Team interview, VIKTORIA Swedish ICT


Jul 06 2016

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? 

Lei.jpg
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.