In this paper we focus on the software architectures' description of System of Systems (SoS).... more In this paper we focus on the software architectures' description of System of Systems (SoS). In fact, SoS is a new class of complex software systems resulting from the massive development of wireless communication technologies and the integration of several independent systems working together. From another perspective, software architectures have been recognized as the cornerstone to the success of any software system. Considering the complexity of SoS, its development demands special attention to its software architectures. In this paper, we address the problem of how SoS' software architectures need to be described. For this purpose, we present an approach based on the standard 'ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010: Systems and software engineering- Architecture Description' to describe the software architectures of an SoS. We introduce this standard in a first step, then we illustrate it with study dealing with smart energy distributions entitled Smart City and we explain how we apply the standard rules on the case study to obtain the software architecture description of this SoS.
Blockchain is an emergent technology which enables the execution of collaborative business proces... more Blockchain is an emergent technology which enables the execution of collaborative business processes while ensuring trust by replacing central authority with cryptographic proof and distributed consensus. Thus, Blockchain technology can be used to find agreement between untrusted collaborating parties in business processes. However, temporal constraints of processes need more investigation. Indeed, Blockchain platforms do not offer means to represent nor to manage temporal constraints for business processes. Moreover, transaction completion time is not fixed, it can take from a few seconds to several minutes. In this paper, we include temporal constraints in smart contracts, which could mitigate the violation of time constraints, minimize the costly execution time, and avoiding thus financial penalties. To achieve this, we extend Caterpillar tool, which is the first open-source blockchain-based BPMN execution engine, to enable the automatic transformation of a large set of temporal constraints for business process model to smart contract code. We illustrate our approach with a use case, which we deploy in Ethereum Testnet.
2017 IEEE 26th International Conference on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE), 2017
Scientific research teams have immense valuable knowledge that need to be managed. Organizing sci... more Scientific research teams have immense valuable knowledge that need to be managed. Organizing scientific contributions of team members constitutes a major challenge for the monitoring of knowledge evolution, team member’s competences discovery, and facilitating information retrieval processes. However, performing manual annotations is often time consuming and labor-intensive task, especially in case of complex annotation schemas. Currently, existing knowledge management systems focus on ensuring the scientific knowledge creation, sharing, organization and evaluation but don’t provide a way for helping researchers in the classification task. In this paper, we introduce a knowledge management system that offers an annotation service for researchers’ contributions by including some natural language processing techniques. The provided service process comprises four phases: (1) the semantic enrichment of domain ontology based on the extraction of background data from Babelnet knowledge base, (2) the automatic generation of candidate categories using the enriched domain ontology, (3) the forwarding of the pre-annotated papers to our web-based system to interact with researchers, and finally (4) the human revision of the generated annotations. Evaluation results show its advantage not only in reducing human effort and time consumption during the annotation task but also in improving annotations quality.
Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping across the world and causing widespread death and disruption. T... more The COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping across the world and causing widespread death and disruption. To this effect, nations have struggled to use technologies to detect and to monitor COVID-19 cases and related information. Unfortunately, both inconsistent and inaccurate information from "trustless" sources, and "mistrust" in effectively monitoring and reporting patients symptoms and condition have highlighted the failure of existing infrastructures to preserve human healthcare while maintaining patient's privacy and to slow down the widespread of the pandemic. This paper provides an insight of the perceived benefits of Blockchain to expectations of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of providing "trust" in addressing information sharing in health systems while maintaining privacy. This paper exhibits a Blockchain-based COVID-19 Smart Healthcare approach that embraces Blockchain's benefits in healthcare systems.
