Project Context. This project will be carried out collaboratively with INRIA-Lille, France. Therefore, the master student will be given the opportunity to work closely with researchers and students from INRIA and possibly visit Lille for a period of time.
Background. A business process or business method is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product (serve a particular goal) for a particular customer or customers. Business processes are typically defined as composition of web services in a XML-based language under a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT)—the vision for bridging the gap between the physical world and enterprise systems— will have a strong impact on business processes [1,2]. This is because context information provided by IoT systems from the physical world can be used to optimize their execution and react to emergent situations in real time such as in home care situations. Moreover, physical objects, such as sensor nodes, can also execute parts of the business process logic.
Problem. The support of IoT-aware business processes, providing the information and functionalities of physical objects as web services, has recently been proposed. Because of the high dynamicity of IoT systems there is a need to be able to dynamically reconfigure parts of the associated business processes in response to the changes in the real world [2]. However, this topic is still in its infancy and various challenges remain to be addressed when the dynamicity of business processes comes into play.
Goal. This master project is focused on addressing this issue. In particular, the main goal of this project is to: 1) study an existing business process management tool with respect to its software architecture and provided API, 2) extend this tool with a set of software components that enable migration of parts of a given business process to a Android smart phone (or cloud).
The ND group has recently been working on these issues, in particular the migration of business processes to Android smart phones, as well as barriers and technological issues for integration of business processes to IoT systems. Therefore, the master student will be provided with practical background information about the technical and research challenges in this project. In particular, the researchers from INRIA-Lille have extensive knowledge and experience in programming Android smart phones. Additionally, the master student will need to study one of the following business process management tools: JBoss jBPM [4] or Activti [5], then study the exposed interfaces by this tools for process management, and finally develop a software tool to enable migration of parts of a business process to an Android device. It should be noted that both jBPM and Activiti are portable to Andriod OS, but Activiti is lighter in terms of resource usage.
The student in this project should have quite good knowledge in Java programming.
References
- Stefano Tranquillini et al., Process-Based Design and Integration of Wireless Sensor Network Applications, BPM 2012
- N. Glombitza et al. Using BPEL to Realize Business Processes for an Internet of Things. LNCS. 2011
- Kashif Sana Dar, Amir Taherkordi, Romain Rouvoy and Frank Eliassen , Adaptable Service Composition for Very-Large-Scale Internet of Things Systems, , Doctoral Symposium in the 12th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, Dec. 2011
- http://www.jboss.org/jbpm
- http://www.activiti.org/