Nirmit Desai

Amoeba: A methodology for modeling and evolving cross-organizational business processes

Business service engagements involve processes that extend across two or more autonomous organizations. Because of regulatory and competitive reasons, requirements for cross-organizational business processes often evolve in subtle ways. The changes may concern the business transactions supported by a process, the organizational structure of the parties participating in the process, or the contextual policies that apply to the process. Current business process modeling approaches handle such changes in an ad hoc manner, and lack a principled means for determining what needs to be changed and where. Cross-organizational settings exacerbate the shortcomings of traditional approaches because changes in one organization can potentially affect the workings of another. This article describes Amoeba, a methodology for business processes that is based on business protocols. Protocols capture the business meaning of interactions among autonomous parties via commitments. Amoeba includes guidelines for (1) specifying cross-organizational processes using business protocols, and (2) handling the evolution of requirements via a novel application of protocol composition. This article evaluates Amoeba using enhancements of a real-life business scenario of auto-insurance claim processing, and an aerospace case study.

A Domain-Specific Language for Web APIs and Services Mashups

Distributed programming has shifted from private networks to the public Internet and from using private and controlled services to increasingly using publicly available heterogeneous Web services (e.g., REST, SOAP, RSS, and Atom). This move enables the creation of innovative end-user-oriented composed services with user interfaces. These services mashupsare typically point solutions to specific (specialized) problems; however, what is missing is a programming model that facilitates and accelerates creation and deployment of mashups of diverseservices. In this paper we describe a domain-specific language that unifies the most common service models and facilitates service composition and integration into end-user-oriented Web applications. We demonstrate our approach with an implementation that leverages the Ruby on Rails framework.

Commitment-Based Service-Oriented Architecture

Existing service-oriented architectures are formulated in terms of low-level abstractions far removed from business services. In a new SOA, the components are business services and the connectors are patterns, modeled as commitments, that support key elements of service engagements.

Transaction policies for service-oriented computing

Service-oriented computing is emerging as a distributed computing model where autonomous services interact with each other using standard Internet technology. In addition to the application-specific functions that services provide (different) services may also support (different) sets of protocols and formats addressing extra-functional concerns such as transaction processing and reliable messaging. This raises the need for services to complement their functional service descriptions with descriptions of extra-functional capabilities, requirements, and/or preferences, which must be matched and enforced for service interactions. In this paper, we address the problem of transactional coordination in service-oriented computing. We argue for the use of declarative policy assertions to advertise and match support for different transaction styles (direct transaction processing, queued transaction processing, and compensation-based transaction processing), and introduce the concept of and system support for transaction coupling modes as the policy-based contracts guiding transactional business process execution. We focus on concrete, protocol-specific policies that apply to relevant Web services specifications. Using transaction policies and our middleware system, we are able to support a reliable SOC environment.

Event-based monitoring of process execution violations

Process-aware information systems support business operations as they are typically defined in a normative process model. Often these systems do not directly execute the process model, but provide the flexibility to deviate from the normative model. This paper proposes amethod for monitoring control-flow deviations during process execution. Our contribution is a formal technique to derive monitoring queries from a process model, such that they can be directly used in a complex event processing environment. Furthermore, we also introduce an approach to filter and aggregate query results to provide compact feedback on deviations. Our techniques is applied in a case study within the IT service industry.

Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems

This special issue presents four revised and extended papers from PRIMA 2010: the 13th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, which was held in November 12–15, 2010, in Kolkata, India. Agent computing and technology is an exciting emerging paradigm that is expected to play a key role in many society-changing practices, from disaster response to manufacturing, and from energy management to healthcare. Agent systems are expected to operate in real-world environments, with all the challenges that such environments present. This special issue contains revised and extendedversions of four papers thatwere originally presented at the conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA). PRIMA has been held since 2007, and is successor to a workshop series (also called PRIMA, Pacific Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents) which has been running since 1998. Each of the four papers in this special issue received high scores from reviewers, and they were given awards at the conference (best paper, two best paper runner-ups, and an IBM Research best paper award for a paper in the area of agents and services). Each of the four papers was invited to be extended, and was then reviewed by the original reviewers, and then checked by the chairs. The four papers cover a wide range of topics, and we hope that they capture the diversity and richness of work in the area, and specifically, of the work that was presented at PRIMA 2010. Effect of DisCSP Variable-Ordering Heuristics in Scale-free Networks, by Tenda Okimoto, Atsushi Iwasaki and Makoto Yokoo. This paper considers the long-standing problem of distributed constraint satisfaction in the case where the network structure of the problem has a particular structure, in this case being scale-free. The authors find that for scale-free networks the choice of variable-ordering heuristic is more significant than in random networks. The authors then develop a heuristic for ordering variables that is especially designed for scale-free networks, and that exhibits improved performance in such networks.

OWL-P: a methodology for business process development

Business process modelling and enactment are notoriously complex, especially in open settings where the business partners are autonomous, requirements must be continually finessed, and exceptions frequently arise because of real-world or organizational problems. Traditional approaches, which attempt to capture processes as monolithic flows, have proved inadequate in addressing these challenges. We propose an agent-based approach for business process modelling and enactment which is centred around the concepts of commitment-based agent interaction protocols and policies. A (business) protocol is a modular, public specification of an interaction among different roles. Such protocols, when integrated with the internal business policies of the participants, yield concrete business processes. We show how this reusable, refinable and evolvable abstraction simplifies business process design and development.

Protocols for processes: programming in the large for open systems

The modeling and enactment of business processes is being recognized as key to modern information managment. The expansion of Web services has increased the attention given to processes, because processes are how services are composed and put to good use. However, current approaches are inadequate for flexibly modeling and enacting processes. These approaches take a logically centralized view of processes, treating a process as an implementation of a composed service. They provide low-level scripting languages to specify how a service may be implemented, rather than what interactions are expected from it. Consequently, existing approaches fail to adequately accommodate the essential properties of the business partners in a process (the partners would be realized via services)---their autonomy (freedom of action), heterogeneity (freedom of design), and dynamism (freedom of configuration).Flexibly represented protocols can provide a more natural basis for specifying processes. Protocols specify what rather than how; thus they naturally maximize the authonomy, heterogeneity, and dynamism of the interacting parties. We are developing an approach for modeling and enacting business processes based on protocols. This paper describes some elements of (1) a conceptual model of processes that will incorporate abstractions based on protocols, roles, and commitments; (2)the semantics or mathematical foundations underlying the conceptual model and mapping global views of processes to the local actions of the parties involved; (3) methodologies involving rule-based reasoning to specify processes in terms of compositions of protocols.

Toward verification of commitment protocols and their compositions

Commitment protocols have been proposed as a basis for modeling and enacting interactions among agents, such as those needed to carry out business processes. A central idea is that protocols would be developed and shared via libraries, and refined and composed to produce protocols that serve specific needs. Success in this program, therefore, presupposes that individual protocols and their compositions can be formally verified with respect to the properties of interest. This paper outlines an approach for verifying the correctness of commitment protocols and their compositions that exploits the well-known software engineering technique of model checking.

Engineering Foreign Exchange Processes via Commitment Protocols

Foreign exchange (FX) markets see a transaction volume of over