@article {Bocciarelli2014573, title = {A model-driven method for enacting the design-time QoS analysis of business processes}, journal = {Software and Systems Modeling}, volume = {13}, number = {2}, year = {2014}, note = {cited By 6}, pages = {573-598}, publisher = {Springer Verlag}, abstract = {

Business Process Management (BPM) is a holistic approach for describing, analyzing, executing, managing, and improving large enterprise business processes. A business process can be seen as a flow of tasks that are orchestrated to accomplish well-defined goals such as goods production or services delivery. From an IT perspective, BPM is closely related to a business process automation approach carried out by use of IT standards and technologies, such as service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and Web Services. This paper specifically focuses on fully automated business processes that are defined and executed as orchestrations of software services. In a BPM context, the ability to predict at design time the business process behavior assumes a strategic relevance, both to early assess whether or not the business goals are achieved and to gain a competitive advantage. A business process is typically specified by use of Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), the standard language for the high-level description of business processes. Unfortunately, BPMN does not support the characterization of the business process in terms of nonfunctional or QoS properties, such as performance and reliability. To overcome such a limitation, this paper introduces Performability-enabled BPMN (PyBPMN), a lightweight BPMN extension for the specification of performance and reliability properties. PyBPMN enables the design time prediction of the business processes behavior, in terms of performance and reliability properties. Such prediction activity requires the use of models that are to be first built and then evaluated. In this respect, this work introduces a model-driven method that exploits PyBPMN to predict, at design time, the performance and the reliability of a business process, either to select the process configuration that provides the best behavior or to check if a given configuration satisfies the overall requirements. The proposed model-driven method that enacts the automated analysis of a business process behavior embraces the complete business process development cycle, from the specification phase down to the implementation phase. The paper also describes how the proposed model-driven method is implemented. The several model transformations at the core of the method have been implemented by use of QVT, and the standard language for specifying model transformations provided by OMG{\textquoteright}s MDA. The availability of such automated model transformations allows business analysts to predict the process behavior with no extra effort and without being required to own specific skills of performance or reliability theory, as shown by use of an example application. {\textcopyright} 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

}, keywords = {Administrative data processing, Automation, Availability, BPMN, Business Process, Competition, Design, Enterprise resource management, Forecasting, High level languages, Information services, LQN, Mathematical models, MDA, Performance, Quality of service, Reliability, Service oriented architecture (SOA), Software architecture, Specifications, Web services}, issn = {16191366}, doi = {10.1007/s10270-013-0345-5}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84899754418\&partnerID=40\&md5=ac7ae348f9d39ccb87a9aedb7d7524bd}, author = {Bocciarelli, P. and Andrea D{\textquoteright}Ambrogio} } @conference {Gianni2012, title = {Model-driven performance prediction of HLA-based distributed simulation systems}, booktitle = {Proceedings - Winter Simulation Conference}, year = {2012}, note = {cited By 3}, abstract = {Performance models offer a convenient tool to assess design alternatives and predict the execution time of distributed simulation (DS) systems at design time, before system implementation. Currently, performance models are to be manually developed and the related extra effort often becomes the limiting factor for their cost- and time-effective use. In this paper, we aim to reduce this extra effort with the introduction of a model-driven method for the automated building of performance models whose evaluation provides a prediction about of the execution time of a distributed simulation system. As such, the method contributes to bring software performance engineering techniques into the distributed simulation system lifecycle. In particular, we show how the SysML-based specification of the system to be simulated and the design documents of the DS system can be used to derive the topology and the parameters of a performance model specified according to the Extended Queueing Network formalism. {\textcopyright} 2012 IEEE.}, keywords = {Automated buildings, Computer simulation, Design, Design alternatives, Design documents, Design time, Distributed computer systems, Distributed simulation systems, Distributed simulations, Execution time, Forecasting, Model-driven, Model-driven method, Performance Model, Performance prediction, Software performance engineerings, System implementation, Topology}, isbn = {9781467347792}, issn = {08917736}, doi = {10.1109/WSC.2012.6465255}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84874698997\&partnerID=40\&md5=a02b093d52a8995b3774ab0d2df86fb2}, author = {Gianni, D. and Bocciarelli, P. and Andrea D{\textquoteright}Ambrogio} } @article {Bocciarelli2011265, title = {A model-driven method for describing and predicting the reliability of composite services}, journal = {Software and Systems Modeling}, volume = {10}, number = {2}, year = {2011}, note = {cited By 11}, pages = {265-280}, abstract = {Service-oriented computing is the prominent paradigm for viewing business processes as composed of functions provided by modular and standardized services. Web services are the building blocks for the application of service-oriented computing on the Web and provide the necessary support for the consolidation of multiple services into a single composite service corresponding to the overall process. In such a context, service providers are strategically interested in both describing the quality of service (QoS) characteristics of offered services, to better qualify their offer and gain a significant advantage in the global marketplace, and predicting the level of QoS that can be offered to service consumers when building composite web services that make use of services managed by various service providers. This paper illustrates a model-driven method to automatically describe and predict the QoS of composite web services specified by use of business process execution language (BPEL). The paper specifically addresses the reliability characteristic of the QoS. The proposed method is founded on Q-WSDL, a lightweight WSDL extension for the description of the QoS characteristics of a web service, and exploits Q-WSDL to annotate reliability data onto a BPEL-based UML model of the composite service. The UML model is then used to predict and describe the reliability of the composite web service. The proposed method is illustrated by use of an example application that deals with a composite web service for the migration of PSTN telephone numbers. {\textcopyright} 2010 Springer-Verlag.}, keywords = {BPEL, Forecasting, Information services, Model-driven prediction, QoS, Quality of service, Reliability, Service oriented architecture (SOA), Telephone systems, UML, Unified Modeling Language, Web services, WSDL}, issn = {16191366}, doi = {10.1007/s10270-010-0150-3}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-79955480530\&partnerID=40\&md5=1e9d768badb65996f4a07183d92b15d5}, author = {Bocciarelli, P. and Andrea D{\textquoteright}Ambrogio} }