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A technical review of an incident on March 21, 2007 that began at 00:50 a.m. and led to a two-hour blackout of the island of Rhodes electric power system is presented with the complete sequence, including all the relevant registered operational data as well as the on-site fi eld findings. A technical analysis of the disturbance was performed to determine the probable causes and factors that contributed to the duration of the disturbance. Since the system is an isolated one, it is particularly vulnerable to perturbations. The roles of system protection and wind power generation during the incident are examined. Conclusions of practical importance are drawn, including recommendations for corrective measures to be implemented for preventing disturbances of this kind from reoccurring in the future.

Process mining is not only about discovery and conformance checking of business processes. It is also focused on enhancing processes to improve the business performance. While from a business perspective this third main stream is definitely as important as the others if not even more, little research work has been conducted. The existing body of work on process enhancement mainly focuses on ensuring that the process model is adapted to incorporate behavior that is observed in reality. It is less focused on improving the performance of the process. This paper reports on a methodology that creates an enhanced model with an improved performance level. The enhancements of the model limit incorporated behavior to only those parts that do not violate any business rules. Finally, the enhanced model is kept as close to the original model as possible. The practical relevance and feasibility of the methodology is assessed through two case studies. The result shows that the process models improved through our methodology, in comparison with state-of the art techniques, have improved KPI levels while still adhering to the desired prescriptive model.

This paper presents a novel extension to the process tree model to support cancelation behavior, and proposes a novel process discovery technique to discover sound, fitting models with cancelation features. The proposed discovery technique relies on a generic error oracle function, and allows us to discover complex combinations of multiple, possibly nested cancelation regions based on observed behavior. An implementation of the proposed approach is available as a ProM plugin. Experimental results based on real-life event logs demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the approach.

Smart contracts gain rapid exposure since the inception of blockchain technology. Yet there is no unified ontology for smart contracts. Being categorized as coded contracts or substitutes of conventional legal contracts, there is a need to reduce the conceptual ambiguity of smart contracts. We applied enterprise ontology and model driven architectures to abstract smart contracts at the essential, infological and datalogical level to explain the system behind computation and platform independent smart contracts rather than its functional behavior. This conceptual paper introduces commitment-based smart contracts, in which a contract is viewed as a business exchange consisting of a set of reciprocal commitments. A smart contract ensures the automated execution of most of these commitments.

Distributing software processes by software producing organizations (SPOs) is emerging increasingly due to benefits that global software engineering (GSE) brings in terms of cost reduction, leveraging competencies, and market expansion. However, these organizations are facing communication and project control issues that can slow down the overall organization performance. Therefore, SPOs should be able to manage inter-dependencies among the tasks distributed to the globally dispersed teams. We analyze existing works and product software companies’ best practices in coordinating tasks in GSE. This paper specifically focuses on constructing methodological support for task coordination that can be influenced by the situational factors at the companies. The support comprises a framework and a method developed by using a method engineering approach. We introduce the framework that depicts the aspects that should be examined by companies and the method that elaborates the practices to guide companies to coordinate tasks in GSE projects. The validation results show that the framework and the method are accepted by experts regarding completeness and applicability to help SPOs in managing coordination among globally distributed teams.

The analysis of event data is particularly challenging when there is a lot of variability. Existing approaches can detect variants in very specific settings (e.g., changes of control-flow over time), or do not use statistical testing to decide whether a variant is relevant or not. In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised and generic technique to detect significant variants in event logs by applying existing, well-proven data mining techniques for recursive partitioning driven by conditional inference over event attributes. The approach has been fully implemented and is freely available as a ProM plugin. Finally, we validated our approach by applying it to a real-life event log obtained from a multinational Spanish telecommunications and broadband company, obtaining valuable insights directly from the event data.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of five international workshops held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in conjunction with the 26th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2014, in June 2014. The 24 full and eight short papers were carefully selected from 63 submissions. The five workshops were the First International Workshop on Advanced Probability and Statistics in Information Systems (APSIS), the First International Workshop on Advances in Services Design Based on the Notion of Capability, the Second International Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Information Systems Engineering (COGNISE), the Third Workshop on New Generation Enterprise and Business Innovation Systems (NGEBIS), and the 4th International Workshop on Information Systems Security Engineering (WISSE).

Today’s enterprises demand a high degree of compliance of business processes to meet regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel I-III. To ensure continuous guaranteed compliance, compliance management should be considered during all phases of the business process lifecycle; from the analysis and design to deployment, monitoring and evaluation. This paper introduces an integrated business process compliance management framework that incorporates design-time verification and runtime monitoring approaches. The nutshell of the approach is the Compliance Request Language (CRL), which is a high-level pattern-based language for the abstract specification of compliance requirements. From CRL expressions, formal compliance rules can be automatically generated, thereby eliminating the need for business and compliance experts to learn and use complex low-level formal languages. Formalized compliance rules enable automated approaches to be used for the static verification and dynamic monitoring of business processes. An integrated prototypical tool-suite is developed as a proof-of-concept to help validating the applicability of the approaches, and validated by experiment with two real-life case studies.

