Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Nowadays, the ability of providing an automated support to the management of business processes is widely recognized as a main competitive factor for companies. One of the most critical resources to deal with is time, but, unfortunately, the time management support offered by available workflow management systems is rather rudimentary. We focus our attention on the modeling and verification of workflows extended with time constraints. We propose (finite) as an effective tool to specify timed workflow schemas and to check their consistency. More precisely, we reduce the consistency problem for workflow schemas to the emptiness problem for timed automata, making it possible to exploit the machinery developed to solve the latter to address the former.

The ongoing optimization of work processes requires a close cooperation of IT systems within an enterprise. Originating from requirements of the utility industry we present a concept of interoperability of utility software systems and its corresponding data. Our solution builds on industry standards – Common Information Model (CIM) as a power system domain data model and SOAP as a standard for messaging and interface specification. Together they provide a basis for translating data between applications and are seamlessly bound to a communication infrastructure.

Adaptive workflow approaches (for example, [1]) promise to provide flexibility of web service composition. However, definition-time adaptive workflow approaches (for example, exception handlers, and alternative flow selection) do not account for service environment dynamics, such as availability of new services and changing QoS parameters of services. This paper introduces a new method of automatic, run-time adaption, called workflow . It utilises ontology in early development; ontology that reflects service message structures though is not semantically rich enough to support pure semantics based discovery and composition [2,3]. Industry is yet to widely embark on developing the complex semantic models that are fundamental for these approaches. Our workflow adaptation approach ensures that ontology is useful and value-added at all stages of development, thus providing an The convergence approach is introduced in the following section. Convergence relies on a service description approach, introduced in the last section, that utilises ontology in early development.

In this paper, we describe a special application domain of data management – the production of high-quality spatial sound. The IOSONO system, developed by Fraunhofer IDMT, is based on the wave field synthesis. Here, a large number of loudspeakers is installed around the listening room. A rendering component computes the signal for each individual speaker from the position of the audio source in a scene and the characteristics of the listening room. So, we can achieve the impression that sound sources are on specific positions in the listening room.

When data itself is the product, the management of data production is quite different from traditional goods production management. Production status, the quality of the products, product identifiers, deviations, and due dates are defined in terms of volatile data and are handled strictly to enable the resulting reports within the allotted time. This paper outlines how the information gathering process for a data production management system can be automated. The system’s architecture is based upon ideas of project management. Milestones are enriched with production information. The major benefits are the following. Operators understand easily this management. They can concentrate on production itself, but are provided with reliable management information without manual effort. Additionally, with this solution a production plan is automatically created in advance.

Complex information systems are increasingly required to support the flexible delivery of information to mobile devices. Studies of these devices in use have demonstrated that the information displayed to the user must be limited in size, focussed in content [1] and adaptable to the user’s needs [2]. Furthermore, the presented information is often dynamic-even changing continuously. Eventbased communication provides strong support for selecting relevant information for dynamic information delivery.

In future ubiquitous environments, contents (data, movie, text, graphics, etc.) will be more sophisticated and context-aware so that they can enrich user experience. We have proposed the Active Contents (AC) framework, which is based on contents encapsulation with program and aspect definition to allow contents to behave actively. AC can be seen as a software component with several viewpoints of contributors (planner, designer, programmer, etc.). The problem is about maintainability of AC which is modified by the contributors based on their own viewpoints.

In this position paper, we propose a mechanism to allow such contributors to modify AC with context-aware aspect. In our mechanism, based on location binding analysis for AC, parallel executions to be performed at a separate location are detected and automatically executed using workflow-aware communication.

Nowadays, more and more applications are distributed and require runtime guarantees from their underlying environment. To reach theses guarantees, Quality of Service (QoS) information must be provided. The development of QoS-aware applications requires the control and management of low-level resources. It is a complex task to correlate high-level domain-specific QoS requirements with low-level system-dependent characteristics. Various middleware architectures have been proposed to provide a QoS support [1][2] and to free the designer from low-level resource concerns. Some architectures [3] use dynamic adaptation of applications or a component-based conception [4]. Our approach uses the Model Driven Architecture [5]: the mapping of QoS constraints with platform specific resource management can be automated during the transformation steps leading from the model to the software implementation. In this paper, we present a solution to model high-level user-oriented QoS constraints, and we demonstrate that the MDA, associated with Aspect-Oriented Software Development, can ease the conception of QoS aware application.

Overlay networks are virtual communication structures that are logically “laid over” underlying hosting networks such as the Internet. They are implemented by deploying application-level topology maintenance and routing functionality at strategic places in the hosting network [1,2]. In terms of , most overlays offer proprietary “self-repair” functionality to recover from situations in which their nodes crash or are unexpectedly deleted. This functionality is typically orthogonal to the purpose of the overlay, and a systematic and complete approach to dependability is rarely taken because it is not the focus of the work. We therefore propose to offer dependability as a to any overlay.

We introduce XMLVM, a Turing complete XML-based programming language based on a stack-based, virtual machine. We show how XMLVM can automatically be created from Java class-files and .NET’s Intermediate Language. While the programmer is never directly exposed to XMLVM, we provide tools based on XMLVM for tasks such as cross-language functional testing or code migration.