PhD Thesis

I am an international cotutelle PhD student enrolled at both the University of Luxemburg and the University of Osnabrück (Germany), as part of a collaboration program between both universities. My area of research is software engineering and I am particularly interested in developing a method and language for regulatory compliance modeling and verification. For more details about my research interests and contributions have a look at my research page.

I am writing my thesis under the supervision of:

• Professor Pierre Kelsen: Model Driven Engineering (MDE) Group, Laboratory for Advanced Software Systems (LASSY), Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC), University of Luxemburg.
• Professor Elke Pulvermüller: Software Engineering Group, Faculty for mathematics and computer Science, University of Osnabrück.

Previously to this, I was working for the IDS Scheer AG in the ARIS Research department. I was involved in international research projects on semantic BPM also tackling compliance management issues. During this period I authored and co-authored several scientific publications (see my publications page). I was also involved in the design of the business rule management solution of the ARIS platform for business process management.

I submitted my research proposal to Professors Pierre Kelsen and Elke Pulvermüller on October 2008. The proposal got accepted during the year 2009 and I officially started working on my thesis on August 2009. My research on compliance in business process management had already begun druing my duty at the ARIS Research in June 2007.

Research

Research Interests

Summary of PhD research

Business process management (BPM) is a core research area in information systems. In particular, the problem of adequate and precise modeling of semantically rich enterprise structure and behavior, as well as the problem of compliance management with regulations are challenges on which I focus in my research. My dissertation provides a formal and model driven framework for covering the regulatory compliance lifecycle in BPM. Policies are used for modeling compliance and model-checking techniques are used for verifying compliance.

Research Vision
The vision of an intelligent, real-time and adaptive enterprise is what drives my research. Therefore the study of enterprise modeling and in particular of business processes is central. However, the big scale and the speed at which data is produced and needs to be processed by information systems strongly challenges current practices and will push the limits of How we make our Information Systems (IS) and What we make them do it. I do believe that the adequate use of carefully engineered business policies and rules, complex event processing (CEP), and model-driven engineering (MDE) may very well form a unique blend of tools worth researching and applying to the governance of information systems, hence leveraging the practice into a more automated and intelligent form.

Research Mission
Business process management (BPM) is a core research area in information systems. My main objective is the use of formal methods to model semantically rich enterprise business processes, which can be verified for compliance with regulations. Enterprise business processes encompass several aspects such as control flow, data flow, resource flow and also provide a link to the motivation level through risks and goals. In particular, the study of the use of policies and rules, model driven technologies and design patterns to represent regulations and verify them on business processes is tackled in my PhD research.

Current Research Focus

The issue of Regulatory Compliance Management (RCM) in information systems is core to my research. It has been tackled in the context of enterprise models and in particular business processes in my initial research, and also in the context of processes defined over the semantic web using semantic web services and ontologies.

RCM has potentially implications for and applications to a variety of domains including enterprise architectures/models, service-oriented-architectures (SOA), requirements engineering and the semantic web. 

I rely on using and adapting techniques from the software engineering sub-areas of model-driven-engineering (formal metamodeling, model transformations) and verification (model checking) to support the full lifecycle of RCM.

Key Areas of Interest

The main areas of interest listed here cover a wide range of topics, due on the one part to the multidisciplinary nature of the research I was involved in, and on the other hand to the potential applications of research results achieved up until now:

1. Business Process Management, in particular the modeling, simulation/monitoring and analysis parts of the lifecycle.

2. Policy and Rule Management, and more generally Decision Management as a means for enabling the vision of the Intelligent Enterprise.

3. Conceptual modeling and application to enterprise models/architectures.

4. Service Oriented Computing.

5. Meta-modeling, model transformation and model composition.

7. Requirements engineering of security and policy requirements.

8.I also made contributions to the semantic web as well as complex event processing.

Reviewer

• For the Electronic Markets - International Journal on Networked Business. http://www.electronicmarkets.org/.
• For the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2011/. Software Engineering Track: http://paris.utdallas.edu/sacse11/.
• For the book: Electronic Business Interoperability - Concepts, Opportunities and Challenges. A book edited by: Ejub Kajan (State University of Novi Pazar, Serbia). IGI Global. To appear in 2011. http://www.igi-global.com/Bookstore/TitleDetails.aspx?TitleId=45956.
• For the book: Modern Software Engineering Concepts and Practices: Advanced Approaches. A book edited by (Dr. Ali H. Dogru, Middle East Technical University, Turkey and Mr. Veli Bicer, FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Germany). http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=687.
• Reviewer at the ECIS 2008: European Conference on Information Systems - Track 6: Strategic Management of IS and IT. http://www.ecis2008.ie/

Research Schools

• 2nd International Summer school on domain specific modeling - theory and practice, 2011, 12-16.09.2011. http://ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/DSM-TP/
• 1st International summer school on domain specific modeling - theory and practice, 2010, 06-09.09.2010. DSM-TP 2010, Casa da Cerca, Lisbon Portugal. http://ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/DSM-TP/.
• European Summer School of Logic, Language and Information. ESSLLI 2010. UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN / DENMARK / AUGUST 9-20, 2010. http://esslli2010cph.info/.

