Service-oriented Process Research Articles

Services-oriented intelligent milling for thin-walled parts based on time-varying information model of machining system

Experience-based process optimization cannot accurately and automatically adapt to the time-varying cutting condition of thin-walled parts because of the large amount of removed material. Thus, machining chatter and error are easily generated if the process parameters are not adjusted in time. To address this problem, a novel intelligent milling methodology is proposed for thin-walled parts, which has three innovations: data-driven time-varying information model construction, adaptive process optimization, and service-oriented automatic process execution. Using this methodology, a time-varying information model of a machining system was first constructed to characterize the actual cutting condition, and this model can be used as the digital twin model for machining thin-walled parts. In addition, the in-process physical and geometric data in the current process step were collected to construct the information model. Subsequently, the process parameters of the next process step were adaptively optimized based on the information model. Finally, a service-oriented process execution stream was built to automate the entire milling process, including data collection, process optimization, and process execution. To verify the proposed method, intelligent milling was performed on thin-walled parts. The experimental results demonstrated that this method can effectively and automatically control the machining chatter and thickness error according to the actual cutting condition. Compared with nominal milling, the machining surface roughness improved from Ra 2.4 to Ra 1.6, and the thickness accuracy improved from ±0.03 to ±0.02 mm.

SPReaD: service-oriented process for reengineering and DevOps

The reengineering of systems into a microservice-based architecture can be seen as an implementation of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). However, the deployment of SOA into an enterprise is a challenging task, as it may involve the modernization of mission-critical systems with high technical debt and high maintenance costs. To this end, a process is required to provide an appropriate set of steps and techniques that minimize risks and at the same time ensure the quality of the systems during the migration process. Thus, this work presents the Service-oriented Process for Reengineering and DevOps—SPReaD, an instantiation of the mainstream SOA methodology focusing on the reengineering of legacy systems integrating DevOps aspects for developing microservices systems. This process has been defined during a real software reengineering project of legacy systems from a Brazilian State Department of Taxation. The results obtained include a substantial improvement in the quality of the main taxation system used by the state, including not only code-related metrics but also performance improvements of the services offered, and a change in the methodology adopted by the software development team.

MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES TO INCREASE THE EFFICIENCY OF TEAM ACTIVITY

The reasons for the increased use of teams to solve various problems are varied. Competitive pressure and changing markets require a constant increase in the efficiency and adaptability of economic units. Greater business flexibility is needed to be able to respond more quickly and effectively to new challenges. The provision of material needs is no longer at the forefront; much more emphasis is placed on the content of the work and the satisfaction from it. The teams create the best opportunity to solve these reconstruction tasks. Fewer errors in production, fast modeling and implementation of new, complex, service-oriented processes are achieved only when employees do not act as ordered, but because they have their own attitude and can be implemented in new structures and processes.
 Teamwork skills are complex because they include communication skills, decision-making skills, ability to express opinions and defend a position, skills to plan and organize various activities, ability to comply with another's position, etc. Behind these skills are specific behaviors that can support successful teamwork. This work requires from all a different profile of competencies and behavior from that in hierarchical structures. In order for a person to deal with the already mentioned factors and to transpose the knowledge from the successful teamwork, it is necessary not only to know these factors, but also to be clear and apply them correctly in teamwork in the course of various situations and challenges. It is the changed requirements in the interpersonal behavior of managers and team members that must be taken seriously and the corresponding behaviors studied.
 Effective teamwork requires tact, understanding and respect not only from the leader but also from the team members. Common understanding is the formula for pleasant and fruitful work, helps to achieve much-needed peace of mind in the workplace and increases people's desire to work, stimulates innovation and innovation, and motivates progress. Managing a team is not easy even in the most favorable times. In order for the team to work towards a common goal and to succeed in difficult situations, the leader and all team members must adhere to mandatory rules to increase the effectiveness of the team.

Blockchain-oriented Inter-organizational Collaboration between Healthcare Providers to Handle the COVID-19 Process

Collaborative business activities have aroused great interest from organizations because of the benefits they offer. However, sharing data, services, and resources and exposing them to external use can prevent organizations involved in collaboration from being engaged. Therefore, the need for advanced mechanisms to ensure trust between the different parties involved is paramount. In this context, blockchain and smart contracts are promising solutions for performing choreography processes. However, the seamless integration of these technologies as non-functional requirements in the design and implementation phases of inter-organizational collaborative activities is a challenging task, as reported in the literature. Consequently, we aim in the proposed approach to extend the modeling and implementation of the choreography lifecycle based on service-oriented processes. This is fulfilled by integrating blockchain transactions and smart contract calls, to allow collaboration and interoperability between different entities while guaranteeing trust and auditability. Moreover, to conduct this extension efficiently we use a BPMN choreography diagram combined with Finite State Automata to ensure a meticulous modeling which targets the processes’ internal interactions. Hyperledger Fabric is used as a permissioned blockchain for proof-of-concept implementation. A use case of COVID-19 collaborative processes is used to experiment our approach, which aims to guarantee a fluid collaboration between healthcare providers and epidemiological entities at a national scale in Morocco.

