Pierluigi Plebani

• Ph. D.
• Professor (Associate) at Politecnico di Milano

Data sharing between organizations is becoming an ever-increasing necessity. Data sharing allows organizations to improve business processes that depend on what happens in other organizations, just as having data from other organizations can enrich data analysis models. However, even though data is seen as the new oil, it does not move like oil. Th...

Since service-oriented computing was introduced as a major topic in the industry and the research community, 20 years have passed. Today, service orientation has become a commodity in many areas. This has also changed the foci of the research community by a very large degree. In this article, we analyze the current state of the research in the fiel...

The goal of this paper is to investigate to which extent the principles defined by the Data Mesh paradigm can find a valuable support in Gaia-X. In particular, an alignment between the Data Mesh self-serve platform and the Gaia-X federated services has been analyzed to understand if the concept of data product, which is central in data mesh, it can...

In this commentary paper, we outline research challenges and possible directions for the potential applications of AI in the judicial domain by specifically considering process analysis in the Italian context. Applying AI to process analysis poses several challenges, including information extraction from legacy information systems and analysis of l...

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for sharing privacy-sensitive data across federations of independent organizations, taking particular regard to flexibility and efficiency. Our approach benefits from data meshes and serverless computing – such as flexible ad-hoc composability or minimal operational overheads – to streamline data sharing p...

Blockchain and smart contracts are promising technologies to perform trusted compliance checking. By formalizing compliance rules with smart contract code and collecting information required to assess them on-chain, anyone can verify if a compliance violation occurred. To this aim, tools and techniques to execute business processes on-chain have be...

Cybersecurity is a fundamental aspect of socio-technical systems. Unfortunately, the price to pay for a secure system is an overhead of computational power and, therefore, of energy consumption. With the last global events, energy consumption is not anymore a secondary effect but should become a relevant driver of decisions on the security measures...

The collection of data during the routine delivery of care is changing the healthcare sector. Indeed, only from the clinical trial data it is difficult to obtain such a complete picture of the status of a patient as that provided by real-world data. However, the creation of valuable real-word evidence requires the adoption of an appropriate solutio...

Being the blockchain and distributed ledger technologies particularly suitable to create trusted environments where participants do not trust each other, business process management represents a proper setting in which these technologies can be adopted. In this direction, current research work primarily focuses on blockchain-oriented business proce...

Data as a Service (DaaS) offers an effective provisioning model able to exploit the advantages of cloud computing in terms of accessibility and scalability when data providers need to make their data available to different data consumers. Nevertheless, in settings where data are generated at the edge and they need to be propagated (e.g., Industry 4...

This chapter consists of several sections which contain contributions from members of IFIP Technical Committee 8 (Information Systems). We highlight the accomplishments of Technical Committee 8 (TC8) and its working groups over its 50 years history, and then envisage possible strategies for the future of information systems (IS) in a post-COVID wor...

The efficiency and effectiveness of business processes are usually evaluated by Process Performance Indicators (PPIs), which are computed using process event logs. PPIs can be insightful only when they are measurable, i.e., reliable. This paper proposes to define PPI measurability on the basis of the quality of the data in the process logs. Then, b...

This volume contains the technical papers presented in the workshops, PhD Symposium and EU Projects Track which took place at the 8th European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing, ESOCC 2020, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, in September 2020: 1st International Workshop on Edge Adoption and Migration, EdgeWays 2020, 16th Internation...

his book constitutes the proceedings of the Blockchain and RPA Forum, held as part of the 19th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2021, which took place during September 6-10, 2021, in Rome, Italy. The Blockchain Forum and the RPA Forum have in common that they are centered around an emerging and exciting technology. The b...

Aiming to break the software monoliths that traditional approaches usually produce as artifacts, solutions that are based on microservices consist of heterogeneous and independent software platforms to manage applications and data. In this scenario, the term polyglot persistence has been introduced to characterize software solutions where the invol...

Pervasive sensing is increasing our ability to monitor the status of patients not only when they are hospitalized but also during home recovery. As a result, lots of data are collected and are available for multiple purposes. If operations can take advantage of timely and detailed data, the huge amount of data collected can also be useful for analy...

Today business organizations operate in digital ecosystems that can be conceptualized in terms of multi-party business processes, where co-operation among parties is mandatory. Being every party a potential source of failures with impacts on the entire ecosystem, resilience is a feature that should be enforced by multi-party business processes dire...

The ability to enable a tamper-proof distribution of immutable data has boosted the studies around the adoption of blockchains also in Business Process Management. In this direction, current research work primarily focuses on blockchain-based business process design, or on execution engines able to enact processes through smart contracts. Although...

