Bringing the MIMOSA OSA-EAI into an object-orientated world

Despite being poised as a standard for data exchange for operation and maintenance data, the database heritage of the MIMOSA OSA-EAI is clearly evident from using a relational model at its core. The XML schema (XSD) definitions, which are used for communication between asset management systems, are based on the MIMOSA common relational information schema (CRIS), a relational model, and consequently, many database concepts permeate the communications layer. The adoption of a relational model leads to several deficiencies, and overlooks advances in object-oriented approach for an upcoming version of the specification, and the common conceptual object model (CCOM) sees a transition to fully utilising object-oriented features for the standard. Unified modelling language (UML) is used as a medium for documentation as well as facilitating XSD code generation. This paper details some of the decisions faced in developing the CCOM and provides a glimpse into the future of asset management and data exchange models.

Pattern-based analysis of EAI languages : the case of the business modelling language

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a challenging area that is attracting growing attention from the software industry and the research community. A landscape of languages and techniques for EAI has emerged and is continuously being enriched with new proposals from different software vendors and coalitions. However, little or no effort has been dedicated to systematically evaluate and compare these languages and techniques. The work reported in this paper is a first step in this direction. It presents an in-depth analysis of a language, namely the Business Modeling Language, specifically developed for EAI. The framework used for this analysis is based on a number of workflow and communication patterns. This framework provides a basis for evaluating the advantages and drawbacks of EAI languages with respect to recurrent problems and situations.

A unified description language for human to automated services

Through the rise of cloud computing, on-demand applications, and business networks, services are increasingly being exposed and delivered on the Internet and through mobile communications. So far, services have mainly been described through technical interface descriptions. The description of business details, such as pricing, service-level, or licensing, has been neglected and is therefore hard to automatically process by service consumers. Also, third-party intermediaries, such as brokers, cloud providers, or channel partners, are interested in the business details in order to extend services and their delivery and, thus, further monetize services. In this paper, the constructivist design of the UnifiedServiceDescriptionLanguage (USDL), aimed at describing services across the human-to-automation continuum, is presented. The proposal of USDL follows well-defined requirements which are expressed against a common service discourse and synthesized from currently available servicedescription efforts. USDL's concepts and modules are evaluated for their support of the different requirements and use cases.

Object-centric process models and the design of flexible processes

Mainstream business process modelling techniques promote a design paradigm wherein the activities to be performed within a case, together with their usual execution order, form the backbone of a process model, on top of which other aspects are anchored. This paradigm, while eective in standardised and production-oriented domains, shows some limitations when confronted with processes where case-by-case variations and exceptions are the norm. In this thesis we develop the idea that the eective design of exible process models calls for an alternative modelling paradigm, one in which process models are modularised along key business objects, rather than along activity decompositions. The research follows a design science method, starting from the formulation of a research problem expressed in terms of requirements, and culminating in a set of artifacts that have been devised to satisfy these requirements. The main contributions of the thesis are: (i) a meta-model for object-centric process modelling incorporating constructs for capturing exible processes; (ii) a transformation from this meta-model to an existing activity-centric process modelling language, namely YAWL, showing the relation between object-centric and activity-centric process modelling approaches; and (iii) a Coloured Petri Net that captures the semantics of the proposed meta-model. The meta-model has been evaluated using a framework consisting of a set of work ow patterns. Moreover, the meta-model has been embodied in a modelling tool that has been used to capture two industrial scenarios.

Maintenance chain integration using Petri-net enabled multiagent system modeling and implementation approach

Engineering asset management (EAM) is a broad discipline and the EAM functions and processes are characterized by its distributed nature. However, engineering asset nowadays mostly relies on self-maintained experiential rule bases and periodic maintenance, which is lacking a collaborative engineering approach. This research proposes a collaborative environment integrated by a service center with domain expertise such as diagnosis, prognosis, and asset operations. The collaborative maintenance chain combines asset operation sites, service center (i.e., maintenance operation coordinator), system provider, first tier collaborators, and maintenance part suppliers. Meanwhile, to realize the automation of communication and negotiation among organizations, multiagent system (MAS) technique is applied to enhance the entire service level. During the MAS design processes, this research combines Prometheus MAS modeling approach with Petri-net modeling methodology and unified modeling language to visualize and rationalize the design processes of MAS. The major contributions of this research include developing a Petri-net enabled Prometheus MAS modeling methodology and constructing a collaborative agent-based maintenance chain framework for integrated EAM.

