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Guarded attribute grammars and publish/subscribe for implementing distributed collaborative business processes with high data availability

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Abstract

With the ever-increasing development of the Internet and the diversification of communication media, business processes of companies are increasingly collaborative and distributed. This contrasts with traditional solutions deployed for their management which are usually centralized, based either on the control and coordination of the flow of activities, or on the documents exchanged or artifacts. Moreover, the users who are usually the main actors in collaborations are often relegated to second place. Recently, a distributed, data-driven and user-centric approach called guarded attribute grammar (GAG) has been proposed for the modeling of such processes; it thus provides an answer to most of these limitations. In this paper, we present an approach for implementing business processes modeled using GAG in which communications are done by publish/subscribe with redirection of subscription (pub/sub-RS). In fact, the pub/sub-RS—which we propose—is a new variant of the publish/subscribe protocol particularly adapted to the asynchronous and incremental exchange of semi-structured data. It allows to guarantee high data availability during the process execution by ensuring that an actor, perceived as a subscriber, will always receive a data he needs to perform a task as soon as it is produced. Moreover, if the data are semi-structured and produced collaboratively and incrementally by several actors, its subscribers will be notified as soon as one of its components (a prefix) is produced, simultaneously as they will be subscribed in a transparent way to the remaining components (the suffix).

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Notes

  1. “An artifact is a document that conveys all the information concerning a particular case from its inception in the system until its completion. It contains all the relevant information about the entity together with a lifecycle that models its possible evolutions through the business process” [4]. So we can assimilate it to an active document [1] combining data and processing.

  2. A variant of the semantic rules of attribute grammars.

  3. In the rest of this paper, we will name “GAG processes” business processes modeled using GAG.

  4. The publish/subscribe is an asynchronous communication scheme between publishers and subscribers. Subscribers express their interest in data through subscriptions and publishers publish data for subscribers. A subscriber is notified each time a publication corresponds to a subscription he has made.

  5. A data produced by a peer X to a peer Y is sent directly to it without passing through a peer Z.

  6. In the tree representation of the artifact, it is a leaf not labeled by a production.

  7. A s-production is a production having s on the left-hand side.

  8. Division des Affaires Académiques et de la Coopération (Academic and Cooperation Affairs Department).

  9. The GAG composition operator noted \(\oplus \) is defined in [4]. It allows to create a GAG G called Global GAG from a set of local GAGs \(G_1, \ldots ,G_k\): \( G = G_1 \oplus ... \oplus G_k\).

  10. An algebraic type is a composite data type, which combines the functionalities of product types (tuplets or records) and sum types (disjoint union). In combination with recursivity, it is used to express structured data such as lists and trees.

  11. Reminder: The list type is defined by two constructors: Nil, which allows to create an empty list, and Cons which allows to create a new list by adding an element to a pre-existing list.

  12. The function match is defined in [4]. It returns a substitution \(\sigma \) itself consisting in two main substitutions \(\sigma _{in}\) and \(\sigma _{out}\). For a specific refinement of a node \(X=F\) into successor nodes \(X_1=F_1\) to \(X_n=F_n\) via a rule \(F_0 \rightarrow F_1 ... F_n \), \(\sigma _{in}\) matches the input values of \(F_0\) to the input values of F and \(\sigma _{out}\) matches the output values of F to the output values of \(F_0\). \(\sigma = \sigma _{out} \cup \sigma _{in} \sigma _{out}\) [4].

  13. Recall that NS is the set of notifications created by the application of the rule.

  14. The notification service is used by a component A to notify a component B, when a business rule applied at the level of the component A produces data to which the component B had subscribed.

  15. A middleware is third-party software that creates a network for information exchange between different computer applications. For our experiments, we used the shared-data overlay network (SON) middleware: “SON is a generic lightweight P2P middleware that assists application developers by providing an automatic code generation which handles several requirements (e.g., communication mechanisms, message queue management, broadcasting messages, etc.)” [19].

  16. Having independent peers with decentralized coordination deal perfectly with multi-agent-based systems. The middlewares like Jade [6] or Netlogo [33] provided by these systems can be used to ensure communication through the redevelopment of a large number of primitives; this is not the case if we use a service-oriented and component-oriented middleware like SON which directly offer a set of tools to model and code services and components.

  17. The data distribution service (DDS) [25] middleware does not use a broker in the middle. Instead, each publisher and subscriber in the pub/sub-system shares meta-data about each other via IP multicast.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Dschang, PO Box 67, Dschang, Cameroon

    Maurice Tchoupe Tchendji & Joskel Ngoufo Tagueu

  2. Lirima, Fuchsia Associate Team, Yaoundé, Cameroon

    Maurice Tchoupe Tchendji & Joskel Ngoufo Tagueu

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  1. Maurice Tchoupe Tchendji
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All the authors contributed to the study, from its conception to its experimentation. In particular, Maurice Tchoupé T. designed the research proposal.

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Correspondence to Maurice Tchoupe Tchendji.

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Tchendji, M.T., Tagueu, J.N. Guarded attribute grammars and publish/subscribe for implementing distributed collaborative business processes with high data availability. SOCA 15, 245–256 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11761-021-00319-z

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