Model-driven process enactment for NFV systems with MAPLE

Abstract

The network functions virtualization (NFV) advent is making way for the rapid deployment of network services (NS) for telecoms. Automation of network service management is one of the main challenges currently faced by the NFV community. Explicitly defining a process for the design, deployment, and management of network services and automating it is therefore highly desirable and beneficial for NFV systems. The use of model-driven orchestration means has been advocated in this context. As part of this effort to support automated process execution, we propose a process enactment approach with NFV systems as the target application domain. Our process enactment approach is megamodel-based. An integrated process modelling and enactment environment, MAPLE, has been built into Papyrus for this purpose. Process modelling is carried out with UML activity diagrams. The enactment environment transforms the process model to a model transformation chain, and then orchestrates it with the use of megamodels. In this paper, we present our approach and environment MAPLE, its recent extension with new features as well as application to an enriched case study consisting of NS design and onboarding process.