Distributed Business Processes Research Articles

Interoperability Is a Process - The Data Sharing Framework.

Common syntax and data semantics are core components of healthcare interoperability standards. However, interoperable data exchange processes are also needed to enable the integration of existing systems between organizations. While solutions for healthcare delivery processes are available and have been widely adopted, support for processes targeting bio-medical research is limited. Our Data Sharing Framework creates a platform to implement research processes like cohort size estimation, reviews and approvals of research proposals, consent checks, record linkage, pseudonymization and data sharing across organizations. The described framework implements a distributed business process engine for executing BPMN 2.0 processes with synchronization and data exchange using FHIR R4 resources. Our reference implementation has been rolled out to 38 organizations across three research consortia in Germany and is available as open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

BP-DEBUG: A Fault Debugging and Resolution Tool for Business Processes.

Cloud computing and Internet-ware software paradigm have enabled rapid development of distributed business process (BP) applications. Several tools are available to facilitate automated/ semi-automated development and deployment of such distributed BPs by orchestrating relevant service components in a plug-and-play fashion. However, the BPs developed using such tools are not guaranteed to be fault-free. In this demonstration, we present a tool called BP-DEBUG for debugging and automated repair of faulty BPs. BP-DEBUG implements our Collaborative Fault Resolution (CFR) approach that utilizes the knowledge of existing BPs with a similar set of web services fault detection and resolution in a given user BP. Essentially, CFR attempts to determine any semantic and structural differences between a faulty BP and related BPs and computes a minimum set of transformations which can be used to repair the faulty BP. Demo url: https://youtu.be/mf49oSekLOA.

An Integrated Framework for Fault Resolution in Business Processes.

Cloud and edge-computing based platforms have enabled rapid development of distributed business process (BP) applications in a plug and play manner. However, these platforms do not provide the needed capabilities for identifying or repairing faults in BPs. Faults in BP may occur due to errors made by BP designers because of their lack of understanding of the underlying component services, misconfiguration of these services, or incorrect/incomplete BP workflow specifications. Such faults may not be discovered at design or development stage and may occur at runtime. In this paper, we present a unified framework for automated fault resolution in BPs. The proposed framework employs a novel and efficient fault resolution approach that extends the generate-and-validate program repair approach. In addition, we propose a hybrid approach that performs fault resolution by analyzing a faulty BP in isolation as well as by comparing with other BPs using similar services. This hybrid approach results in improved accuracy and broader coverage of fault types. We also perform an extensive experimental evaluation to compare the effectiveness of the proposed approach using a dataset of 208 faulty BPs.

Distributed Business Process Discovery in Cloud Clusters

The processing of big data across different axes is becoming more and more difficult and the introduction of the Hadoop MapReduce framework seems to be a solution to this problem. With this framework, large amounts of data can be analyzed and processed. It does this by distributing computing tasks between a group of virtual servers operating in the cloud or a large group of devices. The mining process forms an important bridge between data mining and business process analysis. Its techniques make it possible to extract information from event reports. The extraction process generally consists of two phases: identification or discovery and innovation or education. Our first task is to extract small patterns from the log effects. These templates represent the implementation of the tracking from a business process report file. In this step we use the available technologies. Patterns are represented by finite state automation or regular expressions. And the final model is a combination of just two different styles.

Засоби забезпечення та засвідчення якості контекстно-залежної композиції семантичних веб-сервісів

Author’s Method for Adaptive Semantic Web Service dynamic composition is enriched with the algorithms for both its Context dedicated OWL-S-specification consistent using over its Life Cycle and Cyclic Dependencies at the function level solving with the Formalisms proposed of Knot-service, Proxy-service and Simplification – for sustain Quality implementing of Web Service being formed. Quality assurance for stakeholders is proposed through dynamic verification, in particular meeting the specified context and liveness, with the process Calculus of Context-aware Ambients. The algorithms proposed increase correspondence of Web Service being formed with Customers’ expectations and enable its sustain context-aware tailoring for unified support of both modern organizations’ variable and distributed Business Processes and some problem field Customers’ needs.

