Kelly Rosa Braghetto

Using control-flow patterns for specifying business processes in cooperative environments

The representation and execution of business processes have generated some important challenges in Computer Science. An important related concern is the choosing of the best formal foundation to specify processes behavior, mainly representing control-flow patterns in cooperative environments. The first contribution of this research is the complete definition of the Navigation Plan Definition Language (NPDL) as an alternative for business process managing in cooperative environments. The second contribution is a complete implementation of control-flow patterns using NPDL. These control-flow patterns have been proposed by Aalsts group. Our experience in applying suggestion of Aalsts group to use control-flow patterns as a basis for comparison among control-flow specification languages shows that this comparison method is feasible and the results are useful. The simplicity of NPDL representations shows the advantages of NPDL as a process specification language. NPDL uses a declarative specification (similar to process algebra) to describe the workflow and adds new operators to compensate for the limitations of process algebra and Petri nets. NPDL also increases the modeling flexibility by allowing the reuse of process expressions in relational data-base systems.

Transactional Recovery Support for Robust Exception Handling in Business Process Services

Building mission critical applications and services (e.g. e-commerce) using process-oriented approaches has had successes and difficulties. These applications automated successfully the important frequent cases such as purchases, but the code needed for handling exceptions such as cancellations and failures tend to grow to disproportionate size and complexity. These difficulties lead to non-automated and expensive solutions such as call centers, which resolve data inconsistency problems manually. In this paper we describe the WED-flow (work, event, and data-flow) approach, which provides transactional recovery through incremental evolution of exception handling, by combining the concepts of advanced transaction models, events, and data states. By carefully recording the detailed data states of each execution step, WED-flow composes backward and forward recovery mechanisms as reusable exception handling services to preserve the consistency of all databases involved in the application with well-defined correctness properties. A practical application of the automated recovery in WED-flow is the real-time recovery of failed cases for mission-critical applications and services.

Large Scale Order Processing through Navigation Plan Concept

Order processing is an important application on services computing. On the conceptual side, business process management helps model such applications. On the practical side, workflow systems help implement such systems. We propose the navigation plan concept for order processing. Business steps in order processing are mapped into process algebra and composed into navigation plans. On the practical side, navigation plans are directly executed in the RiverFish architecture, thus guaranteeing the properties predicted by process algebra. Thus a well-defined order processing application is implemented into a reliable cooperative information system. A widely used application (the DECA system for requesting business TaxID involving several government agencies) demonstrates the usefulness of the navigation plan concept in practice

Methodological Guidelines for Reducing the Complexity of Data Warehouse Development for Transactional Blood Bank Systems

Over time, data warehouse (DW) systems have become more difficult to develop because of the growing heterogeneity of data sources. Despite advances in research and technology, DW projects are still too slow for pragmatic results to be generated. Here, we address the following question: how can the complexity of DW development for integration of heterogeneous transactional information systems be reduced? To answer this, we proposed methodological guidelines based on cycles of conceptual modeling and data analysis, to drive construction of a modular DW system. These guidelines were applied to the blood donation domain, successfully reducing the complexity of DW development.

Performance analysis modeling applied to business processes

In order to improve efficiency in organizations, it is important to understand how organizational processes work and how they could be optimized. Our goal is to contribute to the Business Process Management research area providing a summary of the pros and cons of applying three well-known high-level formalisms in the business processes modeling for performance evaluation -- the Generalized Stochastic Petri Nets, the Performance Evaluation Process Algebra and the Stochastic Automata Networks. To evaluate the feasibility of the approaches, we consider criteria regarding the modeling perspective, such as the expressive power, abstraction, readability of the models, and the efficacy of their supporting software tools. Different scenarios are used to illustrate modeling characteristics commonly found in business processes and to evidence the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

A rigorous approach to facilitate and guarantee the correctness of the genetic testing management in human genome information systems

