Sébastien Truptil

Event-driven agility of interoperability during the Run-time of collaborative processes

The modern business environment tends to involve a large network of heterogeneous people, devices and organizations that engage in collaborative processes among themselves. Given the nature of this type of collaboration and the high degree of interoperability between partner Information Systems, these processes need to be agile in order to respond to changes in context, which may occur at any time during the collaborative situation. The objective is to build a Mediation Information System (MIS), in support of collaborative situations, whose architecture must be (i) built to be relevant to the collaborative situation under consideration, (ii) more easily integrated into the existing systems, and (iii) sufficiently agile, through its awareness of the environment and of process events, and through the way it reacts to events detected as being relevant. To apply agility mechanisms, it is crucial to detect the significant events that will lead to a subsequent evolution of the situation (detection step). Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) is used to design the structure of the part of the system that is in charge of MIS agility. This architecture takes the events into account, manages them and, if needed, uses them to trigger the adaptation of the MIS. We have defined a means to monitor the evolution of the situation. If relevant changes are detected, and if the situation does not evolve in the expected way, an adaptation is proposed. It is concluded that the principles of detection and adaptation, combined with the responsiveness of the system (provided by the automation of transitions), and based on Event Driven Architecture principles, together provide the agility required for collaborative processes.

Interoperability of Information Systems in Crisis Management: Crisis Modeling and Metamodeling

In a crisis situation (natural disaster, industrial accident, etc.) several partners have to act simultaneously to solve the emergency situation. Their coordination in such a context is a crucial point, especially in the first moments of the crisis. Their interoperability (precisely their Information Systems interoperability) is a major component of the success of the network. ISyCri17 French project propose to tackle this topic according to two aspects: (i) responsiveness of the network (its ability to act rapidly and efficiently) and (ii) flexibility of the obtained system of systems (its ability to evolve and follow the changing situation). This is so an agility problem of ISs of partners. This article presents the first results of this work: a metamodel of crisis situation and its ontological links with collaborative process design, and also the treatment of a first case of study, a NRBC18 exercise.

A Metamodel for Knowledge Management in Crisis Management

This article considers collaboration issue and data management issue as the key points of crisis management. In this context, the presented research works focus on a crisis management metamodel, dedicated to provide a way to class incoming data by connecting it to concepts of the metamodel. Such instances would then become intelligible for crisis management tools. This metamodel includes several points of view, specific to the domain of crisis management (including characteristics of the crisis, of the context, of the actors involved, etc.). Besides, the models built from this metamodel can be used as information bases for tools dedicated to support collaboration of actors: collaborative processes may be deduced from the models (and then orchestrated). Similarly, the evolution of the situation can be recorded as updates of the crisis models and contribute to the agility of the crisis management.

Information Systems design for emerging ecosystems

This article presents a model-driven approach to improve interoperability into emerging ecosystems. This approach proposes to design a Mediation Information System (MIS) dedicated to deal with exchanged data, shared services and collaborative processes. The MIS design crosses the different abstraction layers (business, logic and technological) and exploits at each level the associated models to build the models of the next level. This article presents the involved models (dedicated to the CIM, PIM and PSM levels of the MDE approach) and the transition mechanisms between levels.

Towards a better management of complex emergencies through crisis management meta-modelling

Managing complex emergency situations is a challenging task, mainly due to the heterogeneity of the partners involved and the critical nature of such events. Whatever approach is adopted to support this objective, one unavoidable issue is knowledge management. In the context of our research project, gathering, formalising and exploiting all the knowledge and information about a given crisis situation is a critical requirement. This paper presents some research results concerning this specific topic: from a theoretical point of view, the generic dimensions of crisis characterisation are defined, while from a technical point of view, we describe a software solution able to collect that knowledge (based on meta-models and ontologies). This is used to confront the characteristics of the situation (context) with characteristics of the resources (relief system) in order to design a suitable response. Finally, an illustrative example concerning a crash between a tanker truck and a train is described.

