Deneb: a nets-within-nets based flexible platform for the development and execution of dynamic web processes

• Autores: Javier Fabra Caro
• Directores de la Tesis: Joaquín Ezpeleta Mateo (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad de Zaragoza ( España ) en 2010
• Idioma: español
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Esperanza Marcos Martínez (presid.) , Pedro Javier Alvarez Pérez Aradros (secret.) , Antonio Ruiz Cortés (voc.) , Omer Rana (voc.) , Congduc Pham (voc.)
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• Resumen

  • Current standards and technologies for the description of processes lack of the required mechanisms in order to satisfy the new flexibility and dynamicity requirements proposed by the Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) for the development of next generation applications. These application must be provided as a suitable solution to approach evolving environments by means of service compositions. A concrete case of these applications are Web processes, those which are executed in interorganizational environments and which must be able to dynamically adapt themselves to new business goals and policies, and also to manage events and unexpected changes at runtime. The flexibility provided by the IT infrastructure in which these processes are developed and executed is a key point, since it determines the way an organization carries out current problems and scenarios. However, there does not exist an infrastructure which covers all these requirements. This is generally due to the fact that current proposals integrate previous, existing technologies, therefore inheriting their lacks and limitations. In the concrete case of process description languages there exists a wide dependency between orchestration and choreography concepts, which makes hard to apply integration techniques based on the separation of the concepts related to the internal logic of processes.

    This dissertation presents the application of the conversational approach, which proposes to integrate flexible processes by means of the explicit separation between their business and interaction logics, and the Nets-within-Nets paradigm to provide a framework for the development and execution of dynamic Web processes, called DENEB. This framework is based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) recommendations and follows the Service-Oriented Computing principles, decoupling its components and concrete technological aspects. The Reference nets technology, a type of high-level Petri nets belonging to the Object nets family, are used for the development of DENEB and also for the Web processes which are developed and executed on it.

    DENEB proposes the use of a message broker as the core of its architecture. This broker is based on the Linda coordination model and implements a mediation system which allows to extend the functionalities of the platform and also to externally expose some of its capabilities as services. Additionally, a dynamic loading component allows to acquire mediators and non-agreed workflows and protocols at runtime. This way, DENEB becomes a very suitable approach for the development of dynamic and flexible Web processes, able to adapt to the highly-competitive requirements imposed by SOC. The functionality of the techniques and mechanisms developed in DENEB has been shown by means of its application to several domains, from the integration of this approach with Software Engineering methodologies to the support for the most common process description standards, going through more technological application scenarios such as the Sensor Web initiative, proposed by the OGC consortium.