University of Stuttgart

Link to partner web site

www.iaas.uni-stuttgart.de

Company introduction

The University of Stuttgart (Germany) participates with its Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS) which has a vast experience in the domain of Web services, middleware and business process management. Besides the technological expertise the well established connections to industry and standardization bodies will be particularly valuable for the project and which are expected to be further developed contributing to the core research interests of the IAAS.

One focus of the current work of the institute is on various aspects of middleware for workflow management including support for Grid environments, flexible application structures packaging, and chaining of process partners. Another focus is on proper support for modelling aggregations of applications like EAI, applications requiring processes with huge numbers of activities, or considering service level agreement. Also, machine processable specifications of agreement protocols to automate dynamic cooperation of applications or to support negotiations of service level agreements is a research area of the IAAS.

Key personnel

The head of IAAS (Prof. Dr. Frank Leymann) is a Former IBM Distinguished Engineer and has twenty years of experience in software development at IBM. For example, he was lead architect of IBM's workflow products, co-architect of IBM's entire middleware stack (especially co-architect of MQSeries, a message queuing middleware used by most of the top fortune 1000 companies of the world), IBM lead architect for Web service Technology, lead-architect "On Demand computing" for IBM Software Group, and he is co-author of many Web service standards specifications. For many companies from all over the world, Prof. Leymann worked as technology consultant on architecture of large application systems.

Involvement/Role in the project

The IAAS is responsible for the language framework in Master which includes the expression of MASTER policies using existing standards and the augmentation of existing standards (such as WS-Policy and WS-Agreement) with security related policies.

The IAAS has experience in building repositories, especially of repositories for process models and policies as attributed to the group in MASTER activity 3. Furthermore, significant experience in modeling business processes is available ("best practices" for compliance). Predecessory work on SLA composition and decomposition has been done which will provide the base for the language framework as attributed to the group in activity 2.