Blockchain Papers

Richard Hull, Vishal Batra, Yimin Chen, Alin Deutsch · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Klaus-Benedikt Schultis

Large-scale organizations, such as Siemens, develop a broad field of products for varying domains. Software constitutes a major innovation and cost factor to their development. Organizational-wide reuse of software across products, even across domains, gives these organizations a competitive advantage. This involves large-scale reuse approaches where software is developed in a decentralized manner by several internal, yet self-contained organizational units -- those units are separate profit centers with own business objectives, organizationally independent with own product management, and have widely autonomous processes and software-engineering life cycles. I define those systems as internal software ecosystems. The intra-organizational, yet decentralized development context increases the amount and complexity of dependencies among both software assets and the responsible organizational units. This significantly impacts collaboration in software engineering. Traditional process-centric coordination mechanisms become increasingly inefficient, calling for a suitable software architecture to enable effective collaboration. However, in order to make informed architecture decisions, applied modes of collaboration and resulting architecture challenges must be understood. As first major contribution in this thesis, I provide strong empirical evidence on collaboration and resulting architecture challenges for two of the largest internal software ecosystems at Siemens -- based on a total of 46 hours of semi-structured interviews with 17 leading software architects from all involved organizational units. I identify three collaboration models on a continuum that ranges from high to low coupling and a classification of architecture challenges together with a qualitative and quantitative exposure of the identified recurring hurdles. My results outline a broad field of real-world challenges that need to be investigated by researchers, and my results support practitioners who follow the collaboration models to make informed architecture decisions based on empirical evidence. Besides taking informed architecture decisions, it is equally important to manage and control adherence to the specified architecture at an ecosystem-wide level. However, feature and schedule pressure regularly require to accept architecture violations by several organizational units, which decreases quality and increases maintenance costs. As main finding of my investigation on collaboration and architecture challenges, I identify the explicit and systematic management of architecture violations as the key challenge for internal software ecosystems, in particular the lack of developer support for resolving violations. As second major contribution within this thesis, I elaborate the TrAViM approach, a framework that comprises seven violation-management capabilities for internal software ecosystems. Their main purpose is developer support for resolving architecture violations, aiming to reduce the developers' effort required to handle them. I develop a prototype that instantiates the approach. Using the prototype, I conduct an in-depth case study on the capabilities' usefulness, involving 9 experts from my study systems. All of them expressed that the capabilities are highly valuable and hold great potential to ease violation management for large-scale software engineering.

Wietse Kuipers

Enterprise systems play a central role in the business processes and management of data within an organization. However it is not uncommon for organizations to posses a multitude of autonomous systems. This thesis examines the way organizations can integrate financial data from different autonomous source systems and examines different factors that can have an impact on data integration processes. The empirical findings were gathered through a case study at Sandvik, a large Swedish industrial firm, making use of qualitative research techniques. The findings contribute to create an in-depth understanding of financial data integration processes. The empirical findings show how an organization can accomplish financial data integration without tight coupling of autonomous systems. Moreover the research contributes by describing various organization and technological factors that impact data integration. The findings indicate that a decentralized organizational structure and singular system architecture play an important role in financial data integration processes. Hereby the research helps to further explore the topic integration within enterprise system research and provides context behind the organizational and technological factors that influence financial data integration processes.

Ingo Weber, Xiwei Xu, Régis Riveret, Guido Governatori · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Alex Norta, Anis Ben Othman, Kuldar Taveter

Recent blockchain-technology related innovations enable the governance of collaborating decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) to engage in agile business-network collaborations that are based on the novel concept of smart contracting. DAOs utilize service-oriented cloud computing in a loosely coupled collaboration lifecycle with the main steps of setup, enactment, possible rollbacks and finally, an orderly termination. This lifecycle supports the selection of services provided and used by DAOs, smart contract negotiations, and behavior monitoring during enactment with the potential for breach management. Based on a sound understanding of the collaboration lifecycle in a Governance- as-a-Service (GaaS)-platform, a new type of conflict management must safeguard business-semantics induced consistency rules. This conflict management involves breach detection with recovery aspects. To fill the detected gap, we employ a formal design-notation that comprises the definition of structural and behavioral properties for exploring conflict-related exception- and compensation management during a decentralized collaboration. With the formal approach, we generate a highly dependable DAO-GaaS conflict model that does not collapse under left-behind clutter such as orphaned processes and exponentially growing database entries that require an unacceptable periodic GaaS reset.

