Barbara Pernici is full professor of Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Milano.
Her research interests include cooperative information systems, workflow management systems, information systems modeling and design, temporal databases, applications of database technology.

She holds a Dr. Eng. Degree from Politecnico di Milano and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University.

She has published 35 papers in international journals, including IEEE and ACM Transactions, co-edited 10 books, and published about 130 papers at international level. She is an editor of the Requirements Engineering Journal. She has participated in several ESPRIT/IST projects (TODOS, Equator, ITHACA, F3, WIDE, Chorochronos, WS-Diamond). She is chief scientist of the Italian FIRB MAIS (Multichannel Adaptive Information Systems), 2002-2006. She is chair of Working Group 8.1 Design and Evaluation of Information Systems of IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing).

Adaptive Information Systems

The advent of Web services, new network technologies, and new devices gives new opportunities and imposes new requirements for the design and the execution of adaptable information system. Processes can be composed using Web services, but their orchestration has to also consider users needs at runtime, where these needs are expressed as context information. Context information is formed by functional and not functional characteristics and Web services must be selected also considering non functional aspects. In this scenario, new approaches and new frameworks have to be studied in order to overcome the limitations of the current standards, such as WSDL and WS-BPEL, which only consider functional aspects of Web services.
The talk presents a framework for adaptive information systems based on web services, which allows to select web services based on functional characteristics and QoS, to execute a context aware orchestration of processes composed of Web services. Within this framework, self-healing functionality is provided to recover from failures, based on dynamic substitution and service management. The design issues raised by such functionalities are discussed.

Conference Program