Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/aghose Recent documents in Professor Aditya K. Ghose en-us Sun, 04 Jan 2009 03:31:43 PST 3600 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/28 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/28 Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:38:48 PDT Business processes represent the operational capabilities of an organization. In order to ensure process continuity, the effective management of risk becomes an area of key concern. In this paper we propose an approach for supporting risk identification with the use of higher-level organizational models. We provide some intuitive metrics for extracting measures of actor criticality, and vulnerability from organizational models. This helps direct risk management to areas of critical importance within organization models. Additionally, the information can be used to assess alternative organizational structures in domains where risk mitigation is crucial. At the process level, these measures can be used to help direct improvements to the robustness and failsafe capabilities of critical or vulnerable processes. We believe our novel approach, will provide added benefits when used with other approaches to risk management during business process management, that do not reference the greater organizational context during risk assessment. M. Bhuiyan http://works.bepress.com/aghose/27 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/27 Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:38:44 PDT Process inter-operation is characterized as cooperative interactions among loosely coupled autonomous constituents to adaptively fulfill system-wide purpose. Issues of inconsistency can be anticipated in inter-operating processes given their independent management and design. To reduce inconsistency (that may contribute to failures) effective methods for statically verifying behavioral interoperability are required. This paper contributes a method for practical, semantic verification of interoperating processes (as represented with BPMN models). We provide methods to evaluate consistency during process design where annotation of the immediate effect of tasks and sub-processes has been provided. Furthermore, some guidelines are defined against common models of inter-operation for scoping traceability to possible causes of inconsistency. This supports subsequent resolution efforts. G. Koliadis http://works.bepress.com/aghose/26 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/26 Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:38:39 PDT Agent-oriented conceptual modeling notations such as i* represents an interesting approach for modeling early phase requirements which includes organizational contexts, stakeholder intentions and rationale. On the other hand, Unified Modeling Language (UML) is suitable for later phases of requirement capture which usually focus on completeness, consistency, and automated verification of functional requirements for the new system. In this paper, we propose a methodology to facilitate and support the combined use of notation for modeling requirement engineering process in a synergistic fashion. For organizational modeling/early phase requirements capturing we use the i* modeling framework that describes the organizational relationships among various actors and their rationales. For late (functional) requirements specification, we rely on UML Activity Diagram. M. Bhuiyan http://works.bepress.com/aghose/25 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/25 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:27 PDT Web Service composition is the ability of one business to provide value-added services to its customers through the composition of basic Web services, possibly offered by different companies [12]. Because of distributed responsibilities, ownership and control, it is often not feasible to acquire all information needed for service composition. These characteristics are fundamental to service oriented computing but make it inherently difficult to avoid service conflicts. To reason about and adapt to a changing environment, in this work, we will extend current OWL-S by introducing the concept of service assumptions which allow reasoning with incomplete information. Furthermore, together with the proposed service assumptions, a sequence of rules is proposed to describe all permitted behaviors in service composition context. Z. Lu http://works.bepress.com/aghose/24 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/24 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:23 PDT Agent-oriented Conceptual Modelling (AoCM, as exemplified by the i* notation by E. Yu (1995)), represents an interesting approach to modelling early phase requirements that is particularly effective in capturing organizational contexts, stake-holder intentions and rationale. There are significant benefits in using formal methods for the development of computer systems and improving their quality. We propose a methodology which permits the use of these two otherwise disparate approaches in a complementary and synergistic fashion for requirements engineering. A. Krishna http://works.bepress.com/aghose/23 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/23 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:21 PDT Hypertree decomposition is a powerful technique for transforming near-acyclic CSPs into acyclic CSPs. Acyclic CSPs have efficient, polynomial time solving techniques, and so these conversions are of interest to the constraints community. We present here an improvement on the opt-k-decomp algorithm for finding an optimal hypertree decomposition. P. Harvey http://works.bepress.com/aghose/22 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/22 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:18 PDT Process inter-operation is characterized as cooperative interactions among loosely coupled autonomous constituents to adaptively fulfill system-wide purpose. Issues of inconsistency can be anticipated in inter-operating processes given their independent management and design. To reduce inconsistency (that may contribute to failures) effective methods for statically verifying behavioral interoperability are required. This paper contributes a method for practical, semantic verification of interoperating processes (as represented with BPMN models). We provide methods to evaluate consistency during process design where annotation of the immediate effect of tasks and sub-processes has been provided. Furthermore, some guidelines are defined against common models of inter-operation for scoping traceability to possible causes of inconsistency. This supports subsequent resolution efforts. A. K. Ghose http://works.bepress.com/aghose/21 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/21 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:15 PDT A key impediment to the widespread adoption of web services is the relatively limited set of tools available to deal with Quality-of-Service (QoS) factors. QoS factors pose several difficult challenges in how they may be articulated. While the functional requirements of a service can be represented as predicates to be satisfied by the target system, QoS factors are effectively statements of objectives to be maximized or minimized. QoS requirements occur naturally as local specifications of preference. Dealing with QoS factors is therefore a multi-objective optimization problem. In effect, these objectives are never fully satisfied, but satisficed to varying degrees. In evaluating alternative design decisions, we need to trade-off varying degrees of satisfaction of potentially mutually contradictory non-functional requirements. One key contribution of this work is the use of the Hierarchical Constraint Logical Programming (HCLP) framework in dealing with functional requirements, business process rules and Quality of Service (QoS) factors. We show how functional requirements and business process rules can be defined as hard constraints, QoS factors can be formulated as soft constraints and how the machinery associated with constraint hierarchies can be used to evaluate the alternative trade-offs involved in seeking to satisfy a set of QoS factors that might pull in different directions. We apply also this approach to the problem of reasoning about web service selection and composition, and establish that significant value can be derived from such an exercise. Y. Guan http://works.bepress.com/aghose/20 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/20 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:12 PDT Compliance issues impose significant management and reporting requirements upon organizations.We present an approach to enhance business process modeling notations with the capability to detect and resolve many broad compliance related issues. We provide a semantic characterization of a minimal revision strategy that helps us obtain compliant process models from models that might be initially non-compliant, in a manner that accommodates the structural and semantic dimensions of parsimoniously annotated process models. We also provide a heuristic approach to compliance resolution using a notion of compliance patterns. This allows us to partially automate compliance resolution, leading to reduced levels of analyst involvement and improved decision support. A. K. Ghose http://works.bepress.com/aghose/19 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/19 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:10 PDT A key impediment to the widespread adoption of web services is the is the relatively limited set of tools available to deal with Quality-of-Service (QoS) factors [12]. QoS factors pose several difficult challenges in how they may be articulated. While the functional requirements of a service can be represented as predicates to be satisfied by the target system, QoS factors are effectively statements of objectives to be maximized or minimized. QoS requirements occur naturally as local specifications of preference. Dealing with QoS factors is therefore a multi-objective optimization problem. In effect, these objectives are never fully satisfied, but satisficed to varying degrees. In evaluating alternative design decisions, we need to trade-off varying degrees of satisfaction of potentially mutually contradictory non-functional requirements. One key contribution of this work is the use of the constraint hierarchies framework from hierarchical constraint logic programming framework in dealing with Quality of Service(QoS) factors . We show how QoS factors can be formulated as soft constraints and how the machinery associated with constraint hierarchies can be used to evaluate the alternative trade-offs involved in seeking to satisfy a set of QoS factors that might pull in different directions. We apply also this approach to the problem of reasoning about web service selection and composition, and establish that significant value can be derived from such an exercise. Y. Guan