Author: De Ley, E.
Paper Title Page
TUAAULT04 Web-based Execution of Graphical Workflows : a Modular Platform for Multifunctional Scientific Process Automation 540
 
  • E. De Ley, D. Jacobs
    iSencia Belgium, Gent, Belgium
  • M. Ounsy
    SOLEIL, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
  
  The Passerelle pro­cess au­toma­tion suite of­fers a fun­da­men­tal­ly mod­u­lar so­lu­tion plat­form, based on a lay­ered in­te­gra­tion of sev­er­al best-of-breed tech­nolo­gies. It has been suc­cess­ful­ly ap­plied by Syn­chrotron Soleil as the se­quencer for data ac­qui­si­tion and con­trol pro­cess­es on its beam­lines, in­te­grat­ed with TANGO as a con­trol bus and Glob­alScreen as the Scada pack­age. Since last year it is being used as the graph­i­cal work­flow com­po­nent for the de­vel­op­ment of an eclipse-based Data Anal­y­sis Work Bench, at ESRF. The top layer of Passerelle ex­pos­es an ac­tor-based de­vel­op­ment paradigm, based on the Ptole­my frame­work (UC Berke­ley). Ac­tors pro­vide ex­plic­it reusabil­i­ty and strong de­cou­pling, com­bined with an in­her­ent­ly con­cur­rent ex­e­cu­tion model. Actor li­braries exist for TANGO in­te­gra­tion, web-ser­vices, database op­er­a­tions, flow con­trol, rules-based anal­y­sis, math­e­mat­i­cal cal­cu­la­tions, launch­ing ex­ter­nal scripts etc. Passerelle's in­ter­nal ar­chi­tec­ture is based on OSGi, the major Java frame­work for mod­u­lar ser­vice-based ap­pli­ca­tions. A large set of mod­ules exist that can be re­com­bined as de­sired to ob­tain dif­fer­ent fea­tures and de­ploy­ment mod­els. Be­sides desk­top ver­sions of the Passerelle work­flow work­bench, there is also the Passerelle Man­ag­er. It is a se­cured web ap­pli­ca­tion in­clud­ing a graph­i­cal ed­i­tor, for cen­tral­ized de­sign, ex­e­cu­tion, man­age­ment and mon­i­tor­ing of pro­cess flows, in­te­grat­ing stan­dard Java En­ter­prise ser­vices with OSGi. We will pre­sent the in­ter­nal tech­ni­cal ar­chi­tec­ture, some in­ter­est­ing ap­pli­ca­tion cases and the lessons learnt.  
slides icon Slides TUAAULT04 [10.055 MB]  
 
WEPKS008 Rules-based Analysis with JBoss Drools : Adding Intelligence to Automation 790
 
  • E. De Ley, D. Jacobs
    iSencia Belgium, Gent, Belgium
  
  Rules en­gines are less-known as soft­ware tech­nol­o­gy than the tra­di­tion­al pro­ce­du­ral, ob­ject-ori­ent­ed, script­ing or dy­nam­ic de­vel­op­ment lan­guages. This is a pity, as their usage may offer an im­por­tant en­rich­ment to a de­vel­op­ment tool­box. JBoss Drools is an open-source rules en­gine that can eas­i­ly be em­bed­ded in any Java ap­pli­ca­tion. Through an in­te­gra­tion in our Passerelle pro­cess au­toma­tion suite, we have been able to pro­vide ad­vanced so­lu­tions for in­tel­li­gent pro­cess au­toma­tion, com­plex event pro­cess­ing, sys­tem mon­i­tor­ing and alarm­ing, au­to­mat­ed re­pair etc. This plat­form has been proven for many years as an au­to­mat­ed di­ag­no­sis and re­pair en­gine for Bel­gium's largest tele­com provider, and it is being pi­lot­ed at Syn­chrotron Soleil for de­vice mon­i­tor­ing and alarm­ing. After an in­tro­duc­tion to rules en­gines in gen­er­al and JBoss Drools in par­tic­u­lar, we will pre­sent some prac­ti­cal use cases and im­por­tant caveats.  
 
WEPKS029 Integrating a Workflow Engine within a Commercial SCADA to Build End User Applications in a Scientific Environment 860
 
  • M. Ounsy, G. Abeillé, S. Pierre-Joseph Zéphir, K.S. Saintin
    SOLEIL, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
  • E. De Ley
    iSencia Belgium, Gent, Belgium
  
  To build in­te­grat­ed high-lev­el ap­pli­ca­tions, SOLEIL is using an orig­i­nal com­po­nent-ori­ent­ed ap­proach based on Glob­alSCREEN, an in­dus­tri­al Java SCADA [1]. The aim of this in­te­grat­ed de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ment is to give SOLEIL's sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal staff a way to de­vel­op GUI ap­pli­ca­tions for beam­lines ex­ter­nal users . These GUI ap­pli­ca­tions must ad­dress the 2 fol­low­ing needs : mon­i­tor­ing and su­per­vi­sion of a con­trol sys­tem and de­vel­op­ment and ex­e­cu­tion of au­to­mat­ed pro­cess­es (like beam­line align­ment, data col­lec­tions, and on-line data anal­y­sis). The first need is now com­plete­ly an­swered through a rich set of Java graph­i­cal com­po­nents based on the COMETE [2] li­brary and pro­vid­ing a high level of ser­vice for data log­ging, scan­ning and so on. To reach the same qual­i­ty of ser­vice for pro­cess au­toma­tion, a big ef­fort has been made to in­te­grate more smooth­ly PASSERELLE [3], a work­flow en­gine, with ded­i­cat­ed us­er-friend­ly in­ter­faces for end users, pack­aged as Jav­aBeans in Glob­alSCREEN com­po­nents li­brary. Start­ing with brief de­scrip­tions of soft­ware ar­chi­tec­ture of the PASSERELLE and Glob­alSCREEN en­vi­ron­ments, we will then pre­sent the over­all sys­tem in­te­gra­tion de­sign as well as the cur­rent sta­tus of de­ploy­ment on SOLEIL beam­lines.
[1] V. Hardion, M. Ounsy, K. Saintin, "How to Use a SCADA for High-Level Application Development on a Large-Scale Basis in a Scientific Environment", ICALEPS 2007
[2] G. Viguier, K. Saintin, https://comete.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/comete, ICALEPS'11, MOPKN016.
[3] A. Buteau, M. Ounsy, G. Abeille, "A Graphical Sequencer for SOLEIL Beamline Acquisitions", ICALEPS'07, Knoxville, Tennessee - USA, Oct 2007.