Towards Correct Cloud Resource Allocation in Business Processes

• Published in: IEEE transactions on services computing Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 23 - 36
• Main Authors: Graiet, Mohamed, Mammar, Amel, Boubaker, Souha, Gaaloul, Walid
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.01.2017
• Subjects: Business process management; Cloud computing; Computational modeling; Computer Science; event-B; formal specification; Process modeling; resource allocation; Resource management; Runtime; Software Engineering; Virtual machining
• ISSN: 1939-1374; 1939-1374; 2372-0204
• DOI: 10.1109/TSC.2016.2594062

Cloud environments are being increasingly used for deploying and executing business processes to provide a high level of performance with low operating cost. Nevertheless, due to the lack of an explicit and formal description of the resource perspective in the existing business processes, the correctness of Cloud resources management can not be verified. The aim of the present work is to offer a formal definition of the resource perspective in business processes as a step towards ensuring a correct and consistent Cloud resource allocation in business process modeling. Concretely, we propose a formalism based on the Event-B language for specifying Cloud resource allocation policies in business process models. This formal specification is used to formally validate the consistency of Cloud resource allocation for process modeling at design time, and to analyze and check its correctness according to user requirements and resource capabilities. In order to show its feasibility, our approach has been tested using a real use case study from an industrial partner.