Executing Distributed Healthcare and Research Processes - The HiGHmed Data Sharing Framework.

Several standards and frameworks have been described in existing literature and technical manuals that contribute to solving the interoperability problem. Their data models usually focus on clinical data and only support healthcare delivery processes. Research processes including cross organizational cohort size estimation, approvals and reviews of research proposals, consent checks, record linkage and pseudonymization need to be supported within the HiGHmed medical informatics consortium. The open source HiGHmed Data Sharing Framework implements a distributed business process engine for executing arbitrary biomedical research and healthcare processes modeled and executed using BPMN 2.0 while exchanging information using FHIR R4 resources. The proposed reference implementation is currently being rolled out to eight university hospitals in Germany as well as a trusted third party and available open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

МОДЕЛЬ ІЄРАРХІЇ КРИТЕРІЇВ ЯКОСТІ ВЕБСЕРВІСІВ

Технології інтернет-сервісів пропонують передові рішення для створення розподілених бізнес-процесів та додатків. У наш час кількість інтернет- сервісів продовжує постійно зростати. Перед споживачами інтернет- сервісів постає проблема вибору із сервісів з однаковою або подібною функціональністю саме того сервісу, який їм найбільше підходить за набором критеріїв, наприклад, вартість, час відгуку, пропускна здатність, безпека, надійність. Такі критерії якості вебсервісів називають нефункціональними характеристиками сервісів або якістю сервісу (Quality of Service, QoS). Залежно від домену та категорій користувачів, а також контексту використання сервісу вебсервіс може мати багато специфічних властивостей та характеристик якості. Є багато стандартів та специфікацій якості вебсервісів. Незважаючи на це, дослідники, розробники та замовники часто по-різному розуміють якість вебсервісів. Вони можуть зменшити або розширити перелік і навіть значення характеристик якості вебсервісів. Метою цієї роботи є розроблення моделі критеріїв якості вебсервісів, яка могла б ураховувати різні аспекти впливу на якість вебсервісів. У цій роботі розглянуто специфікації та стандарти таких організацій, як OASIS, ISO/IEC та OMG. Здійснено пошук інформації у наукометричних базах даних, таких як Scopus та Web of Science. Із розглянутих стандартів та відповідних наукових робіт обрано характеристики якості та критерії для розроблення ієрархічних моделей якості. На основі стандарту метамоделі QoS від Object Management Group запропоновано модель для синтезу колекцій характеристик вебсервісу QoS. У результаті дослідження розроблено модель, засновану на аналізі наявних стандартів, наукових досліджень та оглядів, присвячених вивченню та класифікації характеристик якості та атрибутів якості вебсервісів. Ця модель може бути корисною для вибору вебсервісу з метою безпосереднього застосування, побудови композитних вебсервісів та хмарних сервісів, створення систем на основі сервіс-орієнтованої архітектури та інтернету речей.

Collaborative Business Process Fault Resolution in the Services Cloud.

The emergence of cloud and edge computing has enabled rapid development and deployment of Internet-centric distributed applications. There are many platforms and tools that can facilitate users to develop distributed business process (BP) applications by composing relevant service components in a plug and play manner. However, there is no guarantee that a BP application developed in this way is fault-free. In this paper, we formalize the problem of collaborative BP fault resolution which aims to utilize information from existing fault-free BPs that use similar services to resolve faults in a user developed BP. We present an approach based on association analysis of pairwise transformations between a faulty BP and existing BPs to identify the smallest possible set of transformations to resolve the fault(s) in the user developed BP. An extensive experimental evaluation over both synthetically generated faulty BPs and real BPs developed by users shows the effectiveness of our approach.

Blockchain Based Auditable Access Control for Distributed Business Processes.

