A Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approach for Cloud-Fog Coordination

© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. This paper presents a multi-criteria cloud-fog coordination model to recommend where data that things generate should be sent (either cloud, fog, or cloud & fog concurrently) and in what order (either cloud then fog, fog then cloud, or fog & cloud concurrently). The model considers end-users’ concerns such as data latency, sensitivity, and freshness. The coordination model uses fuzzy logic when addressing these concerns in preparation for producing the recommendations. For validation purposes, a healthcare-driven IoT application along with an in-house testbed, that features real sensors and fog and cloud platforms, have permitted to carry out different experiments that demonstrate the technical feasibility of both the multi-criteria cloud-fog coordination model and the fuzzy-logic-based approach

A Guiding Framework for IoT Servitization

This paper discusses the necessary steps and mechanisms that would allow servitizing the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Servitization exposes functionalities as services allowing potential users to consume these functionalities regardless of the development technologies. To ensure successful use of IoT functionalities, restrictions that hinder this use are identified and then, addressed from a servitization perspective. These restrictions are referred to as no-semantics, silo, and no-reasoning with focus on the first restriction in this paper. Customer-Facilitator-Provider interaction model is developed in the paper allowing to define who does what in the context of IoT servitization

On the Use of Allen’s Interval Algebra in the Coordination of Resource Consumption by Transactional Business Processes

This paper presents an approach to coordinate the consumption of resources by transactional business processes. Resources are associated with consumption properties known as unlimited, limited, limited-but-extensible, shareable, and non-shareable restricting their availabilities at consumption-time. And, processes are associated with transactional properties known as pivot, retriable, and compensatable restricting their execution outcomes in term of either success or failure. To consider the intrinsic characteristics of both consumption properties and transactional properties when coordinating resource consumption by processes, the approach adopts Allen’s interval algebra through different time-interval relations like before, overlaps, and during to set up the coordination, which should lead to a free-of-conflict consumption. A system demonstrating the technical doability of the approach based on a case study about loan application business-process and a real dataset is presented in the paper, as well

Trust-empowered, IoT-driven legitimate data offloading

In an IoT environment deployed on top of fog and/or cloud nodes, offloading data between nodes is a common practice that aims at lessening the burden on these nodes and hence, meeting some real-time processing requirements. Existing initiatives put emphasis on “when to offload” and “where to offload” using criteria like resource constraint, load balancing, and data safety during transfer. However, there is limited emphasis on the trustworthiness of those nodes that will accept the offloaded data putting these data at risk of misuse. To address this limited emphasis, this paper advocates for trust as a decision criterion for identifying the appropriate nodes for hosting the offloaded data. A trust model is designed and then, developed considering factors like legitimacy, quality-of-service, and quality-of-experience. A system demonstrating the technical doability of the trust model is presented in the paper, as well

Social Business Process Modeling

Capitalizing on Web 2.0 to improve communication and knowledge sharing among stakeholders, a new form of business processes (BP), called social business processes (SBP), has emerged. This chapter provides a social business process meta-model called SBP2M that enriches an existing business process meta-model with social aspect. It also proposes a domain-specific language (DSL) for SBP modeling. This DSL is defined based on SBP2M and developed as an extension of the standard BPMN notation. The proposed DSL is simple and yet generic thanks to the reduced number of extensions and its ability to model SBP regardless of the used Web 2.0 technology. To show the applicability of the proposed notation, the authors have implemented it within the BPMN2 modeler editor

Enhancing business processes with web 2.0 features

Web 2.0 aims to support human interactions and content creation by combining information from different contributors. It can enhance business processes by improving communication, collaboration and exchange of knowledge between various participants. These benefits led to the emergence of a new form of business processes called Social Business Process (SBP). This paper provides for SBP modelling by proposing a domain-specific language (DSL) based on an extension of the standard BPMN notation to model social elements within an SBP. It is simple and yet generic thanks to the reduced number of extensions and its ability to model SBP regardless of the used Web 2.0 technology. To show the applicability of the proposed notation, we have implemented it within the BPMN2 modeller editor

A fuzzy logic-based approach for assessing the quality of business process models

Copyright © 2017 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved. Similar to software products, the quality of a Business Process model is vital to the success of all the phases of its lifecycle. Indeed, a high quality BP model paves the way to the successful implementation, execution and performance of the business process. In the literature, the quality of a BP model has been assessed through either the application of formal verification, or most often the evaluation of quality metrics calculated in the static and/or simulated model. Each of these assessment means addresses different quality characteristics and meets particular analysis needs. In this paper, we adopt metrics-based assessment to evaluate the quality of business process models, modeled with Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN), in terms of their comprehensibility and modifiability. We propose a fuzzy logic-based approach that uses existing quality metrics for assessing the attainment level of these two quality characteristics. By analyzing the static model, the proposed approach is easy and fast to apply. In addition, it overcomes the threshold determination problem by mining a repository of BPMN models. Furthermore, by relying on fuzzy logic, it resembles human reasoning during the evaluation of the quality of business process models. We illustrate the approach through a case study and its tool support system developed under the eclipse framework. The preliminary experimental evaluation of the proposed system shows encouraging results

Social Business Process Modeling

Capitalizing on Web 2.0 to improve communication and knowledge sharing among stakeholders, a new form of Business Processes (BP), called Social Business Processes (SBP), has emerged. This chapter provides a social business process meta-model called SBP2M that enriches an existing business process meta-model with social aspect. It also proposes a domain specific language (DSL) for SBP modeling. This DSL is defined based on SBP2M and developed as an extension of the standard BPMN notation. The proposed DSL is simple and yet generic thanks to the reduced number of extensions and its ability to model SBP regardless of the used Web 2.0 technology. To show the applicability of the proposed notation, we have implemented it within the BPMN2 modeler editor

Towards a meta-modeling approach for social business process requirements capture

© 2016 ACM. A Social Business Process (SBP) is the result of blending so-cial computing (a.k.a. Web 2.0) with business process (BP). Despite the benefits of SBP to enterprises, several limita-tions continue to undermine them. In this paper, we ad-dress two specific limitations, namely the difficulty of cap-turing SBP\u27s requirements and the lack of a definition for SBP. Thus, meta-modeling is used to capture requirements from organizational, technological, and management per-spectives. In addition, we introduce a definition for SBP by enriching an existing BP meta-model with social con-cepts. To annotate the SBP model with its requirements, a BPMN extension is proposed. The proposed meta-models are evaluated in terms of completeness and clarity using the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology

A Fuzzy-Based Approach for Identifying Candidate Business Processes for Socialization

© 2019 World Scientific Publishing Company. Social business processes support enterprises tap into the opportunities of Web 2.0. To ensure an efficient support, this paper presents an approach for identifying an enterprise\u27s business processes that could be converted into social. Indeed, not all processes are eligible for this conversion. The approach is built upon the concept of enterprise architecture that sheds the light on the necessary contextual elements for guiding the socialization of business processes. Due to the fuzzy nature of socialization, two multi-criteria decision making techniques, fuzzy logic and fuzzy-decision tree, enhance this guidance. A set of experiments for evaluating the proposed approach are presented in the paper, as well