Time-based orchestration of workflow, interoperability with G-Devs/Hla

Abstract

a b s t r a c tEnterprises information systems (EIS) take benefits of latest advanced of web services and Internet of things to improve information retrieving and gathering for decision making. Furthermore, EIS should permit a more comprehensive information routing in the company within an electronic workflow in order to save time, cost and to reduce production impact on the environment. Such software has to interact frequently with real world data acquired by different sensors. Nevertheless this combination of software and hardware devices frequently faces interoperability problems. Also, testing and validating the EIS is not trivial without testing in real condition that can lead to deploy the large system. Authors assumed that testing and validating part of the system behaviour can be anticipated progressively by simulation, permitting then more progressive and confident system integration. This paper proposes to introduce a new workflow demonstration platform to combine simulation world with real world interacting with sensor, human interfacing and web service calls. In detail, this paper proposes to combine the Taverna Workflow tool, which handles and triggers web services call proposed by a platform server, to other software components. This combination has revealed one drawback of major workflows orchestrators; they do not provide time management facilities to handle synchronization during parallel execution of interdependent workflows. To overcome that limitation a clock ordering solution has been added by reusing G-DEVS/HLA to synchronize workflows running in parallel. The imbrications of G-DEVS M&S with Taverna workflow is now operating thanks to HLA. This work is validated by demonstrating the interoperability and the complementarity of these approaches on a logistic platform study case.

SLMToolBox: enterprise service process modelling and simulation by coupling DEVS and services workflow

“…More recently, (Ribault et al, 2014), authors have pushed further the DEVS/HLA framework by describing how to facilitate interoperability between web services and DEVS simulation using Taverna as a Workflow of services orchestration and a HLA/RTI. In this approach, authors proposed a solution to address the problem of time synchronization management between Workflow of real Web Service calls and simulated service process models.…”

“…So the TIM models could be enriched with technical interfaces, provisionally and in the objective of test, to be connected directly with other software or material components to support a concrete service calls implementation. The idea proposed in this paper is to reuse the experience acquired when connecting DEVS models with service calls (Ribault et al, 2014). The interoperability can gain from this service architecture and distributed interoperability simulation architecture proposed previously.…”

“…This problem arises systematically when parallel process is executed. To address this issue, a solution that has been proposed in (Ribault et al, 2014); it has been reused and merged with the SLMToolBox features.…”

“…As a final contribution, this paper describes a proposition for mixing real services and simulation. It will consist in generating concrete web service calls from the SLMToolBox models thanks to a Workflow Engine (Ribault et al, 2014). The missing data and time management interoperability will be completed by using the HLA Run Time Infrastructure (RTI) (Zacharewicz et al, 2008).…”

“…The idea has consisted in using Taverna WF interoperability facility as the main interoperability layer between services (including applications and simulations) and simulated service processes of the SLMToolBox. We have reused (Ribault et al, 2014) bridge developed in Java between Taverna and the SLMToolBox. It is executing the service call scenario scripts when a message is sent out of the simulation models.…”