The use of blockchain technology has been proposed to provide auditable access control for individual resources. However, when all resources are owned by a single organization, such expensive solutions may not be needed. In this work we focus on distributed applications such as business processes and distributed workflows. These applications are often composed of multiple resources/services that are subject to the security and access control policies of different organizational domains. Here, blockchains can provide an attractive decentralized solution to provide auditability. However, the underlying access control policies may be overlapping in terms of the component conditions/rules, and simply using existing solutions would result in repeated evaluation of user's authorization separately for each resource, leading to significant overhead in terms of cost and computation time over the blockchain. To address this challenge, we propose an approach that formulates a constraint optimization problem to generate an optimal composite access control policy. This policy is in compliance with all the local access control policies and minimizes the policy evaluation cost over the blockchain. The developed smart contract(s) can then be deployed to the blockchain, and used for access control enforcement. We also discuss how the access control enforcement can be audited using a game-theoretic approach to minimize cost. We have implemented the initial prototype of our approach using Ethereum as the underlying blockchain and experimentally validated the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

Platform Solutions for Digital Transformation of Production and Logistics Systems

The work is devoted to the problem of platform solutions for the digital transformation of production and logistics systems. The purpose of this article was a development of approaches to the services formation and filling of the digital platforms. The role and place of digital platforms in the transition of industrial enterprises to work on the models of manufacturing as a service, sharing using of a circular economy, integrated execution by an international supply chain links of a geographically distributed business process are determined. The need for solving the problems of cooperation between production and logistics links based on digital platforms has been identified. In contrast to the existing researches, the article addressed the methodological issues of designing the digital platforms functionality to solve the logistic problems of business, cooperation and coordination of participants in digital platforms. In the work, general scientific methods were used to cognize economic phenomena and processes (analysis and synthesis, a systematic approach, the dialectical method, etc.). The main study results were methodological approaches to the formation of a digital platform as an ecosystem; designing its functional component. The author offered methodological approaches to services designing based on continuous engineering and agile design. The area of the proposed solutions: the design of applied digital platforms and logistics service systems for certain production and logistics systems.

A distributed business process fragmentation method based on community discovery

For deploying a traditional centralized business process to distributed systems, how to properly partition the process is a key issue. If closely related sub-process fragments are assigned into many different servers, the frequent interactions of the sub-processes will result in large server communication costs. However, most of the current works in business process fragmentation focus on optimizing load balancing to achieve high execution performance, without considering the intrinsic functional aggregation of partitioned sub-processes. This paper proposes a novel distributed business process fragmentation method based on community discovery, which aggregates functional related process partitions together to optimize server communication costs during business process execution. An advanced fuzzy models (AFM) and control-data flow model which are more suitable for community discovery are presented. And the community-based process fragmentation algorithm (CPFA) is developed to get an optimized business process distributed deployment schema, reducing communications between servers and data access communication costs. We evaluate our method with BPI dataset, and demonstrate that it significantly reduces communication costs between servers for process execution efficiency while also maintain good server resource load balancing.

Dynamic Provisioning of Service Composition in a Multi-Tenant SaaS Environment

Multi-tenant service composition has become a common delivery model for business processes in cloud computing. To dynamically support the workload tenant variation, elasticity holds the promise of ensuring the quality of service (QoS) of the business process by providing the involved service instances at a low cost. However, integrating both of multi-tenancy and elasticity during service composition is a key problem for serving multiple tenants from a single process instance. Nowadays, existing approaches in the field of cloud service composition, although numerous, still fall short since they cannot adequately address issues related to supporting the scalability of the composed service and adapting it to the workload fluctuation. In this paper, we propose a holistic approach which makes the dynamic multi-tenant services matching and manages their elasticity in distributed business processes. This approach is based on a generic service pattern that integrates multi-tenancy property and handles elasticity at the process and service levels. Furthermore, we present elastic composition algorithms to compose multi-tenant cloud services and perform their elasticity through the proposed service pattern. The evaluation of our approach, compared to the baseline approach, proves that the latency taken to provide an elastic multi-tenant service composition and detect its SLA (Service Level Agreements) violation are reasonably short. We also show that the CPU overhead of using our approach is negligible. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate the merits of our approach in terms of minimizing the memory consumption through the deployed service instances.

