Software Engineering Group - Research

The software engineering group conducts research aimed at addressing the following question: How to cost-effectively build and maintain integrated software systems that are aligned with business goals and business operations? The group works on the following themes:

  • Business Process Management: Designing and building software systems starting from models of how an organisation works, also called business process models. For example, a PhD student in the group has developed a tool to combine multiple business process models together. This tool is currently being used by Australia's largest insurance company in order to consolidate their repository consisting of around 600 business process models.
  • Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing: Cost-effectively running software systems using "on-demand" and "pay-per-use" infrastructure. For example, the group has developed a model for turning servers in a data center on and off, in order to minimize electricity consumption without affecting the end-user experience. The group is seeking motivated students in order test this model using the Wikipedia infrastructure.

The group is involved in the following research projects:

  • Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI). This project is developing techniques and tools to simplify the design, deployment and evolution of service collaborations, based on the concept of business artifacts. Our team is contributing to the development of the conformance checking, process mining and adaptation techniques for artifact-centric process models.
  • Liquid Publications. This project is developing innovative ways of disseminating scientific knowledge and evaluating the impact of scientific research and researchers. Our team is specifically involved in the application of social network analysis techniques to design algorithms for predicting the future impact of scientific publications and for assessing the reputation of scientific researchers.
  • Semantics for Software-as-a-Service and Cloud Computing (SITIO). In this project, we are developing mathematical models and numerical algorithms to estimate the number of servers in a server farm in a way that satisfies specified service-level objectives, while maximizing the net revenue earned by the provider. The proposed models take into account energy costs and penalties paid for unavailability. See the list of publications on this topic and our Cloud Computing economics blog.
  • Configurable process modelling. This project aims at developing techniques for representing process models that can be configured to fit different organizations or projects. This research is conducted in collaboration with Queensland University of Technology and is funded by the Australian Research Council.

Tools

  • BPMN2BPEL Eclipse plugin: This plugin converts BPMN models designed using the SOA Tools BPMN Editor into BPEL code that can be deployed in the Apache ODE orchestration server. The plugin employs the most advanced techniques to generate structured and highly readable BPEL code, even in the case where the input BPMN models are not structured.
  • BPStruct This tool converts any BPMN model into an equivalent block-structured BPMN model. If your BPMN models are getting a bit messy and you would like to get cleaner models, this is the tool you need. BPStruct also includes an extension for computing the Quality of Service (QoS) of business process models based on their structured representation.
  • Process Merger. This tool helps process analysts to construct consolidated process models out of collections of process models that share common fragments. The tool accepts multiple process models and constructs either a ``union'' of the input models (factoring out common fragments) or a digest of the input models (keeping only the most recurrent fragments). The \emph{Process Merger} tool has been used in the context of a process model consolidation project at Australia's largest insurance company. The tool is also part of the AproMore process model repository.

Publications

PhD theses completed in the group

Masters theses completed in the group

List of open topics for Masters and Bachelors theses