Modeling Contextualized Flexible Cloud Workflow Services: An MDE based approach

Abstract

The evolution of the economy, competition, development of new technologies and globalization explain the blooming of inter-organizations cooperation. The interorganizations cooperation represents a new opportunity to answer to complex challenges that a single organization can't face alone. Cloud Computing is an emerging computation paradigm in information technology and networking. Most recently business applications are leveraging the power of this novel technology. In this work, we are interested in the issue of Inter-organizations Cooperation in Cloud Computing environment. More precisely, this paper deals with Contextualized Flexible Cloud Workflow Services (CWS). By CWS, we mean services automating loosely coupled fragments of inter-organization business processes and whose description and execution are accessible through the Cloud. One possible way to deal with CWS modeling in a comprehensive conceptual framework is to use the Model-Driven Engineering. The basic principle of MDE is the separation of organizational concerns from their technical achievement. Therefore, business models are not corrupted by technical concerns and vice versa. Following this practice, we first propose the Cloud Workflow Service Meta-Model (CWS2M) by extending BPMN 2.0 to support the modeling of CWS. In order to deal with variability, evolution and adaptation of CWS, we also propose the Flexible Cloud Workflow Service Meta-Model (FCWS2M) as an extension of the CWS2M meta-model using the versioning technique. Finally, we propose the Contextualized Flexible Cloud Workflow Service Meta-Model (CFCWS2M) to characterize the situations in which CWS versions are executed. We illustrate our solution through the “Drug Development Process” case study.