Abstract Cloud is an increasingly popular computing paradigm that provides on-demand services to ... more Abstract Cloud is an increasingly popular computing paradigm that provides on-demand services to organizations for deploying their business processes over the Internet as it reduces their needs to plan ahead for provisioning resources. Cloud providers offer competitive pricing strategies (e.g., on-demand, reserved, and spot) specified based on temporal constraints to accommodate organizations’ changing and last-minute demands. Despite their varieties and benefits to optimize business process deployment cost, using those pricing strategies can lead to violating time constraints and exceeding budget constraints due to inappropriate decisions when allocating cloud resources to business processes. In this paper, we present an approach to guarantee a correct and optimal time-aware allocation of cloud resources to business processes. Correct because time constraints on these processes are not violated. And, optimal because the deployment cost of these processes is minimized. For this purpose, our approach uses timed automata to formally verify the matching between business processes’ temporal constraints and cloud resources’ time availabilities and linear programming to optimize deployment costs. Experiments demonstrate the technical doability of our proposed approach.
2015 15th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA), 2015
This paper is interested in the assisted interrogation of lexical databases designed according to... more This paper is interested in the assisted interrogation of lexical databases designed according to the LMF standard (Lexical Markup Framework) ISO-24613. The proposed solution is based on a requirement-based lexical web service generation approach that makes easier the task of engineers when developing NLP (Natural Language Processing) systems. Using this approach, the developer will not deal with the database content or its structure. Also, he will not use any language query. For each lexical requirement, we generate through a lexical web service for interrogating LMF databases. Also we generate with it its enhanced WSDL description file that we have enriched by semantic data describing data categories used in the requirement specification.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Internet of things and Cloud Computing, 2016
In the current decade, computing turns towards smart, mobile and ambient devices. As a consequenc... more In the current decade, computing turns towards smart, mobile and ambient devices. As a consequence, applications and services have to be aware in order to react to a highly dynamic context (available resources, environmental conditions, user needs, etc.) and adapt their structures and behaviors. In such context-aware environment (e.g. smart buildings) interoperability is highly recommended and especially for contexts where (i) connected entities in a particular space need to understand each other and (ii) an analysis module can be built based on exchanged data querying. In this paper, we propose an ontology model for smart building that allows monitoring smart entities and enables a rule based analysis. The proposed ontology model defines seven major reusable concepts that provide the basic infrastructure to build an ontology model for smart space environments. As each smart environment is distributed over different locations and may have many kinds of devices etc., we propose domain ontology for the smart building space and implement a prototype for this ontology model using Protégé 3.5 as an ontology editor and Pellet as a reasoning engine. Furthermore, we define smart rules using SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) and infer those rules by SQWRL (Semantic Query-Enhanced Web Rule Language) query language in order to analyze the context and generate alerts regarding abnormal behaviors. The proposed ontology model is illustrated in a smart building space where the analysis infers and detects alerting situations, in a wireless sensor network, based on monitoring data collected from sensors.
2018 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA), 2018
Cloud environments offer an interesting infrastructure for any modern enterprise information syst... more Cloud environments offer an interesting infrastructure for any modern enterprise information systems due to their high performance and low operating cost. Cloud resources are offered in various pricing strategies based on temporal properties. In general, enterprises looking towards minimizing their spending on IT infrastructure find such pricing strategies very attractive to deploy and run their business processes. Nevertheless, due to the lack of explicit and formal description of (Cloud) resources in existing business processes modeling languages, such as BPMN, Cloud resources can not be correctly allocated. Therefore, we elaborate an extension to BPMN 2.0 to fully integrate (Cloud) resource perspective, especially the temporal properties of Cloud pricing strategies in business process model. In order to help the designer to allocate correctly the required Cloud resources, we propose an automatic generation of timed automata from this BPMN extensions to check the matching between both temporal constraints: activities and Cloud resources. To show its feasibility, our approach has been implemented and tested using a real use case from an industrial partner.
Web services compositions must provide different utilities to hundreds even thousands of users si... more Web services compositions must provide different utilities to hundreds even thousands of users simultaneously. An important challenge of testing these applications is load testing. For this purpose, we proposed in a previous work a test architecture aiming to study the limitations of WS-BPEL compositions under load conditions. We also concretized our solution by implementing a tool support (WSCLim). We introduce in this paper a case study on Hospital Blood Ordering for Transfusion Purposes in order to best illustrate our solution.