Composition of Resource-Service Chain Based on Evolutionary Algorithm in Distributed Cloud Manufacturing Systems

In distributed cloud manufacturing (CMfg) systems, multi-resource service can complete more complex manufacturing tasks than single resource service. Especially in business process, all the resource services are invoked in a certain sequence, which is called the Resource-Service Chain (RSC). The RSC, as a sequential composition of resource services, expresses the scheduling and the flow of servicing to a distributed business process. A perfect composition can improve utilization ratio and efficient matching availability of resource services greatly. However, most of the existing methods for resource service composition paid no attention to the temporal relationship between resource services. Moreover, the methods strongly depend on relevant element to be considered. Inspired by biological evolution, a Resource-Service Chain Composition Evolutionary (RSCCE) algorithm is proposed. Specifically, RSCCE tries to find multiple optimal solutions, namely all RSCs in a workflow with given constraints. To begin, initial sets of composite resource service are resolved by calculating the degree of dependency between resource services, so as to obtain initial RSCs by workflow. Then, RSCCE algorithm applies genetic algorithm to search for the extended of each initial RSC, a longer chain composing of it, to improve the reuse of RSC. Under this approach, gene and chromosome represent resource service and the entire RSC respectively. If the propagated chromosomes violate the sequence of resource service, as constraint in RSCCE algorithm, they will be repaired to obtain a valid solution. Finally, we take a multi-enterprise collaborative business process as an example to simulate our approach. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the approach.

Message ordering framework for collaborative web services-based environments

Web service paradigm is becoming a very powerful architecture for organizations when integrating heterogeneous applications. These provide functionality and form the basis for complex distributed business processes. Open standards make suitable Web Services interoperable for distributed environments. Collaboration between organizations is crucial in this context since it allows Web users to share knowledge, ideas, and modify information. Sharing information in a collaborative manner can minimize time spent in problem resolution. Message ordering is critical in this context, information presented to each user must be consistent way to preserve data integrity. For this purpose, causal ordering protocols are essential while exchanging information, however, their implementation is expensive to set up in distributed systems. Ongoing studies try to reduce the overhead imposed by the information carried out by each message, the optimal way of reducing such overhead is implementing the Immediate Dependency Relationship (IDR). In this paper, we present a framework for such message ordering, relative in collaborative environments, maintaining low overhead and computational cost based on the IDR.

Automated Quantitative Verification for Service-Based System Design: A Visualization Transform Tool Perspective

Service-based systems are a new software mode for distributed business processes integration. It is difficult for traditional testing methods to verify the functional and nonfunctional requirements of software. To address this problem, this paper proposes a visual verification platform to quantitatively compute the reliability and cost for evaluating the performance of service-based systems in the design phase. First, an extended automata model namely Probabilistic Reward Labeled Transition System (PRLTS) is proposed to formalize both the functional behaviors and nonfunctional features. Then, the formal language of probabilistic model checker PRISM is introduced to show the grammar of the target verification codes that we want to transform. Second, XML description tags of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is parsed to generate the functional behaviors using different kinds of transformation rules, based on which the probability matrix and reward concept are employed to denote the service’s reliability and cost, respectively. Third, the PRLTS model is turned into the input language of PRISM, where the graphic description language DOT of Graphviz is used as an intermediary to display system behaviors in a visual way. The model layout allows the designer to manually adjust the behaviors of the PRLTS model, where verification codes can be dynamically updated according to the changes in modified information. Fourth, to perform quantitative verification, the verification property in the form of the Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) formula can be automatically generated when the requirement model of the service-based system is inputted, during which the threshold value of qualitative property will be initially computed and returned as a recommended value. This allows the user to modify the qualitative property in an interactive way. Furthermore, experimental analysis of the real-world case study demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed method. Thus, our platform provides guidance for quantitative verification and graphical visualization for effectively generating formal models and checking the quantitative properties for service-based systems.