Alex Norta, Lixin Ma, Yucong Duan, Addi Rull · 6 authors

Meaningfully automating sociotechnical business collaboration promises efficiency-, effectiveness-, and quality increases for realizing next-generation decentralized autonomous organizations. For automating business-process aware cross-organizational operations, the development of existing choreography languages is technology driven and focuses less on sociotechnical suitability and expressiveness concepts and properties that recognize the interaction between people in organizations and technology in workplaces. This gap our suitability- and expressiveness exploration fills by means of a cross-organizational collaboration ontology that we map as a proof-of-concept evaluation to the eSourcing Markup Language (eSML). The latter we test in a feasibility case study to meaningfully support the automation of business collaboration. The developed eSourcing ontology and eSML is replicable for exploring strengths and weaknesses of other choreography languages.

Gebre Miruts Beyene

This study was about the civil service leadership role to implement civil service reform in Tigray Region. In Ethiopia, civil service leaders are required to contribute towards the development of public sectors. To this regard, the district level decentralization in Ethiopia let civil service leaders to provide high quality public services and to ensure freedom of choice and customer participation since early 1991.The 1990s was the period of change in government from Central Planning to Federal system. It was during this time that the government has tried to restructure the civil service system as a structural adjustment with federal outlook. Not only theoretically but also in practical discipline, civil service leaders have the responsibility to implement effectively government policies and strategies. It was with this intention that, the autonomous Ethiopia civil service institutions in general and that of Tigray region’s in particular were established and the civil service leaders were begun to operate independently the civil service organizations. It is believed that, a successful leadership is the cornerstone of government institutions to implement public policy which intern can have a direct impact on the development performance of a nation. However, some empirical evidence indicates that, the civil service leadership approach is inhibited by many administrative bureaucracies. Therefore, the objective of this journal article was to examine leadership role in implementing civil service reform in Ethiopia: the case of Tigray regional state. To examine the leadership role, the relevant data was collected both from primary and secondary data sources. Finally, the factors that impede the role of leadership to implement the civil service reform were identified and the discussion was concluded that regardless of the institutional framework in-place, the civil service leaders were ineffective and were not played their role effectively as a result of the inadequate appointment of civil service officials and process owners.

Alex Norta

No abstract is available for this record.

Torsten O. Paulussen, Armin Heinzl, Christian Becker

The health sector is a central domain in every economy. It is challenged by progressing costs and funding issues. Hospitals play a major role for the examination and treatment of patients. The sequence how patients are assigned to hospital units determines the quality of treatment, the resource utilization, as well as the patients’ overall treatment time. Thus, efficient scheduling of patients in hospitals is crucial. Current approaches disregard the decentral organization in hospitals and neglect the varying pathway of patients since they often focus on one single unit solely. We propose an agent-based coordination mechanism that overcomes these limitations. Patients and hospital resources are modeled as autonomous software agents which follow their own objectives. This reflects the decentralized structure in hospitals. Agents are coordinated by a distributed mechanism where software agents improve their situation through negotiations which moves towards an overall pareto-optimum. We show promising evaluations based on experiments.

Jan Ole Berndt

No abstract is available for this record.

Jon G. Hall, Lucia Rapanotti

No abstract is available for this record.

Mercedes Canavesio, Ernesto Martínez

No abstract is available for this record.

Thibaud Monteiro, Daniel Roy, Didier Anciaux

A new approach of coordination of decisions in a multi site system is proposed. It is based this approach on a multi-agent concept and on the principle of distributed network of enterprises. For this purpose, each enterprise is defined as autonomous and performs simultaneously at the local and global levels. The basic component of our approach is a so-called Virtual Enterprise Node (VEN), where the enterprise network is represented as a set of tiers (like in a product breakdown structure). Within the network, each partner constitutes a VEN, which is in contact with several customers and suppliers. Exchanges between the VENs ensure the autonomy of decision, and guarantiee the consistency of information and material flows. Only two complementary VEN agents are necessary: one for external interactions, the Negotiator Agent (NA) and one for the planning of internal decisions, the Planner Agent (PA). If supply problems occur in the network, two other agents are defined: the Tier Negotiator Agent (TNA) working at the tier level only and the Supply Chain Mediator Agent (SCMA) working at the level of the enterprise network. These two agents are only active when the perturbation occurs. Otherwise, the VENs process the flow of information alone. With this new approach, managing enterprise network becomes much more transparent and looks like managing a simple enterprise in the network. The use of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) allows physical distribution of the decisional system, and procures a heterarchical organization structure with a decentralized control that guaranties the autonomy of each entity and the flexibility of the network.

