Andrea D'Ambrogio - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Andrea D'Ambrogio

Distributed Simulation and Real-Time Applications, Oct 18, 2017

Computers

Process-oriented requirements engineering approaches are often required to deal with the effectiv... more Process-oriented requirements engineering approaches are often required to deal with the effective adaptation of existing processes in order to easily introduce new or updated requirements. Such approaches are based on the adoption of widely used notations, such as the one introduced by the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. However, BPMN models do not convey enough information on the involved entities and how they interact with process activities, thus leading to ambiguities, as well as to incomplete and inconsistent requirements definitions. This paper proposes an approach that allows stakeholders and software analysts to easily merge and integrate behavioral and data properties in a BPMN model, so as to fully exploit the potential of BPMN without incurring into the aforementioned limitation. The proposed approach introduces a lightweight BPMN extension that specifically addresses the annotation of data properties in terms of constraints, i.e., pre- and post-cond...

IoT-aware business processes are gaining momentum as part of an effort to exploit the potential o... more IoT-aware business processes are gaining momentum as part of an effort to exploit the potential of IoT technology in the business process management field. The conventional lifecycle of a business process (BP) consists of several phases, from modeling and analysis down to implementation, monitoring and optimization. The availability of widely used standard notations for BP modeling, such as BPMN, allows business analysts to specify their BPs and get the corresponding implementations in an effective and largely automated way. Introducing IoT technologies from the BP design phase proves to bring significant improvements in terms of BP efficiency but also difficulties, when it comes to deal with the complexity and heterogeneity of such technologies at BP modeling time. This paper proposes an approach, named Process over Things (PoT), that aims at overcoming such difficulties by using a standardized ontology to deal with IoT interaction at BP modeling and design time. The proposed approach introduces a BPMN extension to explicitly address the IoT ontology in the BPMN model, yet being independent of the specific ontology implementation. A technology named PoT Broker is also introduced to fill the gap between the BP execution platform and the IoT devices access layer. The PoT Broker also obtains a significant level of automation when implementing IoT-aware BPs making use of a specific IoT ontology. The paper describes the architecture of the PoT approach and illustrates its application to a case study dealing with a weather alert system.

The development of complex systems may take advantage by the introduction of Modeling & Simul... more The development of complex systems may take advantage by the introduction of Modeling & Simulation (M&S) based analysis techniques from the early stages of the system lifecycle. However, M&S approaches typically require significant know-how and effort, as well as remarkable resources to setup and maintain proper execution platforms. Such issues can be tackled by use of automated approaches based on model transformation, which reduce the simulation model building effort, and by the M&S as a Service (MSaaS) paradigm, which brings the benefits of service-oriented architectures and cloud computing into the M&S field, so to reduce the costs of M&S efforts. In this paper, we show how MSaaS platforms can be effectively extended by introducing model transformation services, with specific application to the M&S-based analysis of complex systems specified by use of SysML. The paper also describes a catalog of currently available model transformation services, in order to show how the proposed MSaaS platform may ease the introduction of M&S approaches at any stage of the system development cycle.

The 9th edition of the CoMetS track aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners ... more The 9th edition of the CoMetS track aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners from both the modeling and simulation (M&S) community and the collaborative environments community, in order to focus on innovative research contributions that address both the use of collaborative technologies in the field of M&S and the use of M&S methodologies and tools to address the design of collaborative systems. This paper reports on the motivations of the track and the organization of its ninth edition.

ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, May 31, 2020

The combination of process modeling and simulation-based analysis provides a quantitative approac... more The combination of process modeling and simulation-based analysis provides a quantitative approach to analyze business processes, and to evaluate design alternatives before committing the required resources, to properly align operations with business strategies, improve operational efficiency, and gain competitive advantage. However, the use of simulation-based analysis is still limited in practice, mainly because it does not exploit process modeling standards and typically addresses performance-related properties only, such as time and cost. This article proposes a methodology that first extends the standard language for process modeling (i.e., BPMN) to introduce a flexible and accurate specification of business process resources, and then exploits the extended process specification to analyze and predict the process behavior by use of a simulation approach that takes into account reliability-related properties, to consider unexpected failures of process resources. The simulation-based analysis is implemented by use of a domain-specific process simulation language that preserves the BPMN execution semantics. An example application is introduced to show the importance of addressing both performance and reliability properties for the simulation-based analysis of business processes.