The increasing complexity of the business transaction results in a higher potential risk in terms of SLA violation. The fulfillment of the QoS constraints specified in global SLA can be threatened at any time by different unexpected events that could occur during the execution of a business transaction. Unfortunately, there is no solution found that can efficiently mitigate this risk. Some of the current business transaction monitoring and managing solutions can monitor business transaction and report fault only after it happens. The framework proposed in this paper, monitors business transactions, computes potential risks and performs proactively adaptation actions in order to avoid global SLA violation that could causes transaction abortion.

Contemporary cloud technologies face insurmountable obstacles. They follow a pull-based, producer-centric trajectory to development where cloud consumers have to ‘squeeze and bolt’ applications onto cloud APIs. They also introduce a monolithic SaaS/PaaS/IaaS stack where a one-size-fits-all mentality and vendor lock-in prevail. As a consequence consumers cannot mix and match functionality from diverse tiers of the cloud stack – horizontally or vertically – dynamically configuring it to address their needs. This paper presents an approach that overcomes these obstacles by providing an innovative reference architecture, an enhanced cloud delivery model which breaks down the rigidity of the cloud stack and transforms it into modular and easily combined components, and a complete integration and management environment that offers integration-as-a-service functionality.

Web service technology provides basic infrastructure for deploying collaborative business processes. Web Service security standards and protocols aim to provide secure communication and conversation between service providers and consumers. Still, for a client calling a Web service it is difficult to ascertain that a particular service instance satisfies—at execution time—specific non-functional properties. In this paper we introduce the notion of certified Web service assurance, characterizing how service consumers can specify the set of security properties that a service should satisfy. Also, we illustrate a mechanism to re-check non-functional properties when the execution context changes. To this end, we introduce the concept of context-aware certificate, and describe a dynamic, context-aware service discovery environment.

Current cloud solutions are fraught with problems. They introduce a monolithic cloud stack that imposes vendor lock-in and donot permit developers to mix and match services freely from diverse cloud service tiers and configure them dynamically to address application needs. Cloud blueprinting is a novel model-driven approach that allows developers syndicate, configure, and deploy virtual service-based application payloads on virtual machine and resource pools in the cloud. Cloud blueprinting helps developers automatically provision services, effectively manage workload segmentation and portability (i.e., the seamless movement of workloads across many platforms and clouds), and manage virtual service instances, all while taking into account the availability of cloud resources and accelerating the deployment of new composed cloud services. Cloud blueprinting equips developers with a unified approach that allows them configure cloud applications by pooling appropriate resources at any layer of the cloud stack - irrespectively whether these are provided from multiple cloud providers.

Today’s business environment demands a high rate of compliance of service-enabled business processes with which enterprises are required to cope. Thus, a comprehensive compliance management framework is required such that compliance management must crosscut all the stages of the complete business process lifecycle, starting from the very early stages of business process design. Formalizing compliance requirements based on a formal foundation of an expressive logical language enables the application of associated verification and analysis tools to ensure the compliance. In this paper, we have conducted a comparative analysis between three languages that can be used as the formal foundation of business process compliance requirements, focusing on design-time phase. Two main families of languages have been identified, which are: the temporal and deontic families of logic. In particular, we have considered LTL, CTL and FCL. The comparative analysis is based on the capabilities and limitations of each language and a set of required identified features.

Differences in Web Service interfaces can be classified as signature or protocol incompatibilities, and techniques exist to resolve one or the other of these issues but rarely both. This paper describes complex event processing approach to resolving both signature and protocol incompatibilities existing between Web Service interfaces. The solution uses a small set of operators that can be applied to incoming messages individually or in combination to modify the structure, type and number of messages sent to the destination. The paper describes how CEP-based adapters, deployable in CEP engines, can be generated from automata representations of the operators through a standard process and presents a proof-of-concept implementation.

Current cloud-based service offerings are often provided as one-size-fits-all solutions and give little or no room for customization. This limits the ability for application developers to pick and choose offerings from multiple software, platform, infrastructure service providers and configure them dynamically and in an optimal fashion to address their application requirements. Furthermore, combining different independent cloud-based services necessitates a uniform description format that facilitates their design, customization, and composition. Hence, there is a need to break down the monolithic offerings into loosely-coupled cloud services offered by multiple providers that can be flexibly customized and (re-)composed in different settings. We propose in this paper the Blueprint concept - a uniform abstract description for cloud service offerings that may cross different cloud computing layers, i.e. software, platform and infrastructure. Using the proposed Blueprint Template for engineering cloud service offerings will solve these shortcomings and subsequently lower the barrier to entry for cloud computing.

Web services allow new and improved ways for enterprise applications to communicate and integrate with each other over the Web and, as such, are having a profound effect on both the worlds of business and of software development. The new edition of this bestselling book offers a comprehensive and up to date treatment of web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), giving you all you need to know to gain a solid foundation in this area. Building upon the clear, accessible approach of the first edition, it provides a complete introduction to the concepts, principles, technology and standards of web services. The book also provides an in depth examination of good design and development practises for SOA applications in organisations.

Today’s business climate demands business processes to meet many compliance regulations that require all enterprises to review their processes and ensure that they satisfy the set of relevant compliance requirements. Compliance management should be considered from the very early stages of business process design, thus achieving compliance by design. In this paper, we give a brief overview of an approach for managing business process compliance during design-time phase of business process lifecycle. We also discuss the roadmap for the key components and their relationship for a comprehensive design-time compliance support.