Creating pre-conditions for change in clinical practice: the influence of interactions between multiple contexts and human agency.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what happens when changes to clinical practice are proposed and introduced in healthcare organisations. The authors use the implementation of Treatment Escalation Plans to explore the dynamics shaping the translational journey of a complex intervention from research into the everyday context of real-world healthcare settings. A qualitative instrumental collective case study design was used. Data were gathered using qualitative interviews (n=36) and observations (n=46) in three English acute hospital trusts. Normalisation process theory provided the theoretical lens and informed data collection and analysis. While each organisation faced the same translational problem, there was variation between settings regarding adoption and implementation. Successful change was dependent on participants' ability to manage and shape contexts and the work this involved was reliant on individual capacity to create a new, receptive context for change. Managing contexts to facilitate the move from research into clinical practice was a complex interactive and iterative process. The paper advocates a move away from contextual factors influencing change and adoption, to contextual patterns and processes that accommodate different elements of whole systems and the work required to manage and shape them. The paper addresses important and timely issues of change in healthcare, particularly for new regulatory and service-oriented processes and practices. Insights and explanations of variations in implementation are revealed which could contribute to conceptual generalisation of context and implementation.

Resilience analysis of service-oriented collaboration process management systems

Collaborative business process management allows for the automated coordination of processes involving human and computer actors. In modern economies, it is increasingly needed for this coordination to be not only within organizations but also to cross organizational boundaries. The dependence on the performance of other organizations should, however, be limited, and the control over the own processes is required from a competitiveness perspective. The main objective of this work is to propose an evaluation model for measuring a resilience of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) collaborative process management system. In this paper, we have proposed resilience analysis perspectives of SOA collaborative process systems, i.e., overall system perspective, individual process model perspective, individual process instance perspective, service perspective, and resource perspective. A collaborative incident and maintenance notification process system is reviewed for illustrating our resilience analysis. This research contributes to extend SOA collaborative business process management systems with resilience support, not only looking at quantification and identification of resilience factors, but also considering ways of improving the resilience of SOA collaborative process systems through measures at design and runtime.

Portability of executable service-oriented processes: metrics and validation

A key promise of process languages based on open standards, such as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language, is the avoidance of vendor lock-in through the portability of processes among runtime environments. Despite the fact that today various runtimes claim to support this language, every runtime implements a different subset, thus hampering portability and locking in their users. It is our intention to improve this situation by enabling the measurement of the portability of executable service-oriented processes. This helps developers to assess their implementations and to decide if it is feasible to invest in the effort of porting a process to another runtime. In this paper, we define several software quality metrics that quantify the degree of portability of an executable, service-oriented process from different viewpoints. When integrated into a development environment, such metrics can help to improve the portability of the outcome. We validate the metrics theoretically with respect to measurement theory and construct validity using two validation frameworks. The validation is complemented with an empirical evaluation of the metrics using a large set of processes coming from several process libraries.

A Petri net-based methodology to increase flexibility in service-oriented holonic manufacturing systems

Distributed control systems such as the holonic manufacturing systems and service-oriented architectures have demonstrated to provide higher levels of flexibility, notably in the planning and scheduling functionalities, if well exploited. In scheduling, the use of fixed process plans generated by traditional planning approaches, usually leads to unrealistic schedules due to the lack of considerations of the workshop status. IPPS approaches try to break the gap between these two functionalities in favor of providing flexible plans adapting to the shop floor's state. A key element in the creation of flexible process plans is the definition of a process model capable of representing alternatives solutions to the sequencing problem and therefore increasing the potential solution space. This paper presents a methodology to increase planning flexibility in service-oriented manufacturing systems (SOHMS). The methodology introduces a Petri net service-oriented process model (SOP model) capable of computing a product's deadlock free sequential space and adapts to the fractal character of holonic architectures. A set of modeling rules, with illustrations, is presented for the automatic generation of the Petri net, based on a set of precedence conditions. To explore the solution space represented by the SOP model a holonic interaction protocol is presented. Moreover, a set of behavioral strategies is proposed in order to cope with the effects of a possible combinatorial explosion. A study case applied workshop example is presented to illustrate the modeling process of SOP models, compute the sequential solution space and demonstrate how this notably increases the number of potentially goods feasible solutions.