In this paper we focus on the software architectures' description of System of Systems (SoS).... more In this paper we focus on the software architectures' description of System of Systems (SoS). In fact, SoS is a new class of complex software systems resulting from the massive development of wireless communication technologies and the integration of several independent systems working together. From another perspective, software architectures have been recognized as the cornerstone to the success of any software system. Considering the complexity of SoS, its development demands special attention to its software architectures. In this paper, we address the problem of how SoS' software architectures need to be described. For this purpose, we present an approach based on the standard 'ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010: Systems and software engineering- Architecture Description' to describe the software architectures of an SoS. We introduce this standard in a first step, then we illustrate it with study dealing with smart energy distributions entitled Smart City and we explain how we apply the standard rules on the case study to obtain the software architecture description of this SoS.
Blockchain is an emergent technology which enables the execution of collaborative business proces... more Blockchain is an emergent technology which enables the execution of collaborative business processes while ensuring trust by replacing central authority with cryptographic proof and distributed consensus. Thus, Blockchain technology can be used to find agreement between untrusted collaborating parties in business processes. However, temporal constraints of processes need more investigation. Indeed, Blockchain platforms do not offer means to represent nor to manage temporal constraints for business processes. Moreover, transaction completion time is not fixed, it can take from a few seconds to several minutes. In this paper, we include temporal constraints in smart contracts, which could mitigate the violation of time constraints, minimize the costly execution time, and avoiding thus financial penalties. To achieve this, we extend Caterpillar tool, which is the first open-source blockchain-based BPMN execution engine, to enable the automatic transformation of a large set of temporal constraints for business process model to smart contract code. We illustrate our approach with a use case, which we deploy in Ethereum Testnet.
2017 IEEE 26th International Conference on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE), 2017
Scientific research teams have immense valuable knowledge that need to be managed. Organizing sci... more Scientific research teams have immense valuable knowledge that need to be managed. Organizing scientific contributions of team members constitutes a major challenge for the monitoring of knowledge evolution, team member’s competences discovery, and facilitating information retrieval processes. However, performing manual annotations is often time consuming and labor-intensive task, especially in case of complex annotation schemas. Currently, existing knowledge management systems focus on ensuring the scientific knowledge creation, sharing, organization and evaluation but don’t provide a way for helping researchers in the classification task. In this paper, we introduce a knowledge management system that offers an annotation service for researchers’ contributions by including some natural language processing techniques. The provided service process comprises four phases: (1) the semantic enrichment of domain ontology based on the extraction of background data from Babelnet knowledge base, (2) the automatic generation of candidate categories using the enriched domain ontology, (3) the forwarding of the pre-annotated papers to our web-based system to interact with researchers, and finally (4) the human revision of the generated annotations. Evaluation results show its advantage not only in reducing human effort and time consumption during the annotation task but also in improving annotations quality.
Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping across the world and causing widespread death and disruption. T... more The COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping across the world and causing widespread death and disruption. To this effect, nations have struggled to use technologies to detect and to monitor COVID-19 cases and related information. Unfortunately, both inconsistent and inaccurate information from "trustless" sources, and "mistrust" in effectively monitoring and reporting patients symptoms and condition have highlighted the failure of existing infrastructures to preserve human healthcare while maintaining patient's privacy and to slow down the widespread of the pandemic. This paper provides an insight of the perceived benefits of Blockchain to expectations of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of providing "trust" in addressing information sharing in health systems while maintaining privacy. This paper exhibits a Blockchain-based COVID-19 Smart Healthcare approach that embraces Blockchain's benefits in healthcare systems.
