It has been way too long since I’ve updated this. I will be more diligent about it.

I’ve been meeting with my advisor weekly for most of this semester so far. Each time, I’ve fleshed out more and more of the details of how I’d like my research topic to shape up. At this point, I think I’m close to having a complete architecture that I can start working toward implementing to prove my ideas will work.

So far, I’ve laid out several items. First, a high-level architecture describing the main components needed to construct an automated workflow composition capability. Along with that, I’ve laid out the sequence of steps that those components need to execute to correctly parse through a BPMN model and pick out services needed to execute that workflow.

I’ve also specified some basic definitions and equations to capture the formal definitions and relations needed to compose services into workflows. And as of this week, I’ve detailed the major decision points necessary to compose services. This includes mapping services to individual activities in the process model, deciding which services can be composed together, how to analyze the quality of service attributes and recommend a choice of service compositions, and the factors to be considered when evaluating quality of service across complex workflows.

Now I need to specify the metadata that needs to be attached to a process model, plus an overall detailed architecture for the system. Luckily I did a fair bit of that work over the summer and I just need to formalize it.