Defining the relationships between IT service management and IT service governance

IT service provider organizations need both IT service management (ITSM) and IT service governance (ITSG) to ensure successful service provision for their customers. However, current service science literature has not adequately addressed how these activities differ from each other. Focusing solely on IT service management and ignoring service governance aspects may cause difficulties in measuring the performance of service management, defining and deploying the roles and responsibilities of service management, allocating the resources for right service improvements and adopting the service-oriented process culture. The research problem of this study is: How does IT service management differ from IT service governance? The main contribution of the study is a framework for IT service governance and a roadmap of IT service management frameworks and standards that can be utilized in establishing IT service governance activities. The theory-based framework is validated in an IT service change management case study with five Finnish IT service provider organizations. The results of this study may be used by top management, service directors and the IT service managers of IT service companies to better identify different aspects of IT service management and IT service governance.

Psychosocial Interventions, Peacebuilding and Development in Rwanda

Post-conflict peacebuilding has been criticised as being too focused on macro-level economic development and institutional reform at the expense of a more people-centred, service-oriented process that promotes the transformation in relationships and life conditions necessary to support a sustainable peace. This article suggests that the essence of peace and the capacity for development at the individual and community level are being lost in the dominant state-centric model of peacebuilding. It also suggests that psychosocial services that address the need for individual and community capacity-building should be seen as an integral part of social services where people are struggling to engage meaningfully in life after experiencing mass violence. Using Rwanda as a case study, it argues for a greater emphasis on psychosocial interventions as part of a more holistic and transformative approach to peacebuilding that promotes resilience, social cohesion and sustainable development.

An International Call for Democratizing the Academic Journal Culture From a Community of Editors

In our reflective essay from our multiple perspectives as journal editors, peer reviewers, and published authors, we present ideas about editorial support, democracy, and innovation in the publishing process. As four tenured professors who work in universities in the states of Illinois, Virginia, Texas, and Kentucky, we are a community of editors who are committed to a transparent, service-oriented support process. Our collective experience has allowed us to shape numerous academic bodies of work, culminating in an experiential point of view that reflects a political take on the support role of editors. We include lengthy, databased statements from journal editors in the form of vignettes that underscore the importance of community-based, democratic editorial practices that are themselves simultaneously personal testimonials and political statements. Our call is intended to foster large-scale social change within the academic editorial culture through global understanding about the sensibilities of editors and reviewers as well as authors and publishers engaged in the complex work of publication review. Our academic goal is to enhance fair practices and inclusive opportunities, worldwide, through more relational, equitable, and supportive editorial practices.

Applying Service-Oriented Composition Process in TPMS

Nowadays, the companies must adapt their business processes changing more dynamically in accordance with rapidly changing market conditions and IT systems. This paper extends our previous method, which shows a novel approach to integrate a service system. In this paper, we focus on the integrated problems of the Business Process Management System (BPMS). The service is encapsulated as a SCA service component，which is extended to be a service surrogate. Meanwhile, the XML-based process template is used to define the composition process. An interactive access control strategy based on service components is also proposed. At the end of this paper, it is applied in the textile-order process management system (TPMS) as a case study.

Service-oriented Process Control with Grafchart and the Devices Profile for Web Services

To fulfill increasing requirements within the manufacturing sector, highly flexible and adaptable automation systems are needed. It is desirable to have one integrated approach that stretches from the process planning phase, through the implementation phase and all the way to the phase for execution of the process control logics. One promising approach is to use the concepts of service-oriented architectures within automation, here referred to as SOA-AT. As service technology, DPWS has proved to be the most suitable for realizing service based communication on device level. The paper shows how Grafchart, a graphical language aimed for sequential control applications, can support the development of DPWS applications, and how Grafchart can be used for process modeling and execution in the planning and execution phase. This constitutes a unique framework for the development and execution of SOA applications in accordance with the requirements for automatic control tasks. The paper also presents an industry-related experimental setup in which the SOA-AT concepts are demonstrated through the use of Grafchart.

Towards a contractual approach for transaction management1

We model and analyse a business case from a dual view of process and service perspectives. We discover that a common understanding of transactional reliability is missing between the parties collaborating in this case. Therefore, we propose to enclose a transactional quality of service (TxQoS) specification in a service level agreement (SLA) to infuse transactional semantics into e-contracts for contract-driven service-oriented processes. A contract structure with a business terminology is designed to enable unambiguous interpretation and understanding of transactional qualities between the business and technical communities as well as between the contracting parties. A framework is developed consisting of an architecture, a mapping–matching model and a monitoring mechanism to support the TxQoS approach.

