Interviews


Nov 23 2017

Nikolaos Georgantas, INRIA Researcher

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An automated tool chain to faciltate the integration of heterogeneous systems into choreographies

What is the new development paradigm for IoT, smart city and smart mobility applications? 

The IoT domain is extremely fragmented with very diverse technologies and siloed vertical solutions proposed by the ever increasing number of actors of this field. IoT application designers need a new open development environment for easily building secured and large-scale applications combining services and things. Smart cities and intelligent transportation systems need a flexible platform for composing rapidly new services based on the IoT and existing web services. Designed for fast changing environments, the open source CHOReVOLUTION platform helps business users, software architects and developers to build, run and monitor distributed applications based on service choreography. This new approach requires no central coordination, in contrast to service orchestration.

 
What are the main benefits for software architects and developers of using the CHOReVOLUTION platform?

Using simple drag-and-drop operations, the end-users of the Eclipse-based CHOReVOLUTION Studio can build a choreography diagram integrating business goals, connected things and services. Then, the platform middleware components contribute to generate and deploy the resulting service choreography. Most importantly, a number of software artifacts are synthesized that resolve all heterogeneity issues inherent in a distributed system composed from independently developed and possibly autonomous entities. These relate, for instance, to business operations and data, business protocols, middleware protocols or security. Once distributed in the cloud, the application remains scalable, reconfigurable and secured. It respects the initial business goals, but important updates can still be brought at multiple levels, without having to re-invent the whole application.

Is the project designed for DevOps / SecOps allowing to compose and run dynamic services on hybrid clouds?

The CHOReVOLUTION platform & methodology certainly adheres to the philosophy of DevOps / SecOps, as it enables managing the whole lifecycle of secure service choreographies in an agile way. It automates most of the tedious and error-prone stages of choreography building, from expressing business objectives to running finally composed systems. Furthermore, dynamic services deployed on multiple clouds and hybrid clouds are certainly possible with the CHOReVOLUTION platform. However, these are not the main focus of our current experimentations and use cases. DevOps and SecOps team members may be looking for a global service inventory, an identity management solution and powerful back-end tools to bridge the gap between existing IoT and web services. They can find such features in the CHOReVOLUTION platform.    

How can a designer build his first choreography? What skills are needed to use the CHOReVOLUTION Studio?

An eCommerce application is provided with the CHOReVOLUTION platform, including all artifacts and files to try the Studio (an Eclipse-based IDRE), starting with a standard BPMN 2.0 modeling approach. BPMN, Java and basic Eclipse knowledge are required to build business-oriented service choreographies. And some notions of web services, security and IoT protocols are also useful. Nevertheless, the choreography designer can rely on the automated, easy-to-use tool chain of the CHOReVOLUTION platform for tackling all the hard problems of integrating heterogeneous systems into choreographies.  

What key innovation do you bring? Where is the most challenging aspect in this agile development?

My Inria colleagues and I have developed the part of the CHOReVOLUTION platform solution that seamlessly enables end-to-end interconnections of services and things independently of their interaction technologies, be it web services, CoAP-based sensors or MQTT data feeds. Our solution covers practically all existing and possibly future middleware protocols. And this by automated synthesis of the middleware artifacts that enable cross-connecting these heterogeneous technologies. These artifacts form the eVolution Service Bus (VSB), a lightweight, entirely flexible, and fully distributed interoperability bus.   

A word about yourself and your organization

I am a researcher at Inria Paris and Head of the MiMove research team, which has a strong focus on mobile distributed systems and supporting middleware, with special interest in the aspects of emergence and evolution, very-large-scale mobile sensing, and mobile social crowd-sensing. I am leading the effort concerning the CHOReVOLUTION platform middleware.

Jul 26 2017

Cedric Thomas, CEO of OW2

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CHOReVOLUTION is competing in the Application Enablement Platforms

How would you present CHOReVOLUTION? 

CHOReVOLUTION is an integrated platform for the development and deployment of a new generation of secure and dynamic applications based on service compositions. It is important to understand that CHOReVOLUTION addresses the challenges of a new market characterized by the combination of services, mobile devices, things, open data and large scale deployments. It's the Internet of Things at large, what the European Commission also calls the Future Internet.