Multi-party business processes are characterized by the lack of a central coordination, as each participant controls only a portion of the process. Nonetheless, organizations often need to know how the whole process is performed, especially when artifacts belonging to an organization are manipulated by the other participants. This requires a monito...

Modern cloud applications are required to be distributed, scalable, and reliable. The microservice architectural style enables developers to achieve this goal with reduced effort. Nonetheless, microservices deployment is not trivial due to the heterogeneity of the microservices in terms of both functional and non-functional requirements. This is al...

Nowadays, every business organization operates in ecosystems and cooperation is mandatory. If, on the one hand, this increases the opportunities for the involved organizations, on the other hand, every business partner is a potential source of failures with impacts on the entire ecosystem. To avoid that these failures, which are local to one of the...

Data-intensive applications are becoming very important in several domains including e-health, government 2.0, smart cities, and industry 4.0. In fact, the significant increase of sensor deployment in the Internet of things (IoT) environments, in conjunction with the huge amount of data that are generated by the smart and intelligent devices such a...

Sensors, smart devices, and wearables have been widely adopted in recent years, bringing to the production of a vast amount of data which can be shared among several applications as input for their analysis. Data-intensive applications can benefit from these data but only if data are reliable and timely, and if they fit the requirements of the appl...

State-of-the-art applications are typically deployed on top of cloud services which offer the illusion of infinite resources, elastic scalability, and a simple pay-per-use billing model. While this is very convenient for developers, it also comes with relatively high access latency for end users. Future application domains such as the Internet of T...

The adoption of blockchain to enable a trusted monitoring of multi-party business processes is recently gaining a lot of attention, as the absence of a central authority increases the efficiency and the effectiveness of the delivery of monitoring data. At the same time, artifact-driven monitoring has been proposed to create a flexible monitoring pl...

Although it has been initially introduced in the telecommunication domain by Cisco [1], Fog Computing is recently emerging as a hot topic also in the software domain, and especially for data-intensive applications (DIA), with the goal of creating a continuum between the resources living on the Cloud and the ones living on the Edge [3]. In fact, esp...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th IFIP WG 2.14 European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing, ESOCC 2018, held in Como, Italy, in September 2018. The 10 full and 5 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 32 submissions. The volume also contains one invited talk in full pa...

Monitoring the compliance of the execution of multi-party business processes is a complex and challenging task: each actor only has the visibility of the portion of the process under its direct control, and the physical objects that belong to a party are often manipulated by other parties. Because of that, there is no guarantee that the process wil...

State-of-the-art applications are typically deployed on top of cloud services which offer the illusion of infinite resources, elastic scalability, and a simple pay-per-use billing model. While this is very convenient for developers, it also comes with relatively high access latency for end users. Future application domains such as the Internet of T...

The usage of sensors, smart devices, and wearables is becoming more and more common, and the amount of data they are able to generate can create a real value only if such data are properly analyzed. To this aim, the design of data-intensive applications needs to find a balance between the value of the output of the data analysis – that depends on t...

Resiliency in process-aware information systems is based on the availability of recovery flows and alternative data for coping with missing data. In this paper, we discuss an approach to process and information modeling to support the specification of recovery flows and alternative data. In particular, we focus on processes using sensor data from d...

Traditionally, human intervention is required to monitor a business process. Operators notify when manual activities are executed, and manually restart the monitoring whenever the process is not executed as expected. This paper presents mArtifact, an artifact-driven process monitoring platform. mArtifact uses the E-GSM artifact-centric language to...

In a multi-party business process, the choreography defines the conversational protocol among the parties, so that the visibility of the parties’ private processes is limited to the set of operations required to respect such a protocol. Especially in scenarios where physical resources are exchanged, knowing how a resource owned by a party is manage...

Monitoring of services is becoming more and more common to ensure the quality of applications and to provide the required level of service. Nowadays, the technology needed for supporting monitoring and, as a consequence, also monitoring data are widely available. On the other hand, new challenges and research issues arise concerning the design of t...

Monitoring human-centric business processes requires human operators to manually notify to a BPMS when activities start or end. Even if nowadays smart devices, like smartphones and tablets, are adopted to make the transmission of these notifications easier, such devices usually hold a passive role, being a simple mediator between the BPMS and human...

Data-intensive applications are usually developed based on Cloud resources whose service delivery model helps towards building reliable and scalable solutions. However, especially in the context of Internet of Things-based applications, Cloud Computing comes with some limitations as data, generated at the edge of the network, are processed at the c...

