Section: New Results

Business Process Management - Service Oriented Computing

Processes have received a lot of attention in the last decade and proposed workflow solutions for office automation. The topic is subject today to a lot of interests carried by the expansion of business on the Web. However it is required need to satisfy new application requirements and execution contexts. We are interested in different aspects of process engineering: the management of change in business process; modeling and implementing Quality of Services properties (time, security, constraints...); composing existing process fragments of different nature and models; decentralizing a global process for a distributed execution with organizational constraints; process governance. Most of these aspects are considered within the frame of Web services and/or peer to peer architectures, and we are also interested in proposing new models of process for new applications domains.

Optimized decentralization and synchronization of cross-organizational business processes

Participants : Claude Godart, Walid Fdhila.

Globalization and the increase of competitive pressures created the need for agility in business processes, including the ability to outsource, offshore, or otherwise distribute its once-centralized business processes or parts thereof. While hampered thus far by limited infrastructure capabilities, the increase in bandwidth and connectivity and decrease in communication cost have removed these limits. An organization that aims for such fragmentation of its business processes needs to be able to separate the process into different parts. Therefore, there is a growing need for the ability to fragment one's business processes in an agile manner, and be able to distribute and wire these fragments so that their combined execution recreates the function of the original process. Additionally, this needs to be done in a networked environment, which is where Service Oriented Architecture plays a vital role.

Our work is focused on solving some of the core challenges resulting from the need to dynamically restructure enterprise interactions. Restructuring such interactions corresponds to the fragmentation of intra and inter enterprise business process models. It describes how to identify, create, and execute process fragments without loosing the operational semantics of the original process models. It also proposes methods to optimize the fragmentation process in terms of QoS properties and communication overhead [21] , [10] . Moreover, it presents a framework to model web service choreographies in Event Calculus formal language.

Walid Fdhila has successfully defended his thesis on October, 7th [1] .

A Declarative Approach to Web Services Computing

Participants : Olivier Perrin, Ehtesham Zahoor, Claude Godart.

Web services composition and monitoring are still highly active and widely studied research directions. Little work however has been done in integrating these two dimensions using an unified framework and formalism. Classical approaches introduce an additional layer for handling the composition monitoring and thus do not provide the important execution time violations feedback to the composition process. This year, we proposed the DISC framework which aims to provide a highly declarative event-oriented model to accommodate various aspects such as composition design and exceptions, data relationships and constraints, business calculations and decisions, compliance regulations, security or temporal requirements. Then, the same model is used for combining the control of the composition definition, its execution and the composition monitoring. We proposed a service oriented architecture with a flexible logic, including complex event patterns and choreographies, business oriented rules, and dynamic control of compositions. Advantages of this unified framework are the higher level of abstraction to design, execute, and reason upon a composition, the flexibility of the approach, and the ability to easily include non-functional requirements such as temporal or security issues and we implement the DISC framework using the Discrete Event Calculus reasoner. Ehtesham Zahoor defended his thesis in November [3] , and had presented the DISC framework at ICWS 2011 [20] .

We also continued the previous work initiated within the Associate Team INRIA VanaWeb about the provisioning of Web services composition using constraints solvers. The approach consists in instantiating this abstract representation of a composite Web service by selecting the most appropriate concrete Web services. This instantiation is based on constraint programming techniques which allow matching Web services according to a given request. The proposal performs this instantiation in a distributed manner, i.e., the solvers for each service type are solving some constraints at one level, and they are forwarding the rest of the request (modified by the local solution) to the next services. When a service cannot provision part of the composition, a distributed backtrack mechanism enables to change previous solutions (i.e., provisions). A major interest of this approach is to preserve privacy: solutions are not sent to the whole composition, services know only the services to which they are connected, and parts of the request that are already solved are removed from the next requests.

Alignement between Business Process and Service Architecture

Participants : François Charoy, Karim Dahman, Claude Godart.

In the continuation of work done previously on change management during process execution, we are conducting work on the governance of change at the business level and on its implications at the architecture and infrastructure level of an information system. Last year was devoted to the definition of the transformation rules that allowed to go from a business model to an IT model, i.e. a transformation between model based on different paradigms. During this year, a great deal of effort has been done in order to extend our work on Business to IT alignment management. Our goal is still to maintain this alignment at the lowest possible cost when the business process are changing [9] . Further than that we are trying to describe and validated an engineering method to help designer to maintain this alignment [8] .

Distributed Processes with Security Constraints

Participants : Olivier Perrin, Aymen Baouab, Claude Godart.

Distributed processes governance is a very important challenge. In the past, we proposed various approaches for dealing with distribution, particularly for computing a set of sub-processes that can be distributed and that are equivalent to a given process. However, we did not deal with non-functional requirements as the focus was only on control and data flows. In this work, we try to deal not only with functional requirements, but also with non-functional requirements, in particular the security aspects. With Aymen Baouab, we already proposed an event-based approach that is able to verify that choreographies are valid with respect to given constraints (security constraints for instance) [7] .

A Crisis Management Process Model

Participants : François Charoy, Joern Franke.

As said before, crisis management has been a very fruitfull domain to investigate new approaches in the domain of high value, human driven activity coordination in a multi organisational setting. Our work benefits from a large amount of use cases and detailed accounts of previous dramatic events to analyze requirements and confront our proposals. 2011 has been devoted to terminate the evaluation and the validation of the model that we have defined during the previous years. It has also been devoted to complete the work done in the previous years on the inter organisational dimension of the coordination management [11] . The entire contribution on crisis management, i.e. the model, the system and the evaluation are described in Joern Franke PhD document [2]

In order to try to leverage this work in a more information system oriented way, we have started some collaboration to confront our view on coordination with existing reference model for humanitarian operations[12] . We are currently looking for alternative financing vehicle in order to continue this work.

This work was conducted as a cooperation with SAP Research Sophia Antipolis and partially funded by a CIFRE Grant.