The essential innovation in CHOReVOLUTION is a new development paradigm for service-oriented applications. The conventional approach to compose services is called orchestration. CHOReVOLUTION proposes a new method for composing services. We call it service choreography. There is no bottleneck and applications can attain far greater scalability than with traditional orchestration methods.

 
What is your role in CHOReVOLUTION?

We lead the dissemination work package. As such we provide the communication platform, the technical infrastructure for the developers, and our know-how in dissemination activities such as supporting open source projects, supporting a global community, developing awareness, and arranging the project presence at industry events. For instance, we showcased CHOReVOLUTION at CeBIT 2017. We also develop communication material; it starts with the project's visual identity and includes the web site, factsheets, posters, white papers, etc. We will ensure the open source platform is easily downloadable and deployable from our marketplace. 

You've also worked on the market analysis, what are your key findings?

We conducted face-to-face interviews with potential users and we consulted several dozen reports and market studies produced by independent industry analysts and market research firms. We understand that while CHOReVOLUTION is a software engineering project, its market potential is closely determined by growth in related markets such as BPM and IoT. We also found that due to its innovative nature, the market for the CHOReVOLUTION platform can only be approached indirectly by referring to comparable technologies and product categories. At the time of developing the analysis, the “Application Enablement Platforms” product category is the closest identified on the market. 

We think the IoT market will evolve from a situation where all applications are different and built on their own usage-specific technology stacks to a situation where different applications will be able to share common technologies. As it has already happened in other IT markets, we will transition from a fragmented market organized in silos to a standardized market organized in layers. At the bottom you will have the device and connectivity layers, then you will have the cloud computing and data management layers and, on top of that, you will have the application enablement layer. It's where the real business-oriented applications will be developed. CHOReVOLUTION belongs to this layer.

A word about yourself and your organization

I run OW2 a non-profit open source organization. Our mission is to develop a code base (a portfolio, etc.) of open source software, we concentrate on software for complex information systems. This code base is developed by a community of software vendors, system integrators and academics. We support three types of projects: community projects, commercial open source projects and collaborative innovation projects such as CHOReVOLUTION. We are proud to be a partner in the CHOReVOLUTION project: it delivers breakthrough technologies packaged into an open source integrated platform. CHOReVOLUTION contributes to the growth of our code base toward addressing increasingly complex challenges where business processes and IoT interact.    

Nov 08 2016

Team interview, University of L'Aquila

Developers can now focus only on coding the business-level logic

What is the new development paradigm for IoT and business service composition? 

uda_marco_autili.jpgMarco Autili, Assistant Professor:  As the Internet Network grows, the Internet of Services and Things is taking place. We daily experience the interaction with physical objects such as home alarm systems, thermostats, lighting bulbs, and other devices. These objects, which are not normally considered “intelligent”, are becoming smarter and smarter, and are programmed so as to be capable of independent computation and proactive actions. This capability allows these objects to communicate with each other as well as with software business services. Composing services and things spatially distributed over the Internet and coordinating their interactions in a distributed way is far from being simple if handled manually.
Hence, a new development and computing paradigm should offer dedicated modelling techniques, architectural style, integration patterns and middleware-level support to aid the automatic and distributed composition of business services and things.
Choreography-based development and choreography-oriented computation are good candidates towards supporting the realisation of such a paradigm in that choreographies represent an unambiguous and agnostic way of describing the relationships among business participants in a global peer-to-peer collaboration and supporting their distributed coordination.

Massimo Tivoli, Associate Professor:  
It is a paradigm promoting the flexible and easy reuse of existing services and things, and relieving the developer from accounting for composition and coordination issues.

What are the main benefits for software architect and developers to use service choreographies and, as a consequence of that, to use the CHOReVOLUTION platform? 

uda_massimo_tivoli.jpgMassimo Tivoli: On one hand, due to the inherently distributed nature of their software architecture, choreographies allow architects to build more scalable and efficient complex systems. On the other hand, developing concurrent and distributed systems introduces several issues. The main benefit, for choreography developers that use the CHOReVOLUTION platform, is to build choreographies by discarding possible service coordination, concurrency, and heterogeneity issues. That is, developers focus only on coding the business-level logic corresponding to the specified choreography tasks as taken in isolation.