Nowadays every business organization operates in ecosystems and cooperation is mandatory. If, on the one side, this increases the opportunities for the involved organizations, on the other side, every actor is a potential source of failures with impacts on the entire ecosystem. For this reason, resilience is a feature that multi-party business proc...

This paper reports the re-engineering efforts for OWL-Q, a prominent semantic quality-based service description language. These efforts have focused on making OWL-Q more compact without reducing its level of expressiveness as well as enriching it with semantic rules towards semantic validation of quality specifications and new knowledge derivation....

Control flow-based process modeling notations, like BPMN, are good at defining the normal execution flow and the management of foreseen exceptions. When unforeseen situations occur, one cannot detect if the execution is still acceptable with respect to the process definition. In contrast, artifact-centric process modeling notations, like the Guard-...

When adopting a multi-cloud strategy, the selection of cloud providers where to deploy VMs is a crucial task for ensuring a good behaviour for the developed application. This selection is usually focused on the general information about performances and capabilities offered by the cloud providers. Less attention has been paid to the monitoring serv...

Cloud computing has important impacts on the environment: data centers – that represent the physical infrastructure where the cloud resources run – are not always designed as green entities, as they consume large amounts of energy (in form of electric power or fuel) often producing significant amounts of CO2 emissions. Such emissions depend on the...

Business processes are usually designed by means of imperative languages to model the acceptable execution of the activities performed within a system or an organization. At the same time, declarative languages are better suited to check the conformance of the states and transitions of the modeled process with respect to its actual execution. To av...

Although the definition of service-oriented architecture (SOA) included the presence of a service registry from the beginning, the first implementations (e.g., UDDI) did not really succeed mainly because of security and governance issues. This article tackles the problem by introducing DREAM (Distributed Registry by ExAMple): a publish/subscribe-ba...

Managing data produced in the Internet of Things according to the traditional data-center based approach is becoming no longer appropriate. Devices are improving their computational power as the processors installed on them are more and more powerful and diverse. Moreover, devices cannot guarantee a continuous connection due their mobility and limi...

The execution of cross-organization business processes often implies the exchange of physical goods without necessarily changing the ownership of such goods. Typical examples are logistic processes where goods are managed by shipping companies that are not the owner of the goods. To ensure that these goods are properly handled, while the service is...

The increasing utilization of cloud resources raises several issues related to their environmental impact and, more in general, sustainability. Recently, most of the contributions have focused on energy efficiency achieved through a better physical and virtual resource management. The present paper considers instead the application level, extending...

With the increasing popularity of the cloud computing model and rapid proliferation of cloud infrastructures there are increasing concerns about energy consumption and consequent impact of cloud computing as a contributor to global CO2 emissions. To date, little is known about how to incorporate energy consumption and CO2 concerns into cloud applic...

This paper proposes a semantic-based retrieval algorithm that allows the pervasive service system to find services able to return data about specific physical phenomenon (e.g. temperature, humidity), in a given location, with particular timeliness. This retrieval algorithm can be used to increase the capabilities of a self-managing pervasive system...

The widespread adoption of cloud computing is having a big impact on the environment since the energy consumption of data centers and the resulting emissions are significantly increasing. Researchers and practitioners in this field are looking for methods to improve the energy efficiency of data centers and increase the use of green energy sources....

The present paper discusses the issues arising from the need of presenting to the user information about the environmental impact of their applications in a cloud environment. Several aspects have to be considered: to make aware the users of the energy consumption and environmental impact of their applications, but also to make them aware about the...

The development and maintenance of cloud sites are often characterized by energy waste and high CO2 emissions. Energy efficiency and the decrease of the CO2 emissions in cloud-based systems can be only obtained by adopting suitable actions and techniques (e.g., utilization of green energy sources, reduction of the number of physical and virtual mac...

Cloud computing has a big impact on the environment since the energy consumption and the resulting CO2 emissions of data centers can be compared to the worldwide airlines traffic. Many researchers are addressing such issue by proposing methods and techniques to increase data center energy efficiency. Focusing at the application level, this paper pr...

Quality of service (QoS) can be a critical element for achieving the business goals of a service provider, for the acceptance of a service by the user, or for guaranteeing service characteristics in a composition of services, where a service is defined as either a software or a software-support (i.e., infrastructural) service which is available on...

The aim to reduce the energy consumption in data centres is usually analyzed in the literature from a facility and hardware standpoint. For instance, innovative cooling systems and less power hungry CPUs have been developed to save as much more energy as possible. The goal of this paper is to move the standpoint to the application level by proposin...