Teaching

• Winter Semester 2009-2010. Practical sessions (Travaux Diriges) for the Object Oriented Programming Course. Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Mathematics. Prof. Pierre Kelsen.
• Summer Semester 2010. Practical sessions (Travaux Diriges) for the Object Oriented Programming Course. Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Mathematics. Prof. Pierre Kelsen.
• Winter Semester 2010-2011. Practical Sessions (Travaux Diriges) for the Object Oriented Programming Course. Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Mathematics. Prof. Pierre Kelsen.

Presentations

• A number of talks at international events among which EDOC, APCCM, BPSC, ECOWS, CEC, GRCIS, SBPM.
• Number of guest talks at universities: University of Ghent, Universita degli studi di Torino, University of Osnabrueck, Queensland University of Technology (jointly organized by NICTA & University of Queensland).

Scientific Stays and Summer Schools

• Scientific stays at the universities of Osnabrueck, Gent, Torino and at NICTA (Australia).
• Summer schools 1st and 2nd Domain specific modeling summer school in 2010 and 2011, ESSLLI (Logic, Language, Information) in 2010.

Projects

I am currently involved in the following projects:

• MARCO (Managing Regulatory Compliance: a Business Centered Approach): http://marco.gforge.uni.lu/. This projects is funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche du Luxembourg (FNR).
  

I was previously involved in the following projects:

• ADIWA (Allianz Digitaler Warenfkuss): http://www.adiwa.net/
• IP-SUPER (Integrated Project - semantics utilized for process management within and between enterprises): http://www.ip-super.org/

Manifesto

My name is Marwane El Kharbili. I am currently a junior researcher at the university of Luxemburg, where I am enrolled as a PhD Candidate. I am a member of the Model Driven Engineering Group of Prof. Pierre Kelsen.

This is my personal blog and it covers various topics related or not to my research interests (Business Process Management, Compliance Management, Model Driven Engineering, Business Rules Management, and the semantic web).

The opinions on this blog are not all necessarily mine and definitely not those of my employer.

Contact

Address
Marwane El Kharbili
Faculté des Sciences, de la Technologie et de la Communication
6, Rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
L-1359, Luxembourg City
Luxemburg

Office: Campus Kirchberg, L-109
Tel: (+352) 46 66 44 5601
E-mail: marwane (DOT) elkharbili (AT) gmail (DOT) com
Skype ID: Ask me per email and I'll send it to you
LinkedIn: My profile on LinkedIn
Xing: My profile on Xing
Viadeo My profile on Viadeo

I am an evening man

On this website, I have found an article about the two different kinds of people. There are morning people and evening people. The page introduces these and contains three curves. One curve showing the medium performance curve (for the hypothetic "normal" person), the performance curve for an evening man, and a curve for the morning man. The evening man reaches his peak of productivity at around 22:00 O'Clock! The morning man on the opposite at around 08:00 O'clock. Somehow, this doesn't surprise me at all...

So the website advises the following to the evening man. Important and complicated tasks should be done during afternoon. The peak of productivity being between 14:00 and 18:00 at around 16:00. Routine tasks should be done in the morning, to get started. complex tasks should be always prepared the day before, during the evening. I already came up to the point where I put most of these tips in use, since I had to cope and find ways of optimizing with my unorthodox working methods since high school.

A morning man should be at work pretty early and profit from the time where most colleagues are not yet there to do complicated tasks. I know of some colleagues I had in the numerous companies I worked in (in several countries) who come to work before seven. The only question I have is how do they do with children, do they drop them at school at 06:30? Routine tasks should be done during the afternoon. The morning man has an overall decreasing productivity curve over the whole day. The earlier the better for him. Towards mid-afternoon, it is the end, he'd better go home :D

So I am clearly an evening man. This explains quite a lot of things to me. For example, my strong tendency to stay late at night is shown on the graphic. my only questions is where did they get the figures from? I would be very curious to know the whereabouts of the study. That could help a lot of people.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Drools - Business Rules the JBOSS way

I have been hearing about drools for quite time now, at least since 2 years. At the JBOSS JBOSSWorld conference in the US in mid-february in Orlando. Drools is the business rule management system (BRMS) from JBOSS. The contained rules engine is an implementation of the RETE algortihm. I am curious to know what their approach to business rules is. This is why I got started a little bit with the documentation to understand their user interaction strategy.