A Service-oriented Process to Develop Web Applications

A Service-oriented Process to Develop Web Applications

GeneFisher-P: variations of GeneFisher as processes in Bio-jETI.

BackgroundPCR primer design is an everyday, but not trivial task requiring state-of-the-art software. We describe the popular tool GeneFisher and explain its recent restructuring using workflow techniques. We apply a service-oriented approach to model and implement GeneFisher-P, a process-based version of the GeneFisher web application, as a part of the Bio-jETI platform for service modeling and execution. We show how to introduce a flexible process layer to meet the growing demand for improved user-friendliness and flexibility.ResultsWithin Bio-jETI, we model the process using the jABC framework, a mature model-driven, service-oriented process definition platform. We encapsulate remote legacy tools and integrate web services using jETI, an extension of the jABC for seamless integration of remote resources as basic services, ready to be used in the process. Some of the basic services used by GeneFisher are in fact already provided as individual web services at BiBiServ and can be directly accessed. Others are legacy programs, and are made available to Bio-jETI via the jETI technology.The full power of service-based process orientation is required when more bioinformatics tools, available as web services or via jETI, lead to easy extensions or variations of the basic process. This concerns for instance variations of data retrieval or alignment tools as provided by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI).ConclusionsThe resulting service- and process-oriented GeneFisher-P demonstrates how basic services from heterogeneous sources can be easily orchestrated in the Bio-jETI platform and lead to a flexible family of specialized processes tailored to specific tasks.

Activity-centred and QoS semantics in service conceptual customisation and matchmaking

Among the open issues for the modelling and execution of the service-oriented processes, the paper approaches the request-service matchmaking. In order to optimise it, the paper proposes the correlation of the service, process and request semantics, and the dynamic discovery of the services depending on the requestor's preferences and on the service advertised quality. The paper first gives the steps for the service, process and request definition based on the activity semantics (standing for their common semantic base). Then, it gives the steps for the verification of the semantic completeness and correctness of the services and requests and details the two complementary algorithms for the request-service matchmaking, based on functional semantics and on the service quality semantics.

Modelling and analysing reliable service-oriented processes

This paper introduces principled methods for the reliability analysis of business processes that rely on web services. The input to the problem is the BPEL specification of a business process and the output is the prediction of the process's reliability. The first step to this end involves a method for the translation of the BPEL specification to its corresponding UML model. The second step of the reliability analysis involves a principled way for the annotation of the UML model with the necessary extensions for the specification of reliability properties that characterise the behaviour of the elements that constitute the process. The third step of the analysis comprises the systematic mapping of the extended UML model to block diagrams and Markov models which are subsequently used to compute the reliability of the process.

WSCPC: An architecture using semantic web services for collaborative product commerce

In collaborative product commerce (CPC), design activities need to be carried out concurrently with the identification of potential manufacturing partners based on the design requirements and manufacturing constraints. This paper presents a web service based CPC framework, WSCPC (web services for CPC). WSCPC integrates design process, business plan, and assembly operations using web services in which a task is regarded as a service that an organization can provide and is outsourced to other companies on the fly. In addition, we propose a service-oriented process model that enables a machine to locate actively a CPC service, to check service capabilities, and to execute collaborative services into an optimized process workflow. Our service-oriented process model is a general drawing to realize functionalities, such as defining CPC service, enacting CPC service, and monitoring the executing status of CPC service. CPC, therefore, can utilize web services to not only discover diverse services of design, manufacturing and logistics, but configure collaborative process design, supporting service oriented CPC within WSCPC framework.

Process-Based E-Service Composition for Modeling and Automating Zero Latency Supply Chains

E-services are teams of applications and humans (participating electronically) that work together to provide a service or a product. Virtual Enterprises (VEs) are business or organizations that provide products or services that are created and managed by combining and wrapping e-services provided by multiple independent enterprises. To operate efficiently VEs must form supply chains that utilize and manage e-services. In this paper, we propose a Service Oriented Process model (SOP) and describe the architecture and the basic design principles of the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI), a system that supports SOP. SOP permits modeling of e-services and provides for e-service integration to construct efficient multi-enterprise supply chains. This is accomplished by modeling composite e-services as Multi-Enterprise Processes (MEPs). In particular, SOP supports service activities for modeling the services themselves, primitives for composing supply chains from services, and primitives for automating service coordination as required by a supply chain. The CMI system implements SOP and uses a semantic broker that has knowledge about the service capabilities an quality. Therefore, a MEP (and hence its supply chain) is capable of on-the-fly choice of the service providers that are best suited to its objectives (e.g., cheapest or fastest).