Event-based failure prediction in distributed business processes

Traditionally, research in Business Process Management has put a strong focus on centralized and intra-organizational processes. However, today’s business processes are increasingly distributed, deviating from a centralized layout, and therefore calling for novel methodologies of detecting and responding to unforeseen events, such as errors occurring during process runtime. In this article, we demonstrate how to employ event-based failure prediction in business processes. This approach allows to make use of the best of both traditional Business Process Management Systems and event-based systems. Our approach employs machine learning techniques and considers various types of events. We evaluate our solution using two business process data sets, including one from a real-world event log, and show that we are able to detect errors and predict failures with high accuracy.

Self-Organized B2B Production Networks. Part I. Concept and Basic Tasks

Network-centric business implemented via open self-organizing B2B production network is a relatively novel concept of global business organization that has become the subject of the active research and development during the last decade. In the developed countries, this paradigm is considered as a new very promising future model of distributed business and virtual organizations. The paper analyzes the state-of-the-art in this field, formulates its key problems and challenges and proposes, for B2B production network, an open self-organized multi-agent architecture. It describes and justifies the proposed basic models designed to solve the key B2B production network applied tasks. Among them, it outlines panning task that is allocation of particular components of a completely distributed business process to particular network nodes to execute, and distributed coordination of local schedules of the network nodes solving the allocated subtasks of the shared business processes. The significant attention is also paid to the description of the developed model of the software infrastructure intended to support network node communications and interactions in ad-hoc (p2p) manner. The fundamental role of self-organization as the basis of the B2B-open network applied and infrastructural functionalities is emphasized. The B2B production network is considered as a basic class of applications that best fits great potential of self-organized B2B network as a distributed production model.

Secret Forwarding of Events over Distributed Publish/Subscribe Overlay Network.

Publish/subscribe is a communication paradigm where loosely-coupled clients communicate in an asynchronous fashion. Publish/subscribe supports the flexible development of large-scale, event-driven and ubiquitous systems. Publish/subscribe is prevalent in a number of application domains such as social networking, distributed business processes and real-time mission-critical systems. Many publish/subscribe applications are sensitive to message loss and violation of privacy. To overcome such issues, we propose a novel method of using secret sharing and replication techniques. This is to reliably and confidentially deliver decryption keys along with encrypted publications even under the presence of several Byzantine brokers across publish/subscribe overlay networks. We also propose a framework for dynamically and strategically allocating broker replicas based on flexibly definable criteria for reliability and performance. Moreover, a thorough evaluation is done through a case study on social networks using the real trace of interactions among Facebook users.

Territorial Distribution of Business Processes as a Source of Increasing Competitiveness in Companies

Globalization of the economy has changed the nature of competition. Territorial distribution of units, engaged in these or other business processes, assumed the character of an independent source of competitive advantage. The article discusses the features of a modern approach to management of geographically distributed companies. To characterize the dynamics of spatial distribution of business processes the authors define the concepts of "presence region", "base region", "home region" and "key region", which define characteristics of regions where the company can carry out its activities. The authors show that geographically distributed business processes are sources of the company's growth and ways to strengthen its competitiveness, not only due to the choice of the optimal placement of its business processes, but also due to their coordination. The article identifies the benefits and disadvantages of spatial distribution and spatial concentration of business processes. Studying the basis of features of regional development in the Russian Federation the authors conclude that for Russian companies the territorial expansion of activities within the boundaries of the country's complexity and scale is comparable to the process of internationalization of foreign companies’ activities. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s3p503

Research of the Combination of Distributed Business Processes Based on Dynamic Planning

In order to achieve the collaborative completion of entire business process by composition between different workflow management systems, a process composition method based on dynamic programming has been put forward. By analyzing differences and relations between process composition and Web services composition, many aspects have been analyzed with regard to service interface of the workflow system, the interaction control between the workflow systems, parameters and message’s delivery and the planning indexes according to the characteristics of process interaction among the distributed workflow systems. When the process is running, according to the indicators and expectations of users, the optimal workflow services and sub-processes would be selected through dynamic planning method, to provide support to the dynamic combination of workflow processes in a distributed environment.