All I know is that Drools is rather destined to outsource business rules from java code. This is a pretty targeted use of business rules. But this makes sense since drools works on J2EE application servers (rules can be pulled from drools directly into the application). Drools uses the Google Web Toolkit and is free to download under the Apache license. My view on business rules is the following: rules exist on very different layers of the enterprise. Rules are inherently pervasive. for example, business rules can be modeled to describe business decision making patterns for a company routing electricity over a network of cable spanning the whole country. But rules can also be used to contain the parametrization logic of the application implementing this routing, potentially written in a target programing language. so both sets of business rules are needed. business rules have got to be modeled in both cases. The first set of business rules should be destiined to contain implementation-independent logic, and can capture rules on a business lelel. This is why I call these business rules. the other set of rules are implementation specific, and are destined to be modeled and integrated by the programmer, This is why i think they should be simply called rules. Now I am curious about what the components of drools are and what it would allow to do.

I am going to write some future posts about that as I will be discovering more about that. Hopefully some interesting ideas will come out of that.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Agile BPM

I found this post in a Dialog blog. Dialog conference series are organized by ILOG, of course tackle everything around Business Rule Management Systems. The post is about making BPM agile. The answer is: BPM, BRMS, SOA, Events Management. How? Well, Daryl Plummer, Vice President and Chief Gartner Fellow gave a talk about just that at Dialog08. I found the following points very interesting. A more dynamic BPM will have an effect on the following points:

• Business agility
• Decision making
• Revenue opportunities
• Customer satisfaction
• Regulatory compliance

I find the second and last extremely interesting since hey form the core of my work at the IDS and my topic of research. It is true that managing decision making independently from where it is used, but also being able to modify and deploy it into business processes where the business is realized brings agility to the enterprise. Regulatory compliance is also a bog concern at companies currently, and even late adopters are now starting to explore ways of achieving that because they have to comply to laws and regulations in order to avoid judiciary pursuits or trials.
A second interesting though was that SOA is IT driven and BPM business-led. It is not about aligning IT to business, it is about integrating both, make sure they work together. So there is a need for a process-centric layer between both. This is what tools like ARIS are all about. Providing a comprehensive framework for managing business processes, while helping the implementation of these business processes.

The third idea was about events and services. Apart from the fact that consuming services is the natural way humans handle things. Nobody is interested in how a service is realized. A service is just the abstract interface to an value-adding functionality. Now the things is that services are made to be executed upon occuring events. Events and services just fit well. A services architecture integrated with an event management framework is another component in achieving flexibility. I have usually always heard of CEPs, Complex Event Processing frameworks, and how well they would work with business rules. There are vendors for CEPs and looking at what it may bring to a enterprise in terms of flexibility is certainly worth it. Now any process modelling notations such as EPC and BPMN handle events. So there is already event information that can ba managed by the business. so just like business rules, events are present at the different layers of an enterprise's business.

So three ideas about BPM agility out of a post at a BRMS conference. BPM, Services, events and business rules can all work together. We just have to show that in rea world use cases and complex scenarios, I would be very happy to write apost about someone who goves a presentation about such a thing.

Anyways, I have been reading some of the posts at DIALOG08 and many are very interesting. I'll keep on reviewing whatever has to do with BRMS, BPM, SOA and compliance.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Microsoft and the future of quantum computing

...Is the 1st April joke by Microsoft folks on Channel 9. And when you have a look at the reactions and the comments, many people have fallen down for this :D I must say, hadn't it been the comments, I would have believed that a team of genius software architects and astrophysicists have gotten together under the umbrella of the "Quantum Unreality Computation Group" and developed the revolutionary Quark product. This product is the ultimate quantum computing machine, the solution everybody dreamed of to revolutionize parallel computing. Don't look for this one on Microsoft's catalogs, you won't find it. the only thing that betrays the prank is that at the end of the 30 minute video where Dr. Beckman very handily explains the quantum theory behind the discovery, both the reporter and him eventually finish laughing their heart out, lol. If you want to get a not so serious idea about how quantum jokes made by Microsoft look like, get the video!

Marwane El Kharbili.

Business rules, COBOL and Mainframes

Ilog have announced their new Cobol Add-On for Jrules, on the 19.02.2008. I read 2 posts about this here and here too. It should simplify SOA governance for legacy systems. It is destined to be used with legacy systems and in particular mainframe systems upon which applications are coded in COBOL. No need to say that finding programmers which still have much experience in COBOL is no easy task, and maintaining these applications is getting harder. But for companies that have invested much in these mainframe systems, the question of leaving these systems behind doesn't even pose itself. using the COBOL add-on for JRules is a way of outsourcing the business Rules embedded in theses mainframes to manage them. This also allows an SOA integration of these systems by invoking COBOL code through the business rules. COBOL code can also be generated from business rules. So quite an interesting application of business rules to legacy systems. I had heard a webcast by the guys from Corticon about how to realize such a legacy modernization and they were tackling the same topic. So it looks like business rules management system providers see this field of legacy systems as a very important one to their expansion strategy.

Marwane El Kharbili.