Adaptive Process Management in Cyber-Physical Domains

Abstract

The increasing application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging cyber-physical domains beyond business computing (e.g., personalized healthcare, emergency management, factories of the future, home automation, etc.) has led to reconsider the level of flexibility and support required to manage complex processes in such domains. A cyber-physical domain is characterized by the presence of a cyber-physical system coordinating heterogeneous ICT components (PCs, smartphones, sensors, actuators) and involving real world entities (humans, machines, agents, robots, etc.) that perform complex tasks in the "physical" real world to achieve a common goal. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable, and processes enacted in cyber-physical domains must be robust to unexpected conditions and adaptable to unanticipated exceptions. This demands a more flexible approach in process design and enactment, recognizing that in real-world environments it is not adequate to assume that all possible recovery activities can be predefined for dealing with the exceptions that can ensue. In this chapter, we tackle the above issue and we propose a general approach, a concrete framework and a process management system implementation, called SmartPM, for automatically adapting processes enacted in cyber-physical domains in case of unanticipated exceptions and exogenous events. The adaptation mechanism provided by SmartPM is based on declarative task specifications, execution monitoring for detecting failures and context changes at run-time, and automated planning techniques to self-repair the running process, without requiring to predefine any specific adaptation policy or exception handler at design-time.

Exploring the status of the human operator in Industry 4.0: A systematic review

“…For example, in the study carried out by Gualtieri et al ( 2020 ), a manual assembly station was transformed into a collaborative one (with the use of cobots), mainly through the analysis of physical ergonomic assessment, in which the focus was productivity and physical enhancement. Also, Marrella and Mecella ( 2017 ), in their “flexible approach for work design,” aimed to tackle unpredictable phenomena at work, through an extensive theoretical framework, but did not consider the real conditions in which activity is developed and its complexity. In another case study developed by Di Carlo et al ( 2021 ), focused on the use of digital twin techniques for safety and maintenance conditions, the authors reported an improvement in the performance of the system, but they also mentioned the emergence of unpredictable difficulties.…”

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An Example and Directions for Improving the Modeling of the Use of Information Technologies for Actions in Systems

“…Возможные ветвления [15,16] за счет проявляющихся изменений описаны отдельными моделями, примеры которых приведены ниже.…”

“…Полученные результаты планируется воплотить в ряде технологических проектов, в частности в проектах шаблонизации, типовых фрагментах PAIS (Process-Aware Information Systems) [14], паттернах использования информации в них, паттернах решения задач использования ИТ в условиях изменений [15][16][17][18], Actionable Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Activity, информационных системах поддержки изменений функционирования.…”

Contribution to service provision on interoperable mobile devices in Cyber-Physical Systems

“…The invocation has to be coordinated, and to provide a synchronization constraint, a central execution or orchestrator is included into the mix (Seiger, Huber, & Schlegel, 2018). The result is a collection of proposals that using the central orchestrator, propose the use of predefined algorithms that adapt the evolution of the system depending of the physical state of the external variables (Marrella & Mecella, 2017). With this approach, the timing constraint is easily manageable, as the central entity can obtain the current state of each module and delay the execution if needed, but the need of updated low-level information still remains.…”