Franco Guidi-Polanco, Claudio Cubillos, Giuseppe Menga

This work presents our agent-based architecture for the development of Global Automation Systems. These systems consist of software applications that manage all the processes in a network of enterprises, in distributed, decentralized and autonomous way. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Dimitrios G. Katehakis, Manolis Tsiknakis, Stelios C. Orphanoudakis

Healthcare is usually delivered within certain organizational boundaries and information produced at each site is managed by isolated autonomous clinical information systems. In some cases point-to-point communication is enabled, facilitating the exchange of information. In contrast, integrated regional health telematics; networks enable accessibility to information and services without visible organizational boundaries, to provide decentralized healthcare through integrated services for seamless and personalized information delivery. This has the advantage that enables informed citizens to have an impact on the healthcare system and to be more concerned and care for their own health. The current vision comprises affordable access to healthcare resources and services for all citizens, thus making medical expertise a shared resource wherever and whenever needed. Important areas in which information society technologies are likely to have a significant impact include those of pre-hospital health emergencies, remote monitoring of patients with chronic conditions, and medical collaboration through sharing of health-related information resources. Accessibility to these and other media-rich, user-oriented. services, in the context of the emerging global information society, will be supported by a healthcare information infrastructure, which can achieve effective horizontal integration of networked information sources.

Schahram Dustdar

Web services can be seen as a newly emerging research area for Service-oriented Computing and their implementation in Service-oriented Architectures. Web services are self-contained, self-describing modular applications or components providing services. Web services may be dynamically aggregated, composed, and enacted as Web services Workflows. This requires frameworks and interaction protocols for their co-ordination and transaction support. In a Service-oriented Computing setting, transactions are more complex, involve multiple parties (roles), span many organizations, and may be long-running, consisting of a highly decentralized service partner and performed by autonomous entities. A Service-oriented Transaction Model has to provide comprehensive support for long-running propositions including negotiations, conversations, commitments, contracts, tracking, payments, and exception handling. Current transaction models and mechanisms including their protocols and primitives do not sufficiently cater for quality-aware and long running transactions comprising loosely-coupled (federated) service partners and resources. Web services transactions require co-ordination behavior provided by a traditional transaction mechanism to control the operations and outcome of an application. Furthermore, Web services transactions require the capability to handle the co-ordination of processing outcomes or results from multiple services in a more flexible manner. This requires more relaxed forms of transactions—those that do not strictly have to abide by the ACID properties—such as loosely-coupled collaboration and workflows. Furthermore, there is a need to group Web services into applications that require some form of correlation, but do not necessarily require transactional behavior. The purpose of this paper is to provide a state-of-the-art review and overview of some proposed standards surrounding Web services composition, co-ordination, and transaction. In particular the Business Process Execution Language for Web services (BPEL4WS), its co-ordination, and transaction frameworks (WS-Co-ordination and WS-Transaction) are discussed.

Kenneth M. Anderson, Aaron Andersen, Neet Wadhwani, Laura M. Bartolo

The Metis project is developing workflow technology designed for use in digital libraries by avoiding the assumptions made by traditional workflow systems. In particular, digital libraries have highly distributed sets of stake-holders who nevertheless must work together to perform shared activities. Hence, traditional assumptions that all members of a workflow belong to the same organization, work in the same fashion, or have access to similar computing platforms are invalid. The Metis approach makes use of event-based workflows to support the distributed nature of digital library workflow and employs techniques to make the resulting technology lightweight, flexible, and integrated with the Web. This paper describes the conceptual framework behind the Metis approach as well as a prototype which implements the framework. The prototype represents a proof-of-concept of the Metis framework and approach as we show how it can both model and execute a peer review workflow drawn from a real-world digital library. After describing related work, the paper concludes with a discussion of future research opportunities in the area of digital library workflow and outlines how Metis is being deployed to a small set of digital libraries for additional evaluation.

Masashi Katsumata, Haruo Hayami

Recently, the autonomous decentralized heterogeneous environment has been realized by integrating CORBA and Internet technology. On the other hand, workflow management systems have been introduced into organizations. However, it is difficult to apply workflow management system to coordinate workflow across the multiple organization. The next step of introducing workflow in organizations requires technology to link the workflow across multiple organizations. We call this interworkflow. We propose interworkflow for the autonomous decentralized heterogeneous environment and discuss its functional model.

