Orchestration and Management of Adaptive IoT-centric Distributed Applications.

Current Internet of Things (IoT) devices provide a diverse range of functionalities, ranging from measurement and dissemination of sensory data observation, to computation services for real-time data stream processing. In extreme situations such as emergencies, a significant benefit of IoT devices is that they can help gain a more complete situational understanding of the environment. However, this requires the ability to utilize IoT resources while taking into account location, battery life, and other constraints of the underlying edge and IoT devices. A dynamic approach is proposed for orchestration and management of distributed workflow applications using services available in cloud data centers, deployed on servers, or IoT devices at the network edge. Our proposed approach is specifically designed for knowledge-driven business process workflows that are adaptive, interactive, evolvable and emergent. A comprehensive empirical evaluation shows that the proposed approach is effective and resilient to situational changes.

Collaborative Business Process Fault Resolution in the Services Cloud.

The emergence of cloud and edge computing has enabled rapid development and deployment of Internet-centric distributed applications. There are many platforms and tools that can facilitate users to develop distributed business process (BP) applications by composing relevant service components in a plug and play manner. However, there is no guarantee that a BP application developed in this way is fault-free. In this paper, we formalize the problem of collaborative BP fault resolution which aims to utilize information from existing fault-free BPs that use similar services to resolve faults in a user developed BP. We present an approach based on association analysis of pairwise transformations between a faulty BP and existing BPs to identify the smallest possible set of transformations to resolve the fault(s) in the user developed BP. An extensive experimental evaluation over both synthetically generated faulty BPs and real BPs developed by users shows the effectiveness of our approach.

An Integrated Framework for Fault Resolution in Business Processes.

Cloud and edge-computing based platforms have enabled rapid development of distributed business process (BP) applications in a plug and play manner. However, these platforms do not provide the needed capabilities for identifying or repairing faults in BPs. Faults in BP may occur due to errors made by BP designers because of their lack of understanding of the underlying component services, misconfiguration of these services, or incorrect/incomplete BP workflow specifications. Such faults may not be discovered at design or development stage and may occur at runtime. In this paper, we present a unified framework for automated fault resolution in BPs. The proposed framework employs a novel and efficient fault resolution approach that extends the generate-and-validate program repair approach. In addition, we propose a hybrid approach that performs fault resolution by analyzing a faulty BP in isolation as well as by comparing with other BPs using similar services. This hybrid approach results in improved accuracy and broader coverage of fault types. We also perform an extensive experimental evaluation to compare the effectiveness of the proposed approach using a dataset of 208 faulty BPs.

BP-DEBUG: A Fault Debugging and Resolution Tool for Business Processes.

Cloud computing and Internet-ware software paradigm have enabled rapid development of distributed business process (BP) applications. Several tools are available to facilitate automated/ semi-automated development and deployment of such distributed BPs by orchestrating relevant service components in a plug-and-play fashion. However, the BPs developed using such tools are not guaranteed to be fault-free. In this demonstration, we present a tool called BP-DEBUG for debugging and automated repair of faulty BPs. BP-DEBUG implements our Collaborative Fault Resolution (CFR) approach that utilizes the knowledge of existing BPs with a similar set of web services fault detection and resolution in a given user BP. Essentially, CFR attempts to determine any semantic and structural differences between a faulty BP and related BPs and computes a minimum set of transformations which can be used to repair the faulty BP. Demo url: https://youtu.be/mf49oSekLOA.

A Framework for Dynamic Composition and Management of Emergency Response Processes.

An emergency response process outlines the workflow of different activities that need to be performed in response to an emergency. Effective emergency response requires communication and coordination with the operational systems belonging to different collaborating organizations. Therefore, it is necessary to establish information sharing and system-level interoperability among the diverse operational systems. Unlike typical e-government processes that are well structured and have a well-defined outcome, emergency response processes are knowledge-centric and their workflow structure and execution may evolve as the incident unfolds. It is impractical to define static plans and response process workflows for every possible situation. Instead, a dynamic response should be adaptable to the changing situation. We present an integrated approach that facilitates the dynamic composition of an executable response process. The proposed approach employs ontology-based reasoning to determine the default actions and resource requirements for the given incident and to identify relevant response organizations based on their jurisdictional and mutual aid agreement rules. The Web service APIs of the identified response organizations are then used to generate an executable response process that evolves dynamically. The proposed approach is implemented and experimentally validated using an example scenario derived from the FEMA Hazardous Materials Tabletop Exercises Manual.

Blockchain Based Auditable Access Control for Distributed Business Processes.

The use of blockchain technology has been proposed to provide auditable access control for individual resources. However, when all resources are owned by a single organization, such expensive solutions may not be needed. In this work we focus on distributed applications such as business processes and distributed workflows. These applications are often composed of multiple resources/services that are subject to the security and access control policies of different organizational domains. Here, blockchains can provide an attractive decentralized solution to provide auditability. However, the underlying access control policies may be overlapping in terms of the component conditions/rules, and simply using existing solutions would result in repeated evaluation of user's authorization separately for each resource, leading to significant overhead in terms of cost and computation time over the blockchain. To address this challenge, we propose an approach that formulates a constraint optimization problem to generate an optimal composite access control policy. This policy is in compliance with all the local access control policies and minimizes the policy evaluation cost over the blockchain. The developed smart contract(s) can then be deployed to the blockchain, and used for access control enforcement. We also discuss how the access control enforcement can be audited using a game-theoretic approach to minimize cost. We have implemented the initial prototype of our approach using Ethereum as the underlying blockchain and experimentally validated the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.