François Charoy

CrowdSC: Building Smart Cities with Large-Scale Citizen Participation

A platform that connects citizens effectively to local government, letting them contribute to their communitys general well-being, would be an elegant way to make cities smarter. CrowdSC is a crowdsourcing framework designed for smarter cities. The framework lets users combine data collection, selection, and assessment activities in a crowdsourcing process to achieve sophisticated goals within a predefined context. Depending upon this processs execution strategy, different outcomes are possible. The authors describe CrowdSCs process model and evaluate three execution strategies.

COO-FLOW: A PROCESS TECHNOLOGY TO SUPPORT COOPERATIVE PROCESSES

In this paper we present a process management technology for the coordination of creative and large scale distributed processes. Our approach is the result of usage analysis in domains like Software Development, Architecture/Engineering/Construction, and e-Learning processes. The basic conclusions of these experiments are the following: (1) cooperative processes are described in the same way as production processes, but these descriptions are interpreted in a different way depending on the nature of the process, (2) the interpretation of process description depends mainly on the required flexibility of control flow and of data flow, and on the relationship between them, (3) the management of intermediate results is a central feature for supporting the cooperation inherent to these processes. COO-flow is a process technology that results from these studies. It is based on two complementing contributions: anticipation that allows succeeding activities to cooperate, and COO-transactions that allows parallel activities to cooperate. This paper introduces COO-flow characteristics, gives a (partial) formalization and briefly discusses its Web implementation.

Asynchronous coordination of virtual teams in creative applications (co-design or co-engineering): requirements and design criteria

This paper reports on asynchronous coordination of a virtual team in a virtual enterprise. It confronts two approaches: explicit coordination based on explicit process modeling, and implicit coordination, based on group awareness, to finally conclude that a good coordination is a subtle mixture of both approaches. For each approach and for the combination of both, requirements and design criteria are given and a study of the state of the art is done.

Designing and implementing COO : design process, architectural style, lessons learned

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a software development framework named COO (which stands for COOperation and COOrdination in the software process). Its design process is first detailed and justified. Then, the paper emphasizes its layered and subject-oriented architecture. Particularly, it is shown how this architectural style leads to a very flexible and powerful way of defining, integrating and combining services in a software development environment.

Dynamic authorisation policies for event-based task delegation

Task delegation presents one of the business process security leitmotifs. It defines a mechanism that bridges the gap between both workflow and access control systems. There are two important issues relating to delegation, namely allowing task delegation to complete, and having a secure delegation within a workflow. Delegation completion and authorisation enforcement are specified under specific constraints. Constraints are defined from the delegation context implying the presence of a fixed set of delegation events to control the delegation execution. In this paper, we aim to reason about delegation events to specify delegation policies dynamically. To that end, we present an event-based task delegation model to monitor the delegation process. We then identify relevant events for authorisation enforcement to specify delegation policies. Moreover, we propose a technique that automates delegation policies using event calculus to control the delegation execution and increase the compliance of all delegation changes in the global policy.

A dynamic workflow management system for coordination of cooperative activities

This paper comes back to the problem of coordination of cooperative activities with a Workflow management system. First, we describe the differences that we have noted between business processes and cooperative processes. Then we present a set of requirements for a Workflow management system that aims to support cooperative workflow, and among these requirements are high flexibility and dynamicity. Then we describe how this has been taken into account in the development of the Bonita workflow management system that proposes to remove the idea of process model to work only with process instances that can be derived from each others or that can be composed.

Framework for coordination of activities in dynamic situations

Recent disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, have shown several issues for the coordination of human activities in these dynamic situations. Contemporary tools for the coordination used in the disaster response, such as e-mail, Whiteboards or phones, only allow for unstructured coordination, which can cause coordination problems. Hence, we discuss about the current information systems for coordinating the activities in a structured manner and identify their weaknesses in the context of a process modelling effort conducted together with experienced disaster managers. Afterwards, we propose a framework for coordination of activities in dynamic situations. The framework presented in this paper has been implemented as an extension to an open collaboration service. This shows how it can be used in the context of other tools required for disaster response management, such as maps, pictures or videos of the situation. The work described here is the foundation for enabling inter-organisational coordination of activities relevant in other domains, e.g. enterprise support processes, production processes or distributed software development projects. Furthermore, comments by disaster managers show that the concepts are relevant for their work. The expected impact is a more effective and efficient coordination of human activities in dynamic situations by structuring what needs to be coordinated.

Generation of Component Based Architecture from Business Processes: Model Driven Engineering for SOA

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has significantly enhanced inter-organizational systems enabling business flexibility, Information Technology (IT) agility, and value generation. However, building a SOA that reduces technology-driven business and leverages process management seems referring to the recurrent issues of business process logic and IT alignment. This paper presents a model-driven development approach where long-running business service composition models drive their supporting service implementation models. To progress on the successful route to a SOA engineering with minimal design decisions losses, we propose a model-to-model transformation that preserves the architectural alignment between the business process and their supporting service implementation infrastructure. The result of the transformation is a component configuration model based on a SOA. It promotes the separation of business concerns, enabling quick and localized evolutions of the IT infrastructure.

A Secure Task Delegation Model for Workflows

Workflow management systems provide some of the required technical means to preserve integrity, confidentiality and availability at the control-, data- and task assignment layers of a workflow. We currently observe a move away from predefined strict workflow enforcement approaches towards supporting exceptions which are difficult to foresee when modelling a workflow. One specific approach for exception handling is that of task delegation. The delegation of a task from one principal to another, however, has to be managed and executed in a secure way, in this context implying the presence of a fixed set of delegation events. In this paper, we propose first and foremost, a secure task delegation model within a workflow. The novel part of this model is separating the various aspects of delegation with regards tousers, tasks, events and data, portraying them in terms of a multi-layered state machine. We then define delegation scenarios and analyse additional requirements to support secure task delegation over these layers. Moreover, we detail a delegation protocol with a specific focus on the initial negotiation steps between the involved principals.

COO approach to support cooperation in software developments

Indexing terms: Cooperation, Consistency, Concurrency control, Constraints, Software engineering environment, Transactions Abstract: The COO system proposes a framework to organise the cooperation between developers of complex software systems. The key idea of COO is to base software process correctness on a safe transaction model: COO promotes an original advanced transaction model which integrates some general properties that define a very permissive core synchronisation protocol, and process specific knowledge that allows the gearing of the core protocol towards process characteristics.