Paul T. Keyser

A Business Centric End-to-End Monitoring Approach for Service Composites

Enterprise applications today are composed of multiple independently executing services and processes that collectively provide a solution to a business problem. These composite applications contain a heterogeneous collection of services that execute in a variety of runtimes making them difficult to manage while maintaining a business centric point of view, as opposed to a service point of view. This paper introduces a business centric monitoring framework to bridge the gap between the business and service levels in complex business applications. Our technical approach focuses on using business information invariants to define one or more monitor sets in order to relate service activity to business composite execution. We apply this framework to enable end-to-end monitoring of composite business applications. In this paper we present an initial prototype of our business centric monitoring approach using monitor sets for monitoring a simple loan application composite implemented on IBM’s WebSphere Business Modeler, Process Server and Business Monitor. Our prototype implementation demonstrates the convenience, effectiveness and ease of design and deployment of our monitoring solution to attain a single end-to-end business centric view of a collection of heterogeneous services executing together. Our work also exposes potential challenges as we extend this work to support more powerful end-to-end monitoring.

Predictive Analytics for Semi-structured Case Oriented Business Processes

The goal of our work is to examine the utility of predictive analytics for case-oriented semi-structured business processes. As a first step towards this goal, this paper describes an approach to leverage case history to predict outcomes at decision points in case-oriented semi-structured processes, and examine how the contents of documents at these decision points influence their outcomes. We apply an ant-colony optimization (ACO) based algorithm to create a probabilistic activity graph from traces, and use it to identify key decision points in a given process. For each activity node that represents a decision point in the mined probabilistic graph, the likelihood of different outcomes from the node can be correlated with the contents of documents accessed by the activity node. This is achieved by using a standard decision tree learning algorithm. We validate our approach on correlated case instance traces generated by a simulator that we constructed to implement non-deterministic executions of an automobile insurance claims scenario. In practice we find that our approach can lead to useful predictions at different stages of execution in a semi-structured case oriented process.

Science, Medicine, and Technology

Science, medicine, and technology seek knowledge to understand or control the natural world. This chapter draws together science and medicine, occupations primarily of the educated elite, with technology often practiced by slaves or foreigners. Some scholars bridged that gap, particularly those treating architecture, mechanics, poliorcetics, or medicine. A greater number of scientists and engineers, particularly ca. 320-200, accumulated more new knowledge than during any other three centuries of antiquity, and more scientific documents survive from this era than any other kind of writing. But, owing to disproportionately larger losses both of Hellenistic material and of works from all ancient eras on science, medicine, and technology, we consequently rely heavily on fragments quoted or paraphrased by writers in the first centuries of the Roman era. The kingdoms of Alexander’s successors promoted science and engineering due both to governmental patronage and multicultural context. Warfare, trade, and prestige elicited or even demanded the growth of science and engineering. Greeks like Herodotos and Ktesias had admired the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and now elite members of the new Greek kingdoms - rulers, merchants, and scholars - found fresh material to contemplate and adapt in the ideas and practices of the conquered peoples.

Detecting changes in a semi-structured business process through spectral graph analysis

Semi-structured business processes are emerging at a rapid pace in industries such as government, insurance, banking and healthcare. The workflows underlying these case-oriented processes are non-deterministic. They are mostly driven by human decision making and content status and they may change frequently depending on factors such as economic conditions, legislative policy changes and technological upgrades. This paper describes a method to detect changes in a running business process by conducting spectral graph analysis of sets of execution traces of the process. This method is beneficial because it does not require mining a process model of the business process, and is consequently independent of any assumptions about the nature of the business process. This makes it particularly applicable to case-oriented semi-structured business processes whose lifecycle is not fully driven by a formal process model. In this paper we present our algorithm for computing graph spectra from business process execution traces, and discuss some initial promising results, as well as exciting ideas generated by this research for future work.

A Business Centric Monitoring Approach for Heterogeneous Service Composites

Enterprise applications today are composed of multiple independently executing services and processes that collectively provide a solution to a business problem. These composite applications contain a heterogeneous collection of services that execute in a variety of runtimes making them difficult to manage while maintaining a business centric point of view, as opposed to a service point of view. This paper introduces a business centric monitoring framework to bridge the gap between the business and service levels in complex business applications. Our technical approach focuses on using business information invariants to define one or more monitor sets in order to relate service activity to business composite execution. We apply this framework to enable end-to-end monitoring of heterogeneous composite business applications. In this paper we present a prototype of our business centric monitoring approach using monitor sets for monitoring an order management composite implemented on IBMs Web Sphere Integration Developer (WID) v7 and tested on Web Sphere Business Monitor v7. This extends our earlier work on demonstrating end-to-end monitoring of BPEL service composites in Web Sphere Business Modeler v7. The new contribution of this work is (1)a prototype implementation of our monitoring approach on a different IBM product, WID v7, which supports heterogeneous service composites, and (2) demonstration of the effectiveness of this approach with respect to a (new) heterogeneous order management scenario. Our prototype implementation demonstrates the ease of design and deployment of our monitoring solution to attain a single end-to-end business centric view of a collection of heterogeneous services executing together.

Ferret: Programming language support for multiple dynamic classification

We introduce a concept of multiple dynamic classification, a powerful generalization of single-inheritance OO, and a language Ferret which implements it. Multiple classification allows Male, Female, and Married to be subclasses of Person, arranged so that a single Person object may be both Male and Married, but may not be both Male and Female. Dynamic classification allows classes to change: a Person may acquire or lose Married status. The subclasses are true subclasses. Married carries fields (e.g., spouse) which are specific to married people. Methods may be defined on classes, and even on Boolean combinations of class: Male&Married. Ferret provides a generalization of superclass calls, so that the methods for Male&Married can be based on those for Male and Married, without losing other classifications like Employee. Ferret has mutators, analogous to constructors but applicable when objects change class. The resulting language is powerful and highly expressive.