The adoption of modeling and simulation based approaches brings several benefits in various domai... more The adoption of modeling and simulation based approaches brings several benefits in various domains. However, as the simuland and the simulation technologies got more and more complicated, the modeling and simulation became a complex task which eventually required a systems engineering approach. IEEE 1730-2010 Distributed Simulation Engineering and Execution Process (DSEEP) has been published in 2010 as a process framework to help systems engineers in the execution of the several technical and organizational activities which encompass the simulation development life-cycle. It includes a set of high-level best practices and guidelines, particularly for component based distributed simulations. Recent advances in cloud technologies and service-oriented architecture led to Modeling and Simulation as a Service (MSaaS) - a ground breaking paradigm shift from component based technologies that is now changing how we model and simulate. This paper not only presents a critical review, but also proposes revision to DSEEP for supporting the systems engineering effort for modeling and simulation in a cloud-based and service-oriented context.

Inter-organization business process collaboration is one of the most significant factors driving ... more Inter-organization business process collaboration is one of the most significant factors driving today's global business development. Such collaborations are typically composed by various processes executed by different organizations and are often difficult to specify and analyze, due to their distributed nature and to data interoperability issues. The standard notation for business process modeling, namely BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation), only provides a limited support to the specification of collaborations. This paper introduces a data model extension of BPMN inspired by the HLA (High Level Architecture) distributed simulation standard. In addition, the paper proposes a metamodel-based mapping from BPMN to HLA, which can be seen as a significant step towards the implementation of a conceptual framework for specifying and analyzing collaborative business processes by use of distributed simulation approaches.

Spring Simulation Multiconference, Apr 3, 2016

Simulation techniques are successfully applied to analyze and validate the performance of a busin... more Simulation techniques are successfully applied to analyze and validate the performance of a business process (BP) since the early phases of its lifecycle, when the BP representation is commonly specified in BPMN. The BP simulation model is first to be built from the BPMN model, then implemented and finally executed to yield the performance indices of interest.

Future Internet, Jan 26, 2023

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

Elsevier eBooks, 2015

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is one of the prominent architectural paradigms recently adop... more Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is one of the prominent architectural paradigms recently adopted in the software development field. According to SOA principles, a distributed software system can be seen as an orchestration of software services deployed and executed onto networked hosts. The design-time analysis of SOA-based software systems demands new approaches that take into account both the inherent complexity and the architectural characteristics of such systems. In this respect, simulation-based approaches have proven to be effective to obtain quantitative predictions of system performance. Specifically, this chapter explains distributed simulation as a valuable technique to deal with the intrinsic distributed nature of SOA-based systems. Unfortunately, the adoption of distributed simulation requires a significant expertise and a considerable effort due to the complexity of currently available distributed simulation standards and technologies. This chapter introduces an automated method to reduce the effort and make distributed simulation easier to use. The method takes as input a design model of the SOA-based software system and yields as output the corresponding simulation model, ready to be deployed and transparently executed onto either a local or a distributed simulation engine. The design model is specified as a UML (Unified Modeling Language) model extended by use of the SoaML (Service-oriented architecture Modeling Language) profile, while the simulation model is specified in jEQN, a domain-specific language for the simulation of EQN (Extended Queueing Network) models. jEQN is part of SimArch, a layered architecture that eases the use of distributed simulation by hiding all the implementation details of the distributed execution platform. The proposed method is founded on the use of automated model transformations, with specific reference to standards and languages provided by the MDA (Model Driven Architecture). The joint use of automated model transformations and SimArch allows the user to effortlessly obtain, at design time, the performance-oriented distributed simulation model of the SOA-based system under development, thus giving system designers the ability to predict the performance behavior of the to-be system and/or to evaluate the impact on performance of different design alternatives. The chapter also presents an example application that shows how involved stakeholders can effectively benefit from the application of the proposed method.

Future Internet, Jan 28, 2023

An effective analysis of business processes (BPs) is crucial for modern organizations, which are ... more An effective analysis of business processes (BPs) is crucial for modern organizations, which are required to promptly react to rapid market changes and evolving customer expectations. A suitable integration of standard BP management approaches and emerging technologies and methodologies, such as modeling and simulation (M&S), cloud computing and microservices, brings important strategic advantages in terms of cost reduction and efficiency, boosting the effectiveness of BP analysis activities. This paper discusses the MSaaS (M&S as a Service) paradigm, which aims at introducing in the M&S domain innovative serviceoriented approaches based on microservices. The paper proposes an architecture of a MSaaS platform that enacts a service-in-the-loop approach, which properly combines real services and simulated ones for what-if analysis scenarios.