Vijayalakshmi Atluri, Soon Ae Chun

No abstract is available for this record.

M. Oku, M. Omura, J. Kann, Mario Perrone · 5 authors

An automation system architecture for implementing autonomous decentralized systems (ADSs) called Hi-Cell is described. A project model of human organization featuring activities such as teaming is proposed as an analog for Hi-Cell behavior. Familiar team behaviors such as task allocation, learning, and cooperation are explored in the automation domain.>

Vijayalakshmi Atluri, Soon Ae Chun, Pietro Mazzoleni

Workflow systems are gaining importance as an infrastructure for automating inter-organizational interactions, such as those in Electronic Commerce. Execution of inter-organiz-ational workflows may raise a number of security issues including those related to conflict-of-interest among competing organizations. Moreover, in such an environment, a centralized Workflow Management System is not desirable because: (i) it can be a performance bottleneck, and (ii) the systems are inherently distributed, heterogeneous and autonomous in nature. In this paper, we propose an approach to realize decentralized workflow execution, in which the workflow is divided into partitions called self-describing workflows, and handled by a light weight workflow management component, called workflow stub, located at each organizational agent. We argue that placing the task execution agents that belong to the same conflict-of-interest class in one self-describing workflow may lead to unfair, and in some cases, undesirable results, akin to being on the wrong side of the Chinese wall. We propose a Chinese wall security model for the decentralized workflow environment to resolve such problems, and a restrictive partitioning solution to enforce the proposed model.

Michael Gillmann, Jeanine Weißenfels, German Shegalov, Wolfgang Wonner · 5 authors

The Mentor-lite prototype has been developed within the research project “Architecture, Configuration, and Administration of Large Workflow Management Systems” funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG). It has evolved from its predecessor Mentor [1], but aims at a simpler architecture. The main goal of Mentor-lite has been to build a light-weight, extensible, and tailorable workflow management system (WFMS) with small footprint and easy-to-use administration capabilities. Our approach is to provide only kernel functionality inside the workflow engine, and consider system components like history management and worklist management as extensions on top of the kernel. The key point to retain the light-weight nature is that these extensions are implemented as workflows themselves. The workflow specifications are interpreted at runtime, which is a crucial prerequisite for flexible exception handling and dynamic modifications during runtime. The interpreter performs a stepwise execution of the workflow specification according to its formal semantics. For each step, the activities to be performed by the step are determined and started. Mentor-lite supports a protocol for distributed execution of workflows spread across multiple workflow engines. This support is crucial for workflows that span large, decentralized enterprises with largely autonomous organizational units or even cross multiple enterprises to form so-called “virtual enterprises”. A communication manager is responsible for sending and receiving synchronization messages between the engines. In order to guarantee a consistent global state even in the presence of site or network failures, we have built reliable message queues using the CORBA Object Transaction Services. For administration, Mentor-lite provides a Java-based workbench for workflow design, workflow partitioning across multiple workflow servers, and a Java-based runtime monitoring tool.

Ernesto Martínez

No abstract is available for this record.

Frank Dignum, G.J.P.M. Houben

This paper describes a new approach to design modern information systems that offer an integrated access to the data and knowledge that is available in local applications. By integrating the local data management activities into one transparent information distribution process, modern organizations can offer better support for its workers in the execution and coordination of their work activities. Observing practical applications of decentralized, autonomous and heterogeneous information systems we see deficiencies in currently available approaches to model such information systems. They do not acknowledge the pivotal role that (informal) communicating workers play in the context of an entire organization. The interaction between the members of social and informal groups of employees makes it possible that (in many of today’s information-intensive enterprises) the local structured procedures can be effectively and flexibly integrated into global work processes supporting the business goals. Traditional design techniques concentrate on either the structured local procedures (and its local database applications), the structured global process (and its global business goals), or the informal (less structured) communication between individuals. We suggest to combine an activity-based model (suited to describe the structured parts of the processes) with a goal- or conversation-based model to tie the different elements together. Using an agent architecture we show that it is possible to implement this integrated approach. The different types of cooperating agents support the individual workers by assessing the goal of the activity, the applicability of the standard procedure, and the availability of alternative knowledge and information in order to supply the necessary information.