Marco Autili
: The adoption of service choreographies allows software architect and developers to have a global view of the system to be realised and focus on specifying how groups of business participants work together, identifying potential services and things that can play the roles of the identified participants, understanding and analyzing their interactions.
The CHOReVOLUTION platform is a ready-to-use integrated environment to design, synthesize, deploy and enact choreographies. Things are considered as first-class computation citizens and are seamlessly composed with business services despite possible heterogeneities in their business-level interaction protocols and middleware-level communication paradigms. Developers can focus only on implementing (or reusing when already existing) the internal logic of services and things. The CHOReVOLUTION platform will take care of producing the code needed to coordinate, adapt and secure the interaction among services and things, their deployment and enactment.

What skills are required to use the CHOReVOLUTION Studio? 

Massimo Tivoli: Basic knowledge of the ECLIPSE platform, business processes modelling through BPMN2 choreography diagrams, basic notion of service-oriented architectures and enabling technologies such as XML Schemas, WSDL, etc.

What key innovation do you bring? Where is the most challenging aspect in this development?  

Marco Autili: The flexibility and dynamicity come from the fact that CHOReVOLUTION choreographies run on the Cloud, and the project provides the needed middleware-level, monitoring, and run-time support to make a choreography dynamically adaptable to possible context changes. 

Massimo Tivoli: The main innovation brought by the CHOReVOLUTION approach and its related Studio concerns automatic support for a more easy realisation of choreographies by sparing developers from writing code that goes beyond the implementation of the business logic internal to single choreography tasks. These aspects have been appreciated by the industrial partners in that the approach permits to develop choreographies according to their daily development practices.

What are your responsibilities at UDA? 

uda_marco_autili.jpgMarco Autili: I am Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Engineering Computer Science and Mathematics (DISIM), University of L'Aquila - Italy.
My main research areas are software engineering, distributed systems, context-oriented programming, formal methods
I actively work on the (from theory to practice) application of software engineering methods to the modeling, verification, analysis and automatic synthesis of complex distributed systems, and application of context-oriented programming and analysis techniques to the development of adaptable (mobile) applications.

uda_massimo_tivoli.jpgMassimo Tivoli:
I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Information Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics (University of L’Aquila). My main responsibilities concern research coordination activities and teaching activities. 

Jul 06 2016

Team interview, VIKTORIA Swedish ICT

We are building a user application to demonstrate how the choreographies are used to coordinate traffic

How would you describe CHOReVOLUTION? 

Markus.jpgMarkus Millfjord, Senior Software Consultant: I would describe CHOReVOLUTION as a way to try to hide complicated things when you build service applications. Thanks to the project outcomes, you don’t need to deal with parallelism or threads anymore. You just have to focus on your business logic in order to design your service, then send a message as a result.

Cristofer Englund, Research Manager: CHOReVOLUTION is a platform where we integrate services of different kinds, and make them interact with each other to generate a nice and easy-to-use application. We’re using CHOReVOLUTION for transport applications. There are several needs to exchange information in a transportation system with traffic lights, car drivers, road infrastructures and the other road users (pedestrians, bikers…).

Lei Chen, Senior Researcher:  CHOReVOLUTION is a kind of distributed coordination method for web services. We’ve removed the central control unit, and we want all services running everywhere to coordinate themselves in a distributed way. CHOReVOLUTION provides such a method. Most of the present technologies are relying on orchestration, which means you have a unit that controls all the services. We need a more efficient solution for the huge number of connected things and for the data flows to be transmitted over the Internet. We think CHOReVOLUTION is potentially providing such a solution.

What is Viktoria Swedish ICT mission? 

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Lei Chen
: Viktoria Swedish ICT is one of the research institute in Sweden. We are working mostly in the transport sector, with industries and universities to bring sustainable transport solutions to the society.

Cristofer Englund: Viktoria Swedish ICT research institute is working on transport research within five key areas: electrified mobility, connected systems, business models, sustainable transports and how companies are digitizing their business.

What is your contribution to the project and where is it critical? 

