Process chunks selection in the context of loose inter-organizations cooperation in cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud Computing has been attracting the interest of the Information and Communication Technology Community. It has emerged as a compelling paradigm that assures reliable on-demand computing services over Internet. However, the potential that this new model offers for organizations is still not fully explored. In fact, this technology has not been explored yet to manage Loose Inter-Organizations Cooperation (LIOC). Loose Inter-Organizations Cooperation corresponds to occasional cooperation without structural constraints in which the partners involved and their numbers are not predefined. In order to handle LIOC in Cloud Computing we have proposed the notion of Cloud Workflow Services (CWS). CWS is an Inter-Organizations business process having loosely coupled fragments of process that we called Process Chunks (PCs) whose description and execution are accessible through the Cloud. In our previous work, we have used the Model-Driven Engineering approach to deal with modeling and specifying Contextualized Flexible Cloud Workflow Services. In this work, we focus on the selection of PCs. We propose an ontology based approach permitting a PC_Consumer to select the appropriate PC satisfying its requirements. This selection is done according to two different strategies “MIC-selection” and “MAC-selection”. In MIC-Selection, every PC will be selected using the assembling strategy, that’s mean we have the possibility to assemble multiple PCs. In MAC-Selection, for each PC we will select only the best PC with the highest score of similarity. This work has been validated through the “Drug Development process” with the help of experts from the pharmaceutical field.