8159009
A Three-Layer Framework for Cross-Organizational e-Contract Enactment
In an e-commerce environment, contracts are important for attaining business process interoperability and enforcing their proper enactment. An e-contract is the computerized facilitation or automation of a contract in a cross-organizational business process. We find that e-contract facilitation can be divided into multiple levels and perspectives, which has not been adequately addressed before. In this paper, we present a framework for e-contract enactment with three layers, viz., business layer, structural layer, and implementation layer. In the business layer, e-contracts are defined through analyzing the contract clauses to business rules and business entities. In the structural layer, requirements for the E-contract enactment workflow are elucidated through requirement analysis to cover both static and dynamic aspects. In the implementation layer, workflows and cross-organizational interoperating interfaces are implemented using contemporary Enterprise Java Bean and Web services. In this paper, we present the methodology and process for engineering the functional aspects of e-contracts from high-level business-view down to implementation layer based on this framework, illustrated with an investment example. The framework allows an e-contract to be seamlessly defined and enacted. The framework is modeled in UML.
18545755
A Framework for Distributed Object-Oriented Testing
Distributed programming and object-oriented programming are two popular programming paradigms. The former is driven by advances in networking technology whereas the latter provides vigorous software principles needed in developing complex software systems. While more and more distributed object-oriented software has appeared, not much work exists on the testing of these systems in an integrated manner. Instead, the distributed and object features have been tested separately. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework known as DOOT for incremental testing of distributed object-oriented software systems. It combines various testing techniques to provide comprehensive test coverage at four levels — class testing, intra-cluster testing, inter-cluster testing and system testing. Each level uses a specific fault model, test strategy and test case generation that build on the previous test level to reduce the overall test effort. They are designed to handle the distinct requirements of the two paradigms at each level. Moreover, a reduction algorithm for testing the inherited class is also included in the framework. The approach is illustrated using a real life example of a conferencing system.
1065251
Data-driven methodology to extending workflows to e-services over the Internet
E-services refer to the services offered over the Internet. The globalization of economy accelerates the provision of e-services across organizations. Instead of being built from scratch, e-services are mostly extended from existing internal workflows or information systems. In this paper, we examine the requirements of extending a workflow to the provision of e-services, in order to fulfill predefined business processes and data requirements. We also discuss the support of exception handling and asynchronous events across organizational boundaries, through an event publish-and-subscribe mechanism. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach with the E-ADOME extension layer of our ADOME-WFMS, further illustrated with a system integration example. Our event-driven execution model provides a unified framework for both synchronous execution of workflow and asynchronous handling of events and exceptions. Illustrations are also given on the provision of such e-services over the infrastructure of Web services and Enterprise JavaBeans.
17746667
A Multi-Agent Infrastructure for Mobile Workforce Management in a Service Oriented Enterprise
With recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures, there are increasing demands for the support of mobile workforce management (MWM) across multiple platforms. Mobile users can interact with the MWM system through SMS messages or Web browsers from personal computers, PDA devices, or WAP phones. MWM typically involves tight collaboration, negotiation, and sophisticated business domain knowledge. Therefore, the main challenge of MWM for a service oriented enterprise is the integration of disparate business function for its mobile professional workforce and the management with a unified infrastructure, together with the provision of personalized assistance and automation. These requirements can be facilitated with the use