Lei Chen: We are working on one of the use cases of the project, which is the Urban Transport Coordination. We are trying to provide a highly responsive traffic solution to the drivers, with real time information on the road situation, accidents, congestions, and providing the most eco-friendly route to help them reduce their carbon emission and save fuel. This is one of our sustainable path within the transport sector. We have a clear vision to develop the solution using the CHOReVOLUTION platform. The critical part in the project is that we are still in an initial development phase of the platform itself. 

What key innovation do you think CHOReVOLUTION is bringing? 

Markus Millfjord: It’s always nice to be able to separate how different services are interacting, and to make things cleaner. In the CHOReVOLUTION approach, the BPMN 2 choreography diagrams let you place the logic that makes sense in one context on one place and your business logic on a different place. From that perspective, improvements and fixes will be easier and as an end result the CHOReVOLUTION platform will make applications simpler to maintain.

In real life, for what kind of applications will you use service choreographies? 

Cristofer.jpgCristofer Englund: With the urban traffic control, we are building a user application to demonstrate how the choreographies are used to coordinate traffic. 

Markus Millfjord: In our use case, we are focusing on route suggestion. The platform can help you find the best route whatever are the conditions, from an eco-friendliness perspective. We’re trying to coordinate different services to gather information from public APIs, then we’re trying to add contents to these routes to compare them, to predict and to select which one is the best from the ecological perspective. The reason to use CHOReVOLUTION is its flexibility to be able to add more services, more data providers, including different kind of data to our business logic as a whole.

Apr 02 2016

Marco Masetti, Project Manager, SOFTECO

 USE Media Macro instead this one 

Mar 01 2016

Francesco Chicchiriccò, CEO, TIRASA

 USE Media Macro instead this one 

Feb 25 2016

Gianluca Ripa, Senior Account Manager, CEFRIEL

 USE Media Macro instead this one 

Sep 22 2015

Sébastien Keller, Scientific coordinator, Thales Application Security Lab

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We are building an environment to create new advanced applications

Where does the CHOReVOLUTION project come from? 

This project was selected by the European Commission during the first Horizon 2020 call. It started in early 2015 and will extend for three years. Its development framework follows the results of another major project, CHOReOS which began to show how to create higher-level applications, integrating various services, in the field of smart city particularly. CHOReOS brought together the expertise of 17 partners between 2010 and 2013. It showed a great potential but also revealed a need for simplification so that its results can be easily exploited by smart city project managers. 

 
What is the purpose of the CHOReVOLUTION project?

CHOReVOLUTION aims to provide an environment allowing interactions between various services currently provided by local authorities, to deliver advanced applications based for example on traffic conditions or local weather information. Combined with business traveller objectives, for instance, this environment will calculate better routes and provide more accurate information directly on his smartphone. 

Where is the main innovation?

Today, several services and data sources are used for travel guidance. We're looking to provide a way to combine them in order to deliver a higher level of services. We want to offer the infrastructure to create these new advanced applications.

What role plays Thales in this project?

Thales is the project coordinator who ensures the achievement of the project objectives. There are eight partners involved, each having a complementary role. Some of them provide technologies and others develop tangible business cases to demonstrate how to use the CHOReVOLUTION environment in domains like intelligent transportation, smart city or energy savings.

What kind of resources Thales allocates to this project?

Thales provides human resources including a project manager and several engineers to secure the development of new applications.

Are you considering collaborations with other European projects?

Several practical workshops are already planned. Our goal is to foster exchanges at this point and to re-use, as much as possible, what has been done in the context of other European projects.

A word on Sébastien Keller, Thales Scientific coordinator

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Dr. Sébastien Keller received his PhD in Electrical engineering in 1997 from University of Nancy, France. He has more than 15 years of experience in computer science at Thales Group where he worked as Software Project Leader, System Architect and System Integration Leader on several projects like SGEA (Electronic Warfare System for the French Land Forces), FAST (Platform to digitalise information in the French administration), SIV (new French system for vehicles registration),Thales Hypervisor (integration framework for transport and security applications) and for Mexico Ciudad Segura (urban security project for Mexico city). He has joined the Application Security Lab in 2012 and is currently scientific coordinator of OPTET (FP7 project started in November 2012) and of CHOReVOLUTION (H2020 project started in January 2015). He was in charge of CHOReOS (FP7 project ended in November 2013).