BackgroundRecent medical and biological technology advances have stimulated the development of new testing systems that have been providing huge, varied amounts of molecular and clinical data. Growing data volumes pose significant challenges for information processing systems in research centers. Additionally, the routines of genomics laboratory are typically characterized by high parallelism in testing and constant procedure changes.ResultsThis paper describes a formal approach to address this challenge through the implementation of a genetic testing management system applied to human genome laboratory. We introduced the Human Genome Research Center Information System (CEGH) in Brazil, a system that is able to support constant changes in human genome testing and can provide patients updated results based on the most recent and validated genetic knowledge. Our approach uses a common repository for process planning to ensure reusability, specification, instantiation, monitoring, and execution of processes, which are defined using a relational database and rigorous control flow specifications based on process algebra (ACP). The main difference between our approach and related works is that we were able to join two important aspects: 1) process scalability achieved through relational database implementation, and 2) correctness of processes using process algebra. Furthermore, the software allows end users to define genetic testing without requiring any knowledge about business process notation or process algebra.ConclusionsThis paper presents the CEGH information system that is a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) based on a formal framework to support genetic testing management for Mendelian disorder studies. We have proved the feasibility and showed usability benefits of a rigorous approach that is able to specify, validate, and perform genetic testing using easy end user interfaces.

NPTool: Towards Scalability and Reliability of Business Process Management

Currently one important challenge in business process management is provide at the same time scalability and reliability of business process executions. This difficulty becomes more accentuated when the execution control assumes complex countless business processes. This work presents NavigationPlanTool (NPTool), a tool to control the execution of business processes. NPTool is supported by Navigation Plan Definition Language (NPDL), a language for business processes specification that uses process algebra as formal foundation. NPTool implements the NPDL language as a SQL extension. The main contribution of this paper is a description of the NPTool showing how the process algebra features combined with a relational database model can be used to provide a scalable and reliable control in the execution of business processes. The next steps of NPTool include reuse of control-flow patterns and support to data flow management.

Using process algebra to control the execution of business processes

Integrating information systems with tools that manage workflows and business processes is not always a simple task. This difficulty becomes more accentuated when the execution control assumes countless business processes. This work presents an alternative to control the execution of business processes. This alternative consists in a library of functions, called NavigationPlanTool, which can be easily integrated into the information systems and uses Navigation Plan Definition Language (NPDL) as the language to define business processes. NPDL is a language for business processes specification that uses process algebra as formal foundation. The NavigationPlanTool implements NPDL language as a SQL extension and offers two other important services: processes instantiation and process instances execution monitor. The NavigationPlanTool combines the process algebra features with a relational database model to provide a scalable and reliable control in the execution of business processes.

Energy Saving Algorithms for Workflow Scheduling in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is one of the platforms able to provide green computing solutions nowadays. Moreover, it is able to provide a high performance environment for scientific applications. However, if there is dependency between tasks, there may be a low utilization of the cloud. To address the problem, this paper presents new task schedulers for clouds aiming to achieve energy savings. Results of experiments comparing the proposed schedulers with other existing ones show that it is possible to obtain energy savings of up to 22.7%, with no penalty in the make span. Moreover it is observed that the efficiency of the scheduling is dependent on how tasks are interconnected in the workflow.

A Public Database on Traumatic Brachial Plexus Injury

We hereby present the first worldwide public digital database centred on adult Traumatic Brachial Plexus Injury (TBPI). This initiative aims at reducing distance between clinical and experimental practice and encouraging data sharing and reuse. Detailed electronic questionnaires made with the free software LimeSurvey were designed to collect patients’ epidemiological, physical and clinical data. The freely available software Neuroscience Experiments System (NES) was employed to support data storage and management. First results of this effort concern data collected from 109 Brazilian adult TBPI patients with varying degrees of functional impairment. The sample is composed by large majority of men (84.4%), mean age of 32.1 (11.3 SD) years old, victims of motorcycle accidents (67%). The similarity of this dataset basic descriptors with those from previous reports in TBPI validates the strategies employed herein. Managing data from diverse provenance in TBPI may allow identifying functional markers related to the patients’ clinical improvement and foster the development of new investigative tools to unveil its mechanisms.