Chatbots have emerged as a powerful tool for collaborative teamwork. In this paper, we investigate the influence of chatbots on virtual teamwork within the context of a collaborative online activity. To assess chatbots' impact on group dynamics and performance, we designed a novel collaborative activity with an associated online platform and a custom chatbot assistant. We recruited 72 participants divided into four-person teams, with the teams split into four conditions depending on the chatbot's assistance strategy (none, by private chat, by group chat, or both). We found that chatbot assistance improved participants' performance and reduced response times to information requests during the collaborative activity. This improvement was more pronounced for teams in the group and both chats conditions, while participants in the private chat condition reported significantly higher perceived effort. Furthermore, we observed a significant correlation between the perceived quality of the chatbot's communication skills and the cognitive workload and time pressure experienced by the participants. Our findings contribute to the field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work by proposing a new design of experimental activity to study virtual collaboration, providing insights that can inform the design of future collaboration tools and adding to our broader understanding of human-AI synergy in group settings.

APIs allow companies to export, via the Internet, their skills and know-how, or even to open up new markets and new media for sale. But to fully exploit the advantages of these services, customers, mainly developers, must be equipped with tools giving the possibility of being able to assemble different services together. Fortunately, the notion of service composition is quite advanced, and different tools exist to compose services. However, as APIs with similar functionality are expected to be provided by competing providers, the key challenge is to find the most relevant compositions. This issue has been addressed in the context of QoS-based composite service selection. The downside, in practice, customers choose services based on the number of call limits. In this paper, we propose an approach to select the most relevant compositions based on the notion of call limit. Specifically, we show how the call limits of the individual services can be aggregated to obtain the call limits of a given composition. Then, we introduce the notion of minimal budget skyline, which comprises the most interesting compositions that fit within the customer's budget. In addition, we develop two algorithms, based on effective pruning strategies, to efficiently compute the minimal budget skyline. Finally, we present a thorough experimental evaluation of our approach.

Even though the cloud computing paradigm has proven benefits, it faces a serious problem that can compromise its commercial success. It concerns the lack of efficient approach for using optimally the available resources. For this, several approaches have been proposed. However, they suffer from several shortcomings. Often only one objective is taken into account, expressing all operations in terms of cost. Furthermore, business processes should be insured with elasticity and multi-tenancy mechanism while adjusting the available resources to the dynamic load distribution. The proposed approach aims to optimize two conflicting objectives, namely the number of migrations of tenants and the cost incurred using a set of resources. It allows to take into account the multi-tenancy property and the Cloud computing elasticity, and is efficient as shown by an extensive experimentation based on real data from Bonita BPM customers.

In this paper, we describe a framework that allows to automate and repeat business process execution on different cloud configurations. We present how and why the different components of the experimentation pipeline-like Ansible, Docker and Jenkins have been set up, and the kind of results we obtained on a large set of configurations from the AWS public cloud. It allows us to calculate actual prices regarding the cost of process execution, in order to compare not only pure performance but also the economic dimension of process execution.

Software merging is a time-consuming and error-prone activity but essential to large-scale software development. Developers use software merging tools, but if such tools return results with too many conflicts and errors, this activity becomes even more difficult. To help developers, several algorithms have been proposed to improve the automation of merge tools. These algorithms aim at minimising conflict situations and therefore improving the productivity of the development team, however no general framework is proposed to evaluated and compare their result.

In asynchronous collaborative systems, merging is an essential component. It allows to reconcile modifications made concurrently as well as managing software change through branching. The collaborative system is in charge to propose a merge result that includes user's modifications. The users now h

Crowdsourcing platforms provide powerful means to execute queries that require some human knowledge, intelligence and experience instead of just automated machine computation, such as image recognition, data filtering and labeling. With the development of mobile devices and the rapid prevalence of s

Every company wants to improve the way it does business, or produce things more efficiently, and make greater profit. Therefore, business processes have become subject to evolutionary changes, which in turn increase the need for an efficient change support. In this sense, many researches were conduc

