Progress Reports

This project has resulted in close collaboration between the Rutgers University and LUMS on related research and development tasks as well as advising of graduate students. Several graduate students, including two female PhD students (Ayesha Afzal and Sehrish Amjad) at LUMS are working on this project. LUMS PhD student, Ayesha Afzal, has already defended her PhD proposal and is expected to graduate in Spring 2018. Another female PhD student at Rutgers, Abeer Elahraf, is working on this project as part of her PhD dissertation work. All three PhD students are jointly advised by Basit Shafiq (PI, LUMS) and Nabil Adam (PI, Rutgers). It is expected that one more PhD student from LUMS will join this project from Fall 2017. Basit Shafiq (PI, LUMS) visited Rutgers University in Summer 2016 and Summer 2017 to work with the Rutgers faculty and graduate students.

This close collaboration has been very productive in terms of research and scholarship activities as well as infrastructure development. The research work has already resulted in five publications in two years (one book chapter, three conference papers, and one journal paper). In addition two manuscripts have been submitted to relevant journals. This research grant has also enabled us to provide our students and researchers access to the state-of-the-art computation infrastructure. At LUMS, a high-end multi core server machine was procured in 2016, which is being used by the students, faculty, and researchers for the related research and development activities. The PhD students and research staff at LUMS have also been provided with desktop computers through this grant. In addition, the LUMS team has also been provided access to the Rutgers Newark High Performance Computing Cluster.

2018: This project aims at improving the efficiency and reducing the cost for development, deployment, and management of e-government processes as well as business processes of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by utilizing resources (Web services, computational, data, storage resources, etc.) available in the cloud. The proposed work focusses on developing a cloud-based middleware system (called Codec) to support composition and management of e-government processes and business processes.

As part of our project, we have developed a tool, called ASSEMBLE, for collaborative business process (BP) development in a cloud environment depicted. This tool implements our automated BP composition approach that exploits the knowledge of existing BPs in a given domain to help a user organization to compose its BP. Given the BP requirements & available service operations of a user organization as well as a collection of related BPs in a given domain, ASSEMBLE composes an executable BP that can be customized and refined by the user organization based on its requirements. This executable BP can be deployed on any business process execution engine on the user organization’s site or on the cloud. The ASSEMBLE tool provides the following features for collaborative BP development: i) user requirement specification; ii) translation of user requirements into process workflow by exploiting the knowledge of existing BPs; iii) mapping each activity in the BP workflow to the appropriate Web service API of user organization; iv) generation of executable BP code; and iv) deployment and management of the BP in the cloud or at user organization site. The intended users of ASSEMBLE are local government departments and SME organizations that cannot bear with the high cost of personnel and software/hardware resources for BP design and development.

This project has resulted in close collaboration between the Rutgers University and LUMS on related research and development tasks as well as advising of graduate students. Several graduate students, including three female PhD students at LUMS (Ayesha Afzal, Sehrish Amjad, and Hafsa Zafar) have been working on this project. Ayesha Afzal graduated with PhD degree in June 2018 and is now working as an Assistant Professor in Air University Multan Campus. At Rutgers, a female PhD student, Abeer Elahraf, is working on this project as part of her PhD dissertation work. Further, at Rutgers, another female PhD student, Gunjan Batra, as well as a male PhD student, Hafiz Salman Asif, are working on this project on tasks related to their dissertation. Several masters students at LUMS and Rutgers have been working on this project as well.

This close collaboration has been very productive in terms of research and scholarship activities as well as infrastructure development. The research work resulted in nine publications in three years. This research grant has also enabled us to provide our students and researchers access to the state-of-the-art computation infrastructure. At LUMS, a high-end multi core server machine was procured in 2016, which is being used by the students, faculty, and researchers for the related research and development activities. The PhD students and research staff at LUMS have also been provided with desktop computers through this grant.