The analysis of business processes may take considerable advantage by the adoption of simulation-... more The analysis of business processes may take considerable advantage by the adoption of simulation-based techniques from the early phases of process lifecycle. Despite the fact that Modeling & Simulation (M&S) approaches have been widely recognized as a valuable solution, the remarkable effort required for their implementation and their essential complexity may limit their use in practice. In previous contributions we have proposed a model-driven method and a domain specific language, named eBPMN, for enabling the automated development and execution of business process simulations. In this paper, we analyze the performance prediction capabilities of the current implementation of the eBPMN-based model-driven method, by means of a comparison with the same capabilities provided by similar existing tools, such as BIMP and Bizagi, for a reference business process.

The adoption of Modeling & Simulation (M&S) approaches is widely recognized as a valuable solutio... more The adoption of Modeling & Simulation (M&S) approaches is widely recognized as a valuable solution for enacting a timely analysis of business processes (BPs). Despite their relevance, the effective introduction of such approaches in the BP lifecycle is still limited, due to the know-how and skills for building and implementing a simulation model and to the cost and effort for setting up and maintaining the execution platform. In this respect, this paper proposes a cloud-based architecture that exploits the M&S as a Service (MSaaS) paradigm and containerization technology for the flexible and dynamic composition of M&S services, so to allow business analysts to carry out an effortless and effective M&Sbased BP analysis. An example case study dealing with an e-commerce scenario is also presented in order to show the actual application of the proposed approach. • a containerization method, which allows to wrap services in a self-contained runtime environment, in order to ease their cloud-based deployment and execution. Specifically, this paper adopts Docker [5],

Future Internet

Modeling and simulation (M&S) techniques are effectively used in many application domains to supp... more Modeling and simulation (M&S) techniques are effectively used in many application domains to support various operational tasks ranging from system analyses to innovative training activities. Any (M&S) effort might strongly benefit from the adoption of service orientation and cloud computing to ease the development and provision of M&S applications. Such an emerging paradigm is commonly referred to as M&S-as-a-Service (MSaaS). The need for orchestrating M&S services provided by different partners in a heterogeneous cloud infrastructure introduces new challenges. In this respect, the adoption of an effective architectural approach might significantly help the design and development of MSaaS infrastructure implementations that cooperate in a federated environment. In this context, this work introduces a MSaaS reference architecture (RA) that aims to investigate innovative approaches to ease the building of inter-cloud MSaaS applications. Moreover, this work presents ArTIC-MS, a concept...

Informatics

The ever-increasing adoption of innovative technologies, such as big data and cloud computing, pr... more The ever-increasing adoption of innovative technologies, such as big data and cloud computing, provides significant opportunities for organizations operating in the IT domain, but also introduces considerable challenges. Such innovations call for development processes that better align with stakeholders needs and expectations. In this respect, this paper introduces a development framework based on the OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA) that aims to support the development lifecycle of data-intensive web applications. The proposed framework, named E-MDAV (Extended MDA-VIEW), defines a methodology that exploits a chain of model transformations to effectively cope with both forward- and reverse-engineering aspects. In addition, E-MDAV includes the specification of a reference architecture for driving the implementation of a tool that supports the various professional roles involved in the development and maintenance of data-intensive web applications. In order to evaluate the effect...

Modeling and Simulation Based Systems Engineering is emerging as an integrative approach from the... more Modeling and Simulation Based Systems Engineering is emerging as an integrative approach from the long lasting close interaction between modeling and simulation, and systems engineering. It is emphasizing the extensive employment of modeling and simulation through the life cycle of systems engineering. When the system of interest is safety-critical, possible missing qualities of simulation become a safety issue. That eventually makes simulation a subject of a qualification question. Tool qualification requirements have already been established for various safety-critical domains. However, the methods and guidelines for applying these requirements in the simulation engineering life cycle are still missing. This paper proposes a simulation qualification approach for safety-critical systems engineering

2021 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), 2021

The COVID-19 outbreak, which has been recognized as a pandemic in March 2020, has brought the nee... more The COVID-19 outbreak, which has been recognized as a pandemic in March 2020, has brought the need to timely face an extraordinary demand of health-related resources and medical assistance. The objective of this work is to analyze the structural and procedural changes that have been enacted in an emergency department (ED), according to guidelines provided by national authorities. Specifically, guidelines deal with how to manage the access of COVID-19 patients, ensure the isolation of suspected cases, execute a proper triage, and identify the appropriate treatment path for all patients. The paper describes a process modeling and simulation-based approach to analyze the treatment of patients accessing the ED of an Italian hospital. The approach makes use of the Business Process Model and Notation standard to specify ED treatment processes before and during the pandemic, so to evaluate different scenarios and effectively support process improvement activities by use of simulation-based what-if analysis.