Cooperation Patterns and Adaptation Patterns for Service-Based Inter-Organizational Workflows

International audienceModernization is an effective approach to making existing mainframe and distributed systems more responsive to business needs. SOA (service-oriented architecture) is an adequate paradigm that allows companies to tap into the business value in their current systems and position IT for rapid future changes to the business model. In our research works, we focus on the use of SOA to implement Inter- Organizational WorkFlows (IOWF). The goal is to take benefits from the advantages offered by the SOA paradigm like interoperability, reusability and flexibility in order to deal with workflow models easily adaptable, evolvable and reusable. This paper focuses on two specific architectures of IOWF which are the "chained execution" and the "subcontracting"; the first issue of this work is to define Service-Based Cooperation Patterns (SBCP) suitable to the two architectures considered. A SBCP is based on SOA; it is defined through three main dimensions: the distribution of services among the partner's sites, the control of instance execution and the structure of interaction between the workflows involved in the cooperation. The second issue of the paper consists of adaptation and evolution of IOWF process models obeying to the defined SBCP. Then, we state the main operations of adaptation that can be applied on these models; we focus on adaptation at process and interactional levels. Conformably to the three dimensions of SBCP, we define three classes of adaptation patterns: "service adaptation", "control flow adaptation" and "interaction adaptation" patterns. Also, we particularly distinguish some operations of adaptation called evolution of process models based on two perspectives: the expansion of the global functionality of the process and the expansion of the cooperation; we show that some evolutions are realized by reuse of existing IOWF models. For implementation, we consider IOWF process models specified with BPEL

Flexible Loosely Coupled Inter-Organizational Workflows using SOA

8International audienceService Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm that provides important properties for the development of business applications like flexibility and loose coupling. In our research work, we focus on the use of SOA to implement specific architectures of inter-organizational workflows (IOWF). The current paper deals with the "Loosely Coupled Workflow" specifying an IOWF-architecture that connects two or more workflows -attached to a set of business partners- communicating in an asynchronous manner according to a public communication protocol conjointly defined by all partners. The first issue of this work is to define a service based cooperation pattern called LC-IOWF pattern suitable to the architecture considered in order to obtain IOWF models flexible enough to ease their adaptation. The proposed LC-IOWF pattern is based on three main dimensions: services, control of execution and interactions. Then, we define three categories of adaptation patterns corresponding to the three dimensions exhibited. Particularly, the third category of these patterns called "Interaction adaptation patterns" concerns adaptations affecting the communication protocol and constitutes a specific type of adaptation compared with other IOWF-architectures. For implementation, we consider IOWF models specified with BPEL

A Semi-Automated Approach for the Co-Refinement of Requirements and Architecture Models

Requirements and architecture specifications are strongly related as the second provides a solution to a problem stated by the first. This coupling is typically realized by traceability links and maintaining such links becomes extremely difficult as both requirements and architecture specifications frequently evolve, and in particular when the architecture is refined providing an increasing level of details. In such case, not only the traceability must evolve but the requirements must be refined as well. We present a novel semi-automated approach to evolve non-functional requirements and their traceability links following system's architecture refinement in the context of design space exploration and automated code generation. The approach has been prototyped for AADL models refined with the RAMSES tool and for model transformations implemented as Story Diagrams

GENOME : un Modèle pour la Simulation d’Émergence de Structures d’Objets

We propose the GENOME evolution model based on the dynamic evolution of objects structure. Within complex and bulky engineering applications, we want to allow a designer to face unpredicted and badly specified evolution needs. As we consider object evolution as an iterative and adaptive process between classes and objects, our objective is to search and extract several ways of evolution of conceptual structures from the dynamic evolution of objects in their structure. For that, GENOME allows the designer to express directly his new needs on the concerned objects. Then, it explores to find several ways of evolution, in order to achieve the adaptation to these new needs. The exploration is done through the simulation of these evolution ways. The adaptation is done through the emergence of new conceptual structures. These lasts are well-adapted and more complete, and they emerge from the expression of the needs and existing information within the database.This simulation of evolution is done within Evolutionary Processes. Each process can lead to two situations: Development processes which represent classes extension by creating or modifying objects, or by migration of objects; Emergence processes which represent emergence of new properties or/and new conceptual structures. These processes can lead to local emergence of new properties within existing classes, or to global emergence of new conceptual structures from the evolved objects, or by crossing existing conceptual structures thanks to the proposed crossing-over mechanism. In order to control the emergence, we define some object metrics of intra-structure context and inter-structures context. Their use permit to find the most coherent, the most significant emergent structure and which well respond to the designer invariants.Nous proposons le modèle d’évolution GENOME basé sur l’évolution dynamique de structure d’objets. Dans le cadre d’applications d’ingénieries complexes et volumineuses, nous voulons permettre à un concepteur de faire face à des besoins d’évolution imprévus ou mal spécifiés. Comme nous considérons l’évolution comme un processus interactif et itératif d’adaptation entre classes et objets, l’objectif est de rechercher et de dégager diverses voies d’évolution des structures conceptuelles à partir de l’évolution dynamique de la structure d’objets. Pour cela, GENOME permet au concepteur d’exprimer directement les nouveaux besoins sur les objets concernés. Ensuite, il recherche diverses voies possibles d’évolution pour permettre l’adaptation aux besoins. La recherche passe par la simulation de plusieurs voies d’évolution. L’adaptation passe par l’émergence de nouvelles structures conceptuelles. Celles-ci sont mieux adaptées et plus complètes, et émergent en tirant profit de l’expression des besoins ponctuels et des informations présentes dans la base. Cette simulation d’évolution se fait au travers de processus d’évolution. Tout processus peut aboutir à deux situations : les processus de développement qui représentent toute extension de classes existantes par création, modification ou migration d’instances ; les processus d’émergence qui représentent toute émergence de nouvelles propriétés et/ou structures conceptuelles. Ces derniers peuvent être de l’émergence locale de nouvelles propriétés au sein de classes existantes, ou de l’émergence globale d’une nouvelle structure conceptuelle à partir de l’objet ayant évolué, ou en croisant plusieurs structures conceptuelles grâce au mécanisme de croisement proposé. Pour contrôler l’émergence, nous définissons des métriques objets de contextes intra-structure et inter-structures. Leur utilisation permet de trouver la structure émergente la plus cohérente, la plus significative et qui répond au mieux aux invariants du concepteur

Business-IT Alignment Anti-Patterns: A Thought from an Empirical Point of View

This preliminary work aims to formalizes observed recurring bad business-IT alignment scenarios. This observation has been conducted subsequently to a 6-years empirical experience of audits of about thirty companies. It considers two research questions: 1) are there recuring BITA problems independently of the business domains? 2) how to formalize them? 14 BITA anti-patterns have been identified. A visual representation and an identity card are proposed to formalize them and illustrated on the 4 most encountered BITA antipatterns. A first milestone is thus proposed towards a common base of BITA anti-patterns and open the discussion with BITA experts among researchers and practitioners, to pooling our efforts and identify research tracks. In fact, BITA is steel a crucial challenge for companies to have a good alignment between business and software. Moreover, handling misalignments is becoming much more sensitive for companies to move towards adoption of new digital capabilities in Digital Transformation challenges

Recommendation patterns for business process imperative modeling

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Introduction to the Special Theme on Models and Evolution.

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From Monolith to Microservices: Lessons Learned on an Industrial Migration to a Web Oriented Architecture

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