CRISTAL-ISE

CRISTAL-ISE: Discovering and managing eBusiness collaborations

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'Research efforts to tackle problems of system evolution have included different approaches such as design versioning and annotated database capture of designs, but none of these enable the design of existing running systems to be changed on-the-fly and for those changes to be reflected in a new running version of that design nor for external systems to discover how they may inter-operate with the existing system. Such functionality is becoming increasingly important especially in the business to business sector where time-to-market has become a critical driver. Businesses now expect systems to be agile in nature, to be able to cope with heterogeneity between systems and to have inter-business synchronisation and to be responsive to changes in user requirements so that they can evolve over time as the user needs change. What industry needs are the skills to develop semantically rich, open, scalable and flexible systems whose descriptions can be discovered by other cooperating systems so that they can coexist and inter-operate. Researchers at the University of the West of England (UWE) have been developing such skills and have implemented the CRISTAL system, based on data and meta-data descriptions that enable systems to dynamically reconfigure on-the-fly and to have system descriptions managed alongside provenance data. The CRISTAL-ISE project aims to enhance an existing Business Process Management tool based on CRISTAL (called Agilium, as developed by the company M1i) with the ability to capture system semantics and have those semantics and provenance 'discovered' by external systems. As a consequence, CRISTAL-ISE will allow the analysis of system usage patterns, system descriptions and associated provenance data of deployed systems in order to facilitate system interoperability between multiple instances of Agilium and will facilitate ebusiness interoperation.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

Data-tracking software initially designed to help support physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) needed new capabilities. An EU initiative has set out to bring the software up to modern standards.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Thanks to EU funding, the 'CRISTAL-ISE: Discovering and managing eBusiness collaborations' (http://www.cristal-ise.org/ (CRISTAL-ISE)) project is enhancing the software platform that was first created at CERN in the late 1990s. When released, the new version will have a wide variety of potential uses outside of particle physics, including medicine, manufacturing, engineering and logistics.

The project is based around secondments. The early-stage researchers are developing and contributing to an improved version of the software known as Cooperative Repositories and Information System for Tracking Assembly Lifecycles (CRISTAL).

CRISTAL is designed to handle the complexity of data-intensive systems. It also provides the flexibility to adapt to the changing scenarios of any production management system or any process where workflow and data traceability is crucial.

During the first two years of the project, team members released an open source version of CRISTAL that tracks all types of information. In addition, it enables other research projects or businesses to freely use it and tweak the source code. This will lead to further enhancements and more flexibility. Large-scale projects with rapidly evolving workflows can benefit from using CRISTAL.

Collaborative research, knowledge exchange, and secondments from academia and industry have resulted in the publication of six papers in various academic journals.

CRISTAL-ISE outcomes are helping to introduce a new and improved workflow-driven application to map and manage data. The project is also fostering new strategic partnerships and wider participation with European software suppliers and users. Technology developed in the course of particle physics research will have applications far beyond the world of tracking detector components.