TIN2010-18011 and co-financed with ERDF.Alférez, GH.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2013). Facing uncertainty in web service compositions. En Web Services (ICWS), 2013 IEEE 20th International Conference on. IEEE Computer Society. 219-226. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICWS.2013.38S21922

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 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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Software Knowledge Representation to Understand Software Systems

A software development process involves numerous persons, including customers, domain experts, software engineers, managers, evaluators and certifiers. Together, they produce some software that satisfies its requirements and its quality criteria at a certain point in time. This software contains faults and flaws of different levels of severity and at different phases of its production (specification, design, etc.) so maintenance is needed in order to correct it. Perfective and adaptive maintenance is also needed to cope with changes in the environment or with new requirements, e.g. new functionalities. In this work, we introduce the Persistent Knowledge Monitor (PKM), which is being developed within the DECODER H2020 project for handling (i.e. storing, retrieving, merging and checking for consistency) all kinds of knowledge and information related to a software project. The PKM will be part of a platform capable of taking advantage of all the artefacts available in a software ecosystem, not only the source code, but also its version control system, abstract specifications, informal documents or reports, etc. for representing the software knowledge and improving the workflow of software developers.This work has been developed with the financial support of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 824231 and the Spanish State Research Agency under the project TIN2017-84094-R and co-financed with ERDF.Torres Bosch, MV.; Gil Pascual, M.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2019). Software Knowledge Representation to Understand Software Systems. Springer. 137-144. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35333-9_10S13714

Developing BP-driven web application through the use of MDE techniques

Model driven engineering (MDE) is a suitable approach for performing the construction of software systems (in particular in the Web application domain). There are different types of Web applications depending on their purpose (i.e., document-centric, interactive, transactional, workflow/business process-based, collaborative, etc). This work focusses on business process-based Web applications in order to be able to understand business processes in a broad sense, from the lightweight business processes already addressed by existing proposals to long-running asynchronous processes. This work presents a MDE method for the construction of systems of this type. The method has been designed in two steps following the MDE principles. In the first step, the system is represented by means of models in a technology-independent manner. These models capture the different aspects of Web-based systems (these aspects refer to behaviour, structure, navigation, and presentation issues). In the second step, the model transformations (both model-to- model and model-to-text) are applied in order to obtain the final system in terms of a specific technology. In addition, a set ofEclipse-based tools has been developed to provide automation in the application of the proposed method in order to validate the proposal.Torres Bosch, MV.; Giner Blasco, P.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2012). Developing BP-driven web application through the use of MDE techniques. Software and Systems Modeling. 11(4):609-631. doi:10.1007/s10270-010-0177-5S609631114Andrews, T., Curbera, F., Dholakia, H., Goland, Y., Klein, J., Leymann, F., Liu, K., Roller, D., Smith, D., Thatte, S., Trickovic, I., Weerawarana, S.: Business process execution language for Web services version 1.1 (May 2003)Barna, P., Frasincar, F., Houben, G.J.: A workow-driven design of Web information systems. In: Wolber, D., Calder, N., Brooks, C., Ginige, A. (eds.) ICWE, ACM, pp. 321–328Bakshi, K., Karger, D.R.: Semantic Web applications. In: Proceedings of the ISWC 2005 Workshop on End User Semantic Web Interaction (November 2005)Brambilla M., Ceri S., Fraternali P., Manolescu I.: Process modeling in Web applications. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 15(4), 360–409 (2006)Brambilla, M., Preciado, J.C., Trigueros, M.L., Sánchez-Figueroa F.: Business process-based conceptual design of rich internet applications. In: ICWE, pp. 155–161 (2008)Brambilla, M., Butti, S., Fraternali, P.: Webratio bpm: a tool for designing and deploying business processes on the Web. In: ICWE, pp. 415–429 (2010)Business process modeling notation (BPMN). OMG final adopted specification. dtc/06-02-01 (February 2006)Ceri, S., Fraternali, P., Bongio, A.: Web modeling language (Webml): a modeling language for designing Web sites. 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Ph.D. thesis, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (2008)Fons, J., Pelechano, V., Pastor, O., Valderas, P., Torres, V.: Applying the OOWS model-driven approach for developing web applications. The internet movie database case study. In: Web Engineering: Modelling and Implementing Web Applications. Human–Computer Interaction Series, pp. 65–108. Springer, London (2008)Fowler, M.: Inversion of control containers and the dependency injection pattern. http://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html (January 2004)Gershenfeld N., Krikorian R., Cohen D.: The internet of things. Sci Am 291(4), 76–81 (2004)Giner P., Cetina C., Fons J., Pelechano V.: Developing mobile business processes for the internet of things. IEEE Pervasive Comput. 9, 18–26 (2010)Gómez J., Cachero C., Pastor O.: Extending a conceptual modelling approach to Web application design. In: Wangler, B., Bergman, L. (eds) CAiSE. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1789, pp. 79–93. 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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