The 4th International Workshop on Principles of Engineering Service-Oriented Systems (PESOS 2012) was held at the International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2012, on June 4, 2012. The special theme of this 4th edition of PESOS was "The Internet of Services." PESOS 2012 brought together software engineering researchers from academia and...

The 4th International Workshop on Principles of Engineering Service-Oriented Systems (PESOS 2012) was held at the International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2012, on June 4, 2012. The special theme of this 4th edition of PESOS was "The Internet of Services." PESOS 2012 brought together software engineering researchers from academia and...

Due to the increasing usage of modern IT service centers, energy consumption has been one of the top concerns for administrators. Many indicators have been proposed with different aims at several levels, but what is missing is an approach for presenting them together within meaningful indexes. The goal of this paper is to introduce our approach to...

Mobile devices with their more and more powerful resources allow the development of mobile information systems in which services are not only provided by traditional systems but also autonomously executed and controlled in the mobile devices themselves. Services distributed on autonomous mobile devices allow both the development of cooperative appl...

Energy-aware service centers take into account energy consumption of infrastructures, machines, applications, storage systems, and their distributed computing architecture. The approach to energy efficiency in data centers in the GAMES (Green Active Management of Energy in IT Service centers) project is presented: Green Performance Indicators (GPIs...

The goal of this chapter is to discuss how annotating the Web service interfaces can improve the precision of a Web service matchmaking algorithm. To this aim, we adopt Urbe (UDDI Registry By Example) as a matchmaking algorithm for calculating the similarities between two Web service interfaces described using the SAWSDL or WSDL. The approach adopt...

The definition of the contingency plan during the preparedness phase holds a crucial role in emergency management. A proper emergency response, indeed, requires the implementation of a contingency plan that can be accurate only if different people with different skills are involved. The goal of this paper is to introduce SocialEMIS, a first prototy...

The Object Management Group (OMG) is promoting the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach to support interaction among enterprises based on business process models. Based on this approach, we discuss in this paper how to specify performance indicators among the levels with different degree of abstraction suggested in MDA. These indicators will dr...

Green IT mainly focuses on techniques to extend the products longevity or to virtualise physical resources as well as the provision of energy efficient hardware infrastructures. Less attention has been paid on the applications that run on the machines and their impact on energy consumption. This paper proposes an approach for enabling an efficient...

Service retrieval holds a central role during the development of Web services and Service-Based Applications (SBAs). The higher the number of available services, the more complex it becomes to locate the service closer to the developer needs. The complexity increases further with the number of available service versions that could also be suitable...

We present the approach to green information systems adopted in the Green Active Management of Energy in IT Service centres (GAMES) Project. The goal of GAMES is to develop methodologies, models, and tools to reduce the environmental impact of information systems at all levels, from application and services to physical machines and IT plants. This...

In this paper we approach the high energy consumption problem of large virtualized service centers by proposing a dynamic server consolidation methodology for optimizing the service center IT computing resources usage. The consolidation methodology is based on logically structuring the service center servers hierarchical clusters, consolidation dec...

Considering the ever increasing of information technology usage in our everyday life and the huge concentration of computational resources at remote service centers, energy costs become one of the biggest challenging issues for IT managers. Mechanisms to improve energy efficiency in service centers are divided at different levels which range from s...

The Scenario project has set a rather ambitious and even risky goal: to lay down a roadmap for future research in natural risks and mitigation policy in the European Union, drawing on ten years of research on natural hazards, mainly funded under the V (1998–2002) and VI (2002–2006) Framework Programmes. The goal is not only ambitious, but could be...

This initial chapter aims at providing a useful introduction and reference point to the research described in the following chapters. First of all, to provide a homogenous description of the existing approaches on service engineering, we introduce a common case study referring to the telecommunication domain. This case study will be used in the oth...

The chapter introduces a quality of Web service model which can be exploited by a Web service broker during the Web service selection phase. The model considers both user and provider standpoints. On the one hand, providers express their capabilities with respect to measurable dimensions (e.g., response time, latency). On the other hand, users can...

In this paper we propose the development of an Energy Aware Context Model for representing the service centre energy/performance related data in a uniform and machine interpretable manner. The model is instantiated at run-time with the service center energy/performance data collected by monitoring tools. Energy awareness is achieved by using reason...

Energy saving has been mainly focused on techniques to extend the products longevity or to virtualize physical resources. On the contrary, less attention has been paid on the applications that run on the machines and that also contribute to the energy consumption. In this paper we introduce an approach for defining energy-aware adaptive business pr...

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) provide the basis to (re)design business processes in order to develop flexible applications where available services are dynamically composed to satisfy business goals. The adoption of this type of architecture enables the design of information systems that connect IEs to each other to run collaborative busines...