Develop your own Rules!

The SHEA comes with support to program your own rules. Therefore you can use the Visual Service Design Tool enabling to design rule-processes based on the Business Process Development Notation (BPMN).

Check out the video to get an impression how it works:

How to get started

For getting started with the Visual Service Design Tool, just download the ZIP files below. They contain the VSDT plugins, the User's Manual, and some example diagrams. Additionally, you will need the Eclipse IDE, and, for executing the generated code, a Tomcat Web server along with the ActiveBPEL BPEL engine, all of  which can be downloaded freely.

The VSDT is part of the development tools of the JIAC multi-agent system. For the latest version of the VSDT, please visit JIAC.de.

Downloads

	vsdt_1.1.2.zip The Visual Service Design Tool Plugins, to be installed into the Eclipse IDE.	9.0 M
	vsdt_manual.pdf Documentation, including a detailed description of the installation process, usage and selected features.	606 K
	vsdt_examples.zip Example BPMN diagrams, which can be transformed to executable BPEL processes.	38 K
	vsdt_testing.zip Example Web services, process start GUIs and configuration files.	27 M
	vsdt_screencast.wmv Screencast showing the VSDT in action (full resolution). Note: The Video is showing a alightly outdated version from March 2008	19.2 M

Requirements

• Java 1.5 or newer
• Eclipse 3.4 'Ganymede'
• Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework Plugin + Dependencies

More information about the requirements and the setup process can be found in the manual.

Process Deployment and Testing

Once the processes have been developed using the VSDT and the executable BPEL code is generated, it is recommended to check the BPEL files using a native BPEL tool, e.g. the ActiveBPEL Designer.  If the files have been found alright and complete, use the BPEL tool to deploy the files to the Tomcat.  Note that the steps to take here are dependent on the BPEL engine used on the specific system and thus can not be integrated into the VSDT itself, as it would contradict the tool's intent of being independent of any specific execution language, let alone platform.

A number of example Web services as well as two demonstration processes can be found in the testing archive file. These are the processes generated from the examples. As can be seen, only minimal extensions had to be made to the generated code.

For the two demonstration processes, a number of smaller tools have been written, helping to deploy these processes onto the SHEA, where they then can be started.

The tomcat/ directory contains the deployed processes as well as each Web service that has been orchestrated in the processes.  Note that by default these Web services need to interact with the SerCHo Showroom.  Use the configuration file in the conf/ directory to select to use dummy services instead.  If dummy is set to true for a service, the service will not try to connect to the Showroom but instead print out the invoked operation and the parameters. Additionally, the property of the ivistar-service can be set to "simulator", which wil redirect calls to the light service to the showroom simulator service.

The ProcessStartGUI.properties file (located in the conf/ directories in both the tomcat/ and the startgui/ directories) contains the properties used by the start GUIs, e.g. the parameters to invoke the processes with, or - most importantly - the service endpoints.

The ProcessStartGUI provides a very simple way for initializing, deploying, starting, stopping, and resetting a given process. Use the shortcuts to start the ProcessStartGUI for either the Energy Saving or the Light Alarm process.

1. By clicking the Initialize button the necessary web services are initialized and the showroom simulator is started up (mainly used for simulating the person's location)
2. Clicking the Deploy button sends a respective rule description to the SHEA, being displayed on the SHEAs rule selection page, and notifies the user of SHEA about the new rule, which then can be activated
3. Clicking the Start button is another way of activating the rule/process
4. By clicking the Stop button the process is stopped. Note that this will only be necessary for terminating processes running in an infinite loop, such as monitoring processes.
5. By clicking the Reset button the Web services are reset to the state before starting the process. This is useful e.g. for testing the Light Alarm process, which expects the light to be turned off and the blinds to be lowered.

In case you want to create and start your own processes now, you can use the "DynamicGUI", located in the same package. Just type in the URL of your processes WSDL file, select the starting operation, enter the parameters and hit the invoke button. The GUI has been tested with processes deployed with the ActiveBPEL Designer. The source code of both Process Start GUIs is included in the JARs, so you can extend them to fit your processes' needs.

Have fun playing around with the VSDT and the demonstration processes!

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