DECODER - DEveloper COmpanion for Documented and annotatEd code Reference

Software is everywhere and the productivity of Software Engineers has increased radically with the advent of new specifications, design and programming paradigms and languages. The main objective of the DECODER project is to introduce radical solutions to increase productivity by increasing the abstraction level, at specification stage, using requirements engineering techniques to integrate more complete specifications into the development process, and formal methods to reduce the time and efforts for integration testing. DECODER project will develop a methodology and tools to improve the productivity of the software development process for medium-criticality applications in the domains of IoT, Cloud Computing, and Operating Systems by combining Natural Language Processing techniques, modelling techniques and Formal Methods. A radical improvement is expected from the management and transformation of informal data into material (herein called knowledge ) that can be assimilated by any party involved in a development process. The project expects an average benefit of 20% in terms of efforts on several use cases belonging to the beforehand mentioned domains and will provide recommendations on how to generalize the approach to other medium-critical domains.This work has been developed with the financial support of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 824231 and the Spanish State Research Agency under the project TIN2017-84094-R and co-financed with ERDF.Torres Bosch, MV.; Gil Pascual, M.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2019). DECODER - DEveloper COmpanion for Documented and annotatEd code Reference. Springer. 596-601. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35333-9_44S59660

Modeling and "smart" prototyping human-in-the-loop interactions for AmI environments

[EN] Autonomous capabilities are required in AmI environments in order to adapt systems to new environmental conditions and situations. However, keeping the human in the loop and in control of such systems is still necessary because of the diversity of systems, domains, environments, context situations, and social and legal constraints, which makes full autonomy a utopia within the short or medium term. Human-system integration introduces an important number of challenges and problems that have to be solved. On the one hand, humans should interact with systems even in those situations where their attentional, cognitive, and physical resources are limited in order to perform the interaction. On the other hand, systems must avoid overwhelming the user with unnecessary actions. Therefore, appropriate user-centered methods for AmI development should be used to help designers analyze and design human-in-the-loop interactions in AmI environments. This paper presents a user-centered design method that defines a process with a set of tools and techniques that supports the process steps in order to systematically design, prototype, and validate human-in-the-loop (HiL) solutions. The process starts with the definition of the HiL design, which defines how the system cooperates with the human. This HiL design is built using a conceptual framework that focuses on achieving human-system interactions that get human attention and avoid obtrusiveness. Then, we provide a software infrastructure to generate a prototype based on the HiL design and validate it by having end-users use a web simulator. The feedback data generated during the prototype user validation is gathered and used by a machine learning tool that infers the user's needs and preferences. Finally, these inferences are used to automatically enhance the human-in-the-loop designs and prototypes. We have validated the proposed method through a twofold perspective: an experiment to analyze the perception of interaction designers regarding their acceptance of the design method and another experiment to evaluate the usefulness of the "smart" prototyping technique. The results obtained point out the acceptability of the proposed method by designers and the useful adaptations provided by the "smart" prototyping technique to achieve a HiL design that adapts well to users' preferences and needs.This work has been developed with the financial support of the Spanish State Research Agency and the Generalitat Valenciana under the projects TIN2017-84094-R and AICO/2019/009 and co-financed with ERDF.Gil, M.; Albert Albiol, M.; Fons Cors, J.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2022). Modeling and "smart" prototyping human-in-the-loop interactions for AmI environments. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. 26:1413-1444. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-020-01508-x141314442

Generating operation specifications from UML class diagrams: A model transformation approach

One of the more tedious and complex tasks during the specification of conceptual schemas (CSs) is modeling the operations that define the system behavior. This paper aims to simplify this task by providing a method that automatically generates a set of basic operations that complement the static aspects of the CS and suffice to perform all typical life-cycle create/update/delete changes on the population of the elements of the CS. Our method guarantees that the generated operations are executable, i.e. their executions produce a consistent state wrt the most typical structural constraints that can be defined in CSs (e.g. multiplicity constraints). In particular, our method takes as input a CS expressed as a Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagram (optionally defined using a profile to enrich the specification of associations) and generates an extended version of the CS that includes all necessary operations to start operating the system. If desired, these basic operations can be later used as building blocks for creating more complex ones. We show the formalization and implementation of our method by means of model-to-model transformations. Our approach is particularly relevant in the context of Model Driven Development approaches. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.The authors want to thank the anonymous referees of this journal for their interesting suggestions. This work has been partly supported by the MICINN under projects TIN2008-00444, Grupo Consolidado and TIN2010-18011, and by the Generalitat Valenciana under the project OKA PROMETEO/2009/015, and co-financed with the European Regional Development Fund.Albert Albiol, M.; Cabot Sagrera, J.; Gómez Seoane, C.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2011). Generating operation specifications from UML class diagrams: A model transformation approach. Data and Knowledge Engineering. 70(4):365-389. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2011.01.003S36538970

Dynamic adaptation of service compositions with variability models

Web services run in complex contexts where arising events may compromise the quality of the whole system. Thus, it is desirable to count on autonomic mechanisms to guide the self-adaptation of service compositions according to changes in the computing infrastructure. One way to achieve this goal is by implementing variability constructs at the language level. However, this approach may become tedious, difficult to manage, and error-prone. In this paper, we propose a solution based on a semantically rich variability model to support the dynamic adaptation of service compositions. When a problematic event arises in the context, this model is leveraged for decision-making. The activation and deactivation of features in the variability model result in changes in a composition model that abstracts the underlying service composition. These changes are reflected into the service composition by adding or removing fragments of Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) code, which can be deployed at runtime. In order to reach optimum adaptations, the variability model and its possible configurations are verified at design time using Constraint Programming. An evaluation demonstrates several benefits of our approach, both at design time and at runtime.This work has been developed with the support of MICINN under the project everyWare TIN2010-18011 and co-financed with ERDF.Alférez Salinas, GH.; Pelechano Ferragud, V.; Mazo, R.; Salinesi, C.; Díaz, D. (2014). Dynamic adaptation of service compositions with variability models. Journal of Systems and Software. 91:24-47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2013.06.034S24479