Fundamentals of process integration

Technologies and languages for integrated processes are a relatively recent innovation. Over that period many divergent waves of innovation have transformed process integration. Like sockets and distributed objects, early workflow systems ordered programming interfaces that connected the process modelling layer to any middleware. BPM systems emerged later, connecting the modelling world to middleware through components. While BPM systems increased ease of use (modelling convenience), long-standing and complex interactions involving many process instances remained di±cult to model. Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs), followed, connecting process models to heterogeneous forms of middleware. ESBs, however, generally forced modellers to choose a particular underlying middleware and to stick to it, despite their ability to connect with many forms of middleware. Furthermore ESBs encourage process integrations to be modelled on their own, logically separate from the process model. This can lead to the inability to reason about long standing conversations at the process layer. Technologies and languages for process integration generally lack formality. This has led to arbitrariness in the underlying language building blocks. Conceptual holes exist in a range of technologies and languages for process integration and this can lead to customer dissatisfaction and failure to bring integration projects to reach their potential. Standards for process integration share similar fundamental flaws to languages and technologies. Standards are also in direct competition with other standards causing a lack of clarity. Thus the area of greatest risk in a BPM project remains process integration, despite major advancements in the technology base. This research examines some fundamental aspects of communication middleware and how these fundamental building blocks of integration can be brought to the process modelling layer in a technology agnostic manner. This way process modelling can be conceptually complete without becoming stuck in a particular middleware technology. Coloured Petri nets are used to define a formal semantics for the fundamental aspects of communication middleware. They provide the means to define and model the dynamic aspects of various integration middleware. Process integration patterns are used as a tool to codify common problems to be solved. Object Role Modelling is a formal modelling technique that was used to define the syntax of a proposed process integration language. This thesis provides several contributions to the field of process integration. It proposes a framework defining the key notions of integration middleware. This framework provides a conceptual foundation upon which a process integration language could be built. The thesis defines an architecture that allows various forms of middleware to be aggregated and reasoned about at the process layer. This thesis provides a comprehensive set of process integration patterns. These constitute a benchmark for the kinds of problems a process integration language must support. The thesis proposes a process integration modelling language and a partial implementation that is able to enact the language. A process integration pilot project in a German hospital is brie°y described at the end of the thesis. The pilot is based on ideas in this thesis.

Understanding data flow and security requirements in wireless Body Area Networks for healthcare

The Body Area Network (BAN) is an emerging technology that focuses on monitoring physiological data in, on and around the human body. BAN technology permits wearable and implanted sensors to collect vital data about the human body and transmit it to other nodes via low-energy communication. In this paper, we investigate interactions in terms of data flows between parties involved in BANs under four different scenarios targeting outdoor and indoor medical environments: hospital, home, emergency and open areas. Based on these scenarios, we identify data flow requirements between BAN elements such as sensors and control units (CUs) and parties involved in BANs such as the patient, doctors, nurses and relatives. Identified requirements are used to generate BAN data flow models. Petri Nets (PNs) are used as the formal modelling language. We check the validity of the models and compare them with the existing related work. Finally, using the models, we identify communication and security requirements based on the most common active and passive attack scenarios.

Design of a model-generated repository as a service for USDL

SAP and its research partners have been developing a lan- guage for describing details of Services from various view- points called the Unified Service Description Language (USDL). At the time of writing, version 3.0 describes technical implementation aspects of services, as well as stakeholders, pricing, lifecycle, and availability. Work is also underway to address other business and legal aspects of services. This language is designed to be used in service portfolio management, with a repository of service descriptions being available to various stakeholders in an organisation to allow for service prioritisation, development, deployment and lifecycle management. The structure of the USDL metadata is specified using an object-oriented metamodel that conforms to UML, MOF and EMF Ecore. As such it is amenable to code gener-ation for implementations of repositories that store service description instances. Although Web services toolkits can be used to make these programming language objects available as a set of Web services, the practicalities of writing dis- tributed clients against over one hundred class definitions, containing several hundred attributes, will make for very large WSDL interfaces and highly inefficient “chatty” implementations. This paper gives the high-level design for a completely model-generated repository for any version of USDL (or any other data-only metamodel), which uses the Eclipse Modelling Framework’s Java code generation, along with several open source plugins to create a robust, transactional repository running in a Java application with a relational datastore. However, the repository exposes a generated WSDL interface at a coarse granularity, suitable for distributed client code and user-interface creation. It uses heuristics to drive code generation to bridge between the Web service and EMF granularities.

Towards a unified service description language for the internet of services : requirements and first developments

Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web services leverage the technical value of solutions in the areas of distributed systems and cross-enterprise integration. The emergence of Internet marketplaces for business services is driving the need to describe services, not only from a technical level, but also from a business and operational perspective. While, SOA and Web services reside in an IT layer, organizations owing Internet marketplaces are requiring advertising and trading business services which reside in a business layer. As a result, the gap between business and IT needs to be closed. This paper presents USDL (Unified Service Description Language), a specification language to describe services from a business, operational and technical perspective. USDL plays a major role in the Internet of Services to describe tradable services which are advertised in electronic marketplaces. The language has been tested using two service marketplaces as use cases.

Topic dependent language modelling for spoken term detection

This paper investigates the effect of topic dependent language models (TDLM) on phonetic spoken term detection (STD) using dynamic match lattice spotting (DMLS). Phonetic STD consists of two steps: indexing and search. The accuracy of indexing audio segments into phone sequences using phone recognition methods directly affects the accuracy of the final STD system. If the topic of a document in known, recognizing the spoken words and indexing them to an intermediate representation is an easier task and consequently, detecting a search word in it will be more accurate and robust. In this paper, we propose the use of TDLMs in the indexing stage to improve the accuracy of STD in situations where the topic of the audio document is known in advance. It is shown that using TDLMs instead of the traditional general language model (GLM) improves STD performance according to figure of merit (FOM) criteria.