The usage of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) along with the Business Process Management has emerged as a valuable solution for the complex (business process driven) system engineering. With a Model Driven Engineering where the business process models drive the supporting service component architectures, less effort is gone into the Business/IT alignment during the initial development activities, and the IT developers can rapidly proceed with the SOA implementation. However, the difference between the design principles of the emerging domain-specific languages imposes serious challenges in the following re-design phases. Moreover, enabling evolutions on the business process models while keeping them synchronized with the underlying software architecture models is of high relevance to the key elements of any Business Driven Development (BDD). Given a business process update, this paper introduces an incremental model transformation approach that propagates this update to the related service component configurations. It, therefore, supports the change propagation among heterogenous domain-specific languages, e.g., the BPMN and the SCA. As a major contribution, our approach makes model transformation more tractable to reconfigure system architecture without disrupting its structural consistency. We propose a synchronizer that provides the BPMN-to-SCA model synchronization with the help of the conditional graph rewriting.

Task delegation presents one of the business process security leitmotifs.It defines a mechanism that bridges the gap between workflow and access control systems.Delegation completion and authorisation enforcement are specified under specific constraints so-called events.In this article, we aim to reason about delegation events to model task delegation and to specify delegation policies using a logical framework.To that end, we propose an event-based task delegation model to control the delegation execution.We then identify relevant events responsible for the dynamic enforcement of delegation policies.Further, we define a task-oriented access control model to specify delegation constraints into authorisation policies.Finally, we propose a technique to automate the delegation policies integration.Using event calculus, we develop a reasoning tool to control the delegation execution and to increase the compliance of all delegation changes in the existing policy of the workflow.

Managing cooperation in business processes still represents a challenge because of several problems. Concurrent access to common data, coherence of the results, organisation and cooperation correctness are some of them. Looking at isolation problems in the database world and at their solutions using SQL isolation levels, we try to adapt them to the cooperative dimension of processes. In this paper, we identify the phenomena that happen during cooperation in business processes. Then we propose a solution based on isolation spheres to ensure correctness of cooperative processes and customise the exclusion control of the different cooperation phenomena

In this paper we present a process management technology for the coordination of creative and large scale distributed processes. Our approach is the result of usage analysis in domains like Software Development, Architecture/Engineering/Construction, and e-Learning processes. The basic conclusions of these experiments are the following: (1) cooperative processes are described in the same way as production processes, but these descriptions are interpreted in a different way depending on the nature of the process, (2) the interpretation of process description depends mainly on the required flexibility of control flow and of data flow, and on the relationship between them, (3) the management of intermediate results is a central feature for supporting the cooperation inherent to these processes. COO-flow is a process technology that results from these studies. It is based on two complementing contributions: anticipation that allows succeeding activities to cooperate, and COO-transactions that allows parallel activities to cooperate. This paper introduces COO-flow characteristics, gives a (partial) formalization and briefly discusses its Web implementation.

Current workflow models are mainly concerned with the automation of administrative and production business processes. These processes coordinate well-defined activities which execute in isolation, i.e. synchronize only at their start/terminate states. If these models can be applied efficiently for a class of applications, they show their limits when one wants to model the subtlety of cooperative interactions as they occur in more creative processes, typically co-design and co-engineering processes. In this paper, we introduce the concept of cooperative workflow, i.e. a workflow model which extends classical workflow models with capabilities to synchronize activities interacting not only when they start and when they terminate, but also at any point of their execution. In the spirit of the workflow approach, the modelling and enactment of cooperative workflows must remain simple.

The development of large software is always done by teams of people working together and struggling to produce quality software within their budget. Each person in these teams generally knows his job and wants to do it, without being bothered by other people. However, when people work towards a common goal they have to exchange data and create dependencies between each other regarding these data. If these people have to follow a process, cooperating and synchronizing with co-workers and trying to reach one's own goal becomes too difficult to manage. This may lead to frustration, lower productivity and reluctancy to follow the predefined process. This is why some support is needed to avoid common mistakes that occur when people exchange data. In this paper, a hybrid approach to support cooperation is presented. The originality of this approach is the ability to enforce general properties on cooperative interactions while using the semantic of applications to fit particular situations or requirements. This paper gives a brief idea about the general enforced properties on activity interactions. It describes in detail the semantic rules that control activity results, the impacts of the cooperation on these rules and how both dimensions interact.