A paradigm for decentralized process modeling and its realization in the OZ environment

Abstract

We present a model for decentralized Process Centered Environments (PCEs), which support concerted efforts among geographically-dispersed teams -each local team with its own autonomous process -and emphasize flexibility in the tradeoff between collaboration vs. autonomy. We consider both decentralized process modeling and decentralized process enaction. We describe a realization in the OZ decentralized PCE, which eiriploys a rule-based formalism, and also anvestagate the application t o PCEs based on Petri-nets.

Collaboration and coordination in process-centered software development environments: a review of the literature

“…Oz supports geographically-dispersed teams by coordinating a federation of decentralized autonomous processes [43]. These autonomous processes are described using a common formalism (as opposed to systems such as ProcessWall [79] that supports multiple formalisms).…”

“…Oz [43,53,46,78] was developed at Columbia University as an enhancement to the MARVEL system (Section A.5).…”

“…• Step based -Systems such as MARVEL [14], Oz [43] and ALF [34] offer command interfaces through which users select actions to execute. The paradigm employed is therefore similar to shell-based operations (e.g.…”

Supporting virtual software projects on the Web

“…Autonomous parties typically also want to administer their own systems, so ideally we would like to have multiple coordinating process engines. One possible model for decentralized process enactment is proposed in [4], and it seems feasible to utilize the proposed Summit protocol in our enactment environment.…”

Engineering Medical Processes to Improve Their Safety

“…It was suggested that processes be defined using a procedural language [22]. In MARVEL/Oz [23] processes were defined using rules. SLANG [24] used modified Petri Nets to define processes.…”