Research On The Issues In Decentralized Smart Process Applications

With the development of Internet and related technologies, such as WEB service and SOA, Internet has changed its role from a single information promulgating platform to a computing infrastructure supporting complicated applications and massive business cooperative processes. The business modes of organizations and the lives of individuals are being changed by the above fact. And many manifest changes of business process, including scales and relationships among collaborative partners, application domains and the participating modes and roles of user, have been brought out. First, Internet provides possibilities of collaboration for any organization or individual which have exceeded the limitation of business domains, regions and amount. The relationships among collaborative partners are becoming more flexible, open and free, and sometimes there isn' t any uniform organization in reality which is called decentralized relationships. Second, the application scenarios, which were involved in the relatively mature and regular business applications before, have also saturated into every detail of personal lives. Due to the fact of informal or individual requirements raised by these numerous users, it is impossible and unrealistic to define a universal process model for all users or design specific models for each user. The popular users would not analysis the processes and create models using specific modeling tools as the analysts or designers in enterprises. And also they need more friendly, natural and humanized interaction modes during the execution of processes. Third, the possible web services with inconsistent interfaces spreading over Internet provide more choices for the task performers in business process, which have brought out great influences and promotions to the relative technologies in process applications.Considering the new features and requirements of process applications in Internet computing environment, many problems appear in traditional business modes. Traditional process applications, usually based on business analysis and modeling, adopt center-based management mode, which has the advantage of simple construction and easiness to control. However, with the increase of collaborative scale and development of more flexible and free relationships among the business partners, centralized mode exposes obvious constraints on the features of opening ability, flexibility, refractivity and expansibility of applications, which are most important for constructing large scale collaborative complicated applications on Internet. In addition, based on definite model and normative definition, tradition process management focuses on the regular and mature users in the methods of requirements capture, process modeling and interaction modes, which are not applicable for the common users on Internet.Based on the features of requirements and the changes of scenarios in current technology and application background, this paper names the more flexible and agile, Internet-based and process-oriented complicated applications as smart process applications. In the smart process applications, with the resources of web services overspreading Internet, collaborations among decentralized organizations or individuals are supported, flexible and open environment for constructing business process are provided to realize business goals based on dynamic service composition through network and software service, and processes are embedded into users' daily lives to improve their experiences during process execution. This paper emphasizes the research of constructing smart process applications in decentralized environments.Based on the goal of our research, the service providers spreading over Internet obtain the abilities of collaborating and providing services of smart process for users via the solution in this paper (downloading and installing a light-weighted software layer to join the decentralized smart process virtual network). The decentralized feature improves the service abilities of the whole smart process with the increasing of participating service providers, which may bring more business opportunities for them. Besides, the decentralized collaborative relationships allow service providers to join or exit freely to assure the abilities with more agilities and expansibility.Acting as the common supporting technologies for future computing modes and applications on Internet, the relative technologies based on decentralized network environments have becoming the hotspot of research in recent years. Researchers and developers have raised many computing modes, experiences and real applications, including P2P computing, network grid computing and cloud computing model, whose common characteristics are focusing on constructing supporting platform for large scale collaborative complicated applications and service abilities on Internet, and achieving good flexibility and expansibility, which has the similar goal of the research on decentralized smart process applications. At the same time, some issues in our research are the common ones to be solves in current decentralized computing models. On the other hand, compared with traditional technologies in process management, some issues are harder and more complicated, including decentralized network constructing, evaluation and selection for service peers, execution and management of process instances and peer certificating.Considering the target of decentralized smart Process model, this paper performs researches on the following important issues: Studying an efficient decentralized smart Process network logical topology and the self-constructing method based using the ideas and results in a few researching domains, such as classical Process, Web service, P2P network and pervasive computing; Investigating the evaluation of service peers based on their capabilities, qualities of services and loading; Working out the service matching and selecting methods according to the evaluation model of service peers in the automatic generation of process; Researching the issues during executing of process instances dispatched by the involved service peers; In addition, this paper also looks into the multiple interaction modes between users and their process service during the executing of process instances.On the background of e-travel increasingly accepted by providers and consumers, a prototype system with several important functionalities has been developed, which is used to validate and verify the ideas and methods in the research of this paper.In general, the main innovative points of this paper include:First, a decentralized framework for smart Process application is introduced based on the analysis of the new requirements and features of current business processes.Based on Internet and existing network protocols, this paper brings forward the concept and executing mechanism of a decentralized virtual network for smart process, as well as a light weighted software layer (called DFSP, Decentralized Framework of Smart Process) constructing the virtual network by installed on the hosts of Internet service providers. DFSP is designed in this paper, which constructs a smart Process virtual network without any center on Internet by combining the important ideas and technologies in several domains, such as workflow, web service, P2P and pervasive computing, using the web services published by providers as available resources via introducing them into the DFSP framework with minor cost.Second, a service matching and selecting method considering the capabilities, qualities of services and loading of service peers.This paper establishes the evaluation model based on the capabilities and qualities, as well as loading degree to keep the balance of the decentralized SPN network, which provides the basis of selecting and binding services for process engine.Third, According to the features of decentralized SPN network and process execution environment, this paper introduces a dynamic service binding strategy, and then researches the issues during the execution of process instances dispatched by the involved service peers.Next, this paper also proposes an interaction infrastructure with multiple modes between users and their process service during the executing of process instances.Through adding user context management module and multiple modes controlling model, the DFSP framework has the capabilities of extending the interactions between users and their process service to more natural environments from desktop computing.Acting as the common supporting technologies for future computing modes and applications on Internet, as long as acclimating the trends and requirements of decentralizing work to form full distributed computing in the development of software engineering in recent years, there are great theoretic values and expansive application foreground in the research of decentralized smart process modes. Through the study of some critical issues, including dynamic constructing of decentralized smart process network, evaluation and selection of services, scheduling and execution of process instances and peer certificating method for service peers multi-level exception handing in smart process, we build the whole structure present some key technologies and algorithms for decentralized smart process. The productions of this paper not only enrich and consummate the theoretical foundations of smart process, but also promote smart process applications.