Guarded attribute grammars and publish/subscribe for implementing distributed collaborative business processes with high data availability

With the ever-increasing development of the Internet and the diversification of communication media, business processes of companies are increasingly collaborative and distributed. This contrasts with traditional solutions deployed for their management which are usually centralized, based either on the control and coordination of the flow of activities, or on the documents exchanged or artifacts. Moreover, the users who are usually the main actors in collaborations are often relegated to second place. Recently, a distributed, data-driven and user-centric approach called guarded attribute grammar (GAG) has been proposed for the modeling of such processes; it thus provides an answer to most of these limitations. In this paper, we present an approach for implementing business processes modeled using GAG in which communications are done by publish/subscribe with redirection of subscription (pub/sub-RS). In fact, the pub/sub-RS—which we propose—is a new variant of the publish/subscribe protocol particularly adapted to the asynchronous and incremental exchange of semi-structured data. It allows to guarantee high data availability during the process execution by ensuring that an actor, perceived as a subscriber, will always receive a data he needs to perform a task as soon as it is produced. Moreover, if the data are semi-structured and produced collaboratively and incrementally by several actors, its subscribers will be notified as soon as one of its components (a prefix) is produced, simultaneously as they will be subscribed in a transparent way to the remaining components (the suffix).