Description

BPMN4PC is an extension of BPMN 2.0 to handle the pricing strategies specification. The aim of this BPMN extensions is to help business process designer to allocate correctly and cost-effectively the required Cloud resources. Therefore, we propose an automatic generation of timed automata to check correctly the matching between temporal constraints for activities and Cloud resources. Basically, our contributions include:

  1. A BPMN 2.0 extension with Cloud resources, Cloud pricing strategies as well as activities' temporal constraints.
  2. A BPMN2 modeler plugin's extension to support our extensions.
  3. A model-to-model transformation for an automatic generation of timed automata.
  4. An implemention and test using real use case study from from France Telecom/Orange labs in order to show the feasibility of our approach.

Cloud pricing strategies

In Cloud Computing, there exist several providers that sell resources, such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, OVH etc. For example, Google provides a billing strategy that provides resources per-minute. Otherwise, Microsoft proposes pre-paid subscription pricing strategy. Differently, Amazon provides three pricing strategies: on-demand, reserved and spot instances. In our work, we focus on amazon pricing strategies.

Approach overview

Our approach consists of two main steps: the Specification step, and then the formal Verification step.

  1. The specification step is ensured by extending the Business process Model.
  2. the formal verification step is depicted by verifying several properties thanks to model checking. We use UPPAAL model checker for system verification(label 2).
  3. the transition from the specification step to the verification step needs paramount intermediate step, which is Transformation. More precisely, this latter is a set of rules that guarantee the transition between the two steps automatically that are developed with ATL (ATLAS Transformation Language)(label 1).


Approach demonstration: Demo

The folowing video shows a demo about our BPMN4PC plug-in. It depicts the specification and the model transformation using the mapping rules with ATL.

Download

You can download the plugin through this link: plugin_BPMN4CP

Contributors

Contact

  • Imen Zouaghi
    Computer Science Departement
    FSEGS, University of Sfax, Tunisia
    email: zouaghi_imen (-at-) outlook.fr

  • Rania Ben Halima
    Computer Science Departement
    Telecom SudParis, France
    email: rania.ben_halima (-at-) telecom-sudparis.eu