Abstract Cloud is an increasingly popular computing paradigm that provides on-demand services to ... more Abstract Cloud is an increasingly popular computing paradigm that provides on-demand services to organizations for deploying their business processes over the Internet as it reduces their needs to plan ahead for provisioning resources. Cloud providers offer competitive pricing strategies (e.g., on-demand, reserved, and spot) specified based on temporal constraints to accommodate organizations’ changing and last-minute demands. Despite their varieties and benefits to optimize business process deployment cost, using those pricing strategies can lead to violating time constraints and exceeding budget constraints due to inappropriate decisions when allocating cloud resources to business processes. In this paper, we present an approach to guarantee a correct and optimal time-aware allocation of cloud resources to business processes. Correct because time constraints on these processes are not violated. And, optimal because the deployment cost of these processes is minimized. For this purpose, our approach uses timed automata to formally verify the matching between business processes’ temporal constraints and cloud resources’ time availabilities and linear programming to optimize deployment costs. Experiments demonstrate the technical doability of our proposed approach.
2015 15th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA), 2015
This paper is interested in the assisted interrogation of lexical databases designed according to... more This paper is interested in the assisted interrogation of lexical databases designed according to the LMF standard (Lexical Markup Framework) ISO-24613. The proposed solution is based on a requirement-based lexical web service generation approach that makes easier the task of engineers when developing NLP (Natural Language Processing) systems. Using this approach, the developer will not deal with the database content or its structure. Also, he will not use any language query. For each lexical requirement, we generate through a lexical web service for interrogating LMF databases. Also we generate with it its enhanced WSDL description file that we have enriched by semantic data describing data categories used in the requirement specification.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Internet of things and Cloud Computing, 2016
In the current decade, computing turns towards smart, mobile and ambient devices. As a consequenc... more In the current decade, computing turns towards smart, mobile and ambient devices. As a consequence, applications and services have to be aware in order to react to a highly dynamic context (available resources, environmental conditions, user needs, etc.) and adapt their structures and behaviors. In such context-aware environment (e.g. smart buildings) interoperability is highly recommended and especially for contexts where (i) connected entities in a particular space need to understand each other and (ii) an analysis module can be built based on exchanged data querying. In this paper, we propose an ontology model for smart building that allows monitoring smart entities and enables a rule based analysis. The proposed ontology model defines seven major reusable concepts that provide the basic infrastructure to build an ontology model for smart space environments. As each smart environment is distributed over different locations and may have many kinds of devices etc., we propose domain ontology for the smart building space and implement a prototype for this ontology model using Protégé 3.5 as an ontology editor and Pellet as a reasoning engine. Furthermore, we define smart rules using SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) and infer those rules by SQWRL (Semantic Query-Enhanced Web Rule Language) query language in order to analyze the context and generate alerts regarding abnormal behaviors. The proposed ontology model is illustrated in a smart building space where the analysis infers and detects alerting situations, in a wireless sensor network, based on monitoring data collected from sensors.
2018 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA), 2018
Cloud environments offer an interesting infrastructure for any modern enterprise information syst... more Cloud environments offer an interesting infrastructure for any modern enterprise information systems due to their high performance and low operating cost. Cloud resources are offered in various pricing strategies based on temporal properties. In general, enterprises looking towards minimizing their spending on IT infrastructure find such pricing strategies very attractive to deploy and run their business processes. Nevertheless, due to the lack of explicit and formal description of (Cloud) resources in existing business processes modeling languages, such as BPMN, Cloud resources can not be correctly allocated. Therefore, we elaborate an extension to BPMN 2.0 to fully integrate (Cloud) resource perspective, especially the temporal properties of Cloud pricing strategies in business process model. In order to help the designer to allocate correctly the required Cloud resources, we propose an automatic generation of timed automata from this BPMN extensions to check the matching between both temporal constraints: activities and Cloud resources. To show its feasibility, our approach has been implemented and tested using a real use case from an industrial partner.
Web services compositions must provide different utilities to hundreds even thousands of users si... more Web services compositions must provide different utilities to hundreds even thousands of users simultaneously. An important challenge of testing these applications is load testing. For this purpose, we proposed in a previous work a test architecture aiming to study the limitations of WS-BPEL compositions under load conditions. We also concretized our solution by implementing a tool support (WSCLim). We introduce in this paper a case study on Hospital Blood Ordering for Transfusion Purposes in order to best illustrate our solution.
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