Time-based orchestration of workflow, interoperability with G-Devs/Hla

摘要

Enterprises information systems (EIS) take benefits of latest advanced of web services and Internet of things to improve information retrieving and gathering for decision making. Furthermore, EIS should permit a more comprehensive information routing in the company within an electronic workflow in order to save time, cost and to reduce production impact on the environment. Such software has to interact frequently with real world data acquired by different sensors. Nevertheless this combination of software and hardware devices frequently faces interoperability problems. Also, testing and validating the EIS is not trivial without testing in real condition that can lead to deploy the large system. Authors assumed that testing and validating part of the system behaviour can be anticipated progressively by simulation, permitting then more progressive and confident system integration. This paper proposes to introduce a new workflow demonstration platform to combine simulation world with real world interacting with sensor, human interfacing and web service calls. In detail, this paper proposes to combine the Taverna Workflow tool, which handles and triggers web services call proposed by a platform server, to other software components. This combination has revealed one drawback of major workflows orchestrators; they do not provide time management facilities to handle synchronization during parallel execution of interdependent workflows. To overcome that limitation a clock ordering solution has been added by reusing G-DEVS/HLA to synchronize workflows running in parallel. The imbrications of G-DEVS M&S with Taverna workflow is now operating thanks to HLA. This work is validated by demonstrating the interoperability and the complementarity of these approaches on a logistic platform study case. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.