The Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) advent is making way for the rapid deployment of network services (NS) for telecoms. Automation of network service management is one of the main challenges currently faced by the NFV community. Explicitly defining a process for the design, deployment, and management of network services and automating it is therefore highly desirable and beneficial for NFV systems. The use of model-driven orchestration means has been advocated in this context. As part of this effort to support automated process execution, we propose a process enactment approach with NFV systems as the target application domain. Our process enactment approach is megamodel-based. An integrated process modelling and enactment environment, MAPLE, has been built into Papyrus for this purpose. Process modelling is carried out with UML activity diagrams. The enactment environment transforms the process model to a model transformation chain, and then orchestrates it with the use of megamodels. In this paper we present our approach and environment MAPLE, its recent extension with new features as well as application to an enriched case study consisting of NS design and onboarding process.Keywords Process Enactment · Megamodelling · Papyrus · Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) IntroductionAutomating the end-to-end management of network services (NS), in other words, enacting the workflow or process for network service management without manual intervention is highly desirable in the telecommunications domain and remains a major challenge for network operators and service providers [11,38]. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) builds on cloud computing and has the ultimate goal of automating provisioning and management of network services -an essential feature for 5G systems. The European Telecom Standards Institute (ETSI) has recently launched a zero-touch network and service management group. As stated in [23], the challenges of 5G will trigger the need for a radical change in the way networks and services are managed and orchestrated.We believe the application of model-driven engineering (MDE) methods and tools is essential to further such developments in the NFV domain [8,31]. MDE advocates the use of models as first class citizens in the engineering process. The models are manipulated via transformations which form the backbone for automation in MDE. ETSI has recently released an information model for NFV [22]. Leveraging these models can substantially benefit the NFV systems by reducing their development and management efforts. Moreover, explicit modelling of the process not only allows for the automation of the NS management process but also paves the way for streamlining and optimization. Such a process model (PM) can potentially be mapped to model transformation chains hence enabling NS management and orchestration via model-driven process enactment [7,20,46]. Previously, we have proposed a model-based process for NS design and deployment [41]. The proposed workflow is compliant with the NFV reference f...

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Automating the enactment of processes using model-driven methods and tools paves the way for streamlining or optimizing these processes. Establishing traceability in automated processes is instrumental in carrying out analysis of the process and the involved artifacts.In this thesis, we propose a traceability information generation, visualization and analysis approach integrated with process modelling and enactment. A process model (PM) defined as an Activity Diagram has associated model transformations implementing the various activities and actions in the process. Enactment of the PM is carried out with the use of model transformation chaining in cooperation with model management means, in particular, megamodelling. We have incorporated both traceability in the small (at the model transformation level) and traceability in the large (at the PM level) in our approach. The traceability information is retained in the megamodel and forms the basis for traceability analysis of the enacted process. We have built a change impact analysis which allows the impact of a change in a model involved in the process to be assessed with the help of the derived megamodel.We further extended our approach with the notion of intents. We propose the usage of intents at both the PM and model-transformation levels as part of our traceability information. We define intents as information representing the objective of the PM actions/activities and their implementations. Furthermore, we have incorporated traceability visualization support to visualize trace links relating models at different levels through the captured intents. The intent-enriched traceability information and the enhanced visualization enable semantically richer traceability analysis.We applied our work to Network Service (NS) management in the context of the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) paradigm.We believe automation of the orchestration and management of network services can progress rapidly with the help of model-driven engineering methods and tools. We applied our approach on a NS design process to analyze the impact of changing input models on output models as well as to show the benefits of intents not only in the context of this process, but also for the whole NS lifecycle management operations.Our work is concretized in a tool, MAPLE-T, built as an Eclipse plugin. It extends MAPLE, an integrated process modelling and enactment environment.