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Adaptive Process Management in Cyber-Physical Domains

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Advances in Intelligent Process-Aware Information Systems

Part of the book series: Intelligent Systems Reference Library ((ISRL,volume 123))

Abstract

The increasing application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging cyber-physical domains beyond business computing (e.g., personalized healthcare, emergency management, factories of the future, home automation, etc.) has led to reconsider the level of flexibility and support required to manage complex processes in such domains. A cyber-physical domain is characterized by the presence of a cyber-physical system coordinating heterogeneous ICT components (PCs, smartphones, sensors, actuators) and involving real world entities (humans, machines, agents, robots, etc.) that perform complex tasks in the “physical” real world to achieve a common goal. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable, and processes enacted in cyber-physical domains must be robust to unexpected conditions and adaptable to unanticipated exceptions. This demands a more flexible approach in process design and enactment, recognizing that in real-world environments it is not adequate to assume that all possible recovery activities can be predefined for dealing with the exceptions that can ensue. In this chapter, we tackle the above issue and we propose a general approach, a concrete framework and a process management system implementation, called SmartPM, for automatically adapting processes enacted in cyber-physical domains in case of unanticipated exceptions and exogenous events. The adaptation mechanism provided by SmartPM is based on declarative task specifications, execution monitoring for detecting failures and context changes at run-time, and automated planning techniques to self-repair the running process, without requiring to predefine any specific adaptation policy or exception handler at design-time.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The WORKPAD Project (http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~workpad) investigated how the use of a process-oriented approach can enhance the level of collaboration and support provided to first responders that act in emergency/disaster scenarios.

  2. 2.

    http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~smartpm.

  3. 3.

    http://www.jgraph.com/.

  4. 4.

    The SmartPM Definition Tool provides a relevant subset of the BPMN modeling constructs to define the control flow of a process, including basic activities, start/end events and parallel/exclusive gateways.

  5. 5.

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/indigolog/.

  6. 6.

    http://www.swi-prolog.org/.

  7. 7.

    https://developer.android.com/google/gcm/index.html.

  8. 8.

    Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board, cf. http://arduino.cc/en/guide/introduction.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partly supported over the years by the following projects: EU FP-6 WORKPAD, EU FP-7 SM4All, Italian Sapienza grant TESTMED, Italian Sapienza grant SUPER, Italian Sapienza award SPIRITLETS, Italian cluster Social Museum and Smart Tourism, Italian project NEPTIS, Italian project RoMA. The authors would like to thanks the many persons involved over the years in the SmartPM conception and development, namely Giuseppe De Giacomo, Massimiliano de Leoni, Patris Halapuu, Arthur H.M. ter Hofstede, Alessandro Russo, Sebastian Sardina, Paola Tucceri, Stefano Valentini.

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  1. Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy

    Andrea Marrella & Massimo Mecella

  2. Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica Automatica e Gestionale, Rome, Italy

    Andrea Marrella & Massimo Mecella

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  1. Andrea Marrella
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Correspondence to Andrea Marrella .

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  1. Institute of Databases and Information Systems, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany

    Gregor Grambow

  2. Faculty of Electronics and Computer Science, Aalen University, Aalen, Germany

    Roy Oberhauser

  3. Institute of Databases and Information Systems, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany

    Manfred Reichert

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Marrella, A., Mecella, M. (2017). Adaptive Process Management in Cyber-Physical Domains. In: Grambow, G., Oberhauser, R., Reichert, M. (eds) Advances in Intelligent Process-Aware Information Systems. Intelligent Systems Reference Library, vol 123. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52181-7_2

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