An automatic model-to-model mapping and transformation methodology to serve model-based systems engineering

With enterprise collaboration becoming increasingly frequent, the ability of an enterprise to cooperate with others has become one of the core factors in gaining competitive advantage. This trend has led to an urgent requirement to improve cooperation ability. To this end, model-based systems engineering is being adapted so that it can be used to represent and simulate the working processes of enterprises. Model-to-model mappings and transformations, as important aspects in model-based systems engineering, have become two of the key factors in improving the cooperation capabilities of enterprises. However, the foundations for achieving automatic model-to-model transformation have not yet been built. Normally, model transformation rules are built on the basis of model mappings, and model mappings concern semantic or syntactic representations. One of the difficulties in achieving model-to-model mappings and transformations lies in detecting the semantics and semantic relations that are conveyed in different models. This paper presents an automatic model-to-model mapping and transformation methodology, which applies semantic and syntactic checking measurements to detect the meanings and relations between different models automatically. Both of the semantic and syntactic checking measurements are combined into a refined meta-model based model transformation process. To evaluate the performance of this methodology, we demonstrate its applicability with a realistic example.

A meta-ontology for knowledge acquisition and exploitation of collaborative social systems

Designing and/or managing collaborative social systems are obviously a complicated task, mainly due to the heterogeneity of the partners involved in terms of objectives, resources, information systems and so on. Whatever approach is adopted to support the collaboration (Mediation Information System, Peer-to-peer, Centralized Information System, etc.), one unavoidable issue is Knowledge Management. Gathering, formalizing and exploiting all the knowledge and information concerning a given collaborative situation is a critical requirement. In such a context, information and knowledge are widely distributed and the resources are classically not efficiently organized and utilized. A conceptualization is thus required to make the knowledge of the relations among the stakeholders explicit. This research work aims to provide a shared and common understanding of the management of collaboration, in order to be able to design and monitor future Decision-Making Support Tools and/or Collaborative Information Systems. Practically, the research works develops a generic meta-model and its ontology able to characterize a collaborative context and associated behaviors. All this knowledge is summarized through a Collaboration Meta-Ontology (CMO). Being in a formal format, the CMO provides partners with the means for acquiring, sharing and reasoning about collaborative information and knowledge. An illustration on the case of collaborative emergency management systems is developed.

Management of Collaborative Behavior through a Service-Oriented Mediation System: The Case of Crisis Management

In crisis management context, coordination of partners is a crucial requirement. However, defining, orchestrating and maintaining collaborative behavior of stakeholders of crisis management are arduous tasks. This article presents an approach dedicated to support these three missions in crisis management context. This objective is achieved according to three abstraction levels in charge of covering the three previous expectations. Besides, three prototypes have been developed (based on SOA and EDA) and are introduced in this article also through a simple use-case.

On-the-fly adaptation of crisis response information system

This paper presents our solution to build an adaptive information system to support a crisis response. The Characteristics of crisis response bring us to choose a solution based on a mediator, named Mediation Information System. Unfortunately, crisis is an evolutionary phenomenon. Consequently, our information system has to evolve with the situation. For this, we propose an adaptation service. This adaptation service allows us on the one hand to deduce the evolution of the situation and then the new configuration of the information system to ensure it compliance with the solution, on the other hand, to realize this new configuration on-the-fly.

Mediation Information System Engineering for Interoperability Support in Crisis Management

One objective of the French-funded (ANR-2006-SECU-006) ISyCri Project (ISyCri stands for Interoperability of Systems in Crisis situation) is to provide the crisis cell in charge of the situation management with an Information System (IS) able to support the interoperability of partners involved in this collaborative situation. Such a system is called Mediation Information System (MIS). This system must be in charge of (i) information exchange, (ii) services sharing and (iii) behavior orchestration. This article proposes, first, an approach of MIS engineering in crisis context. This design method is model-driven and uses model morphisms principles and techniques. Furthermore, due to the intrinsically evolutionary nature of crisis phenomenon, the MIS must remain adapted to the situation and to the panel of partners involved. This paper presents also the MIS on the fly adaptation, based also on model-driven approach in order to provide agility to the MIS.