SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

process is e xecuted) and def inition of how the business
process should be executed in them are facilitated [17].
Typically, self-adaptive systems have MAPE control loop
and they conform to the principle of separation of concern
(SoC) [18], i.e. a daptation implementation is e ncapsulated
and separated from business logic. Considering this
characteristic, we extend and ref ine Business Process
obtained with Communication Analysis Principles and
indicate abstraction levels to support AC features.
C. Communication Analysis
Communication Analysis proposes undertaking information
system analysis from a com municational perspective [19]. It
offers a req uirements structure and several modeling
techniques for BPM and requirements specification. Among
these techniques, the Communicative Event Diagram and
the Event Specification Templates are pri mary for
conceptual model derivation. The Communicative Event
Diagram is intended to describe business processes from a
communicational perspective. A communicative event is a
set of actions related to i nformation (acquisition, storage,
processing, retrieval, and/or distribution), that are carried
out in a complete and uninterrupted way, on the occasion of
an external stimulus. Business process model modularity
is guided by unity criteria, method described in [20]. For
each event, the actors involved are identified, as well as the
corresponding communicative interactions and the
precedence relations among events.
III. OUR APPROACH
In the sequel we present our Autonomic Business
Process Model approach, which consists of well-defined
abstraction levels (i.e. Com municational Level;
Technological Level; Operational Level and Service Level).
It relies on a closed-loop mechanism to provide system
adaptation (see Figure 3). Our framework considers both
instrumented BPM (context) and Services (self).
Instrumented
BPM
Actuator
Planner
Diagnosis
Figure 3. Framework overview
Services with
QoS Attributes
Log
Database
Monitoring
A running example will be used to illustrate our approach.
We examine the CAGED (General Register of Employed and
Unemployed), a proj ect under the Ministry of Labour and
Employment of Brazil (MTE) and governed by law 4923/65.
It supports the submission of monthly declarations of
change of company’s employees due to dismissal or
admittance (CAGED movements). The deadline for
submission is th e 7 th day of every month. The data
submitted is relate d to previous month (i.e. i ts
competence). The declarations are processed to g enerate
operational data, statistical data for the ministry of labor
and employment.
In figure 4 we depict a pr ocess to h elp to def ine the
appropriate BPM granularity and t he required
instrumentation of system. It consists of 7 stages: (i) Step S1
– Define Business Process with Communication Analysis
Principles; (ii) Step S2 – Define Autonomic Processes; (iii)
Step S3 – Link Services with Autonomic Processes; (iv)
Step S4 – Define contextualization; (v) Step S5 – Define
Services QoS; (vi) Step S6 – Monitor System at Run-Time;
(vii) Step S7 – Choose Autonomic Processes.
We use Communicative Event Diagram and BPMN to
model a simplified version of it. Note that due to lack of
space we do not capture all context variations required for
self-configuration, self-healing and self-protection. For the
sake brevity, this paper focuses on the self-optimization
feature of the “Declarant submits a declarat ion” event
(detailed in Figure 6).
Figure 4. Process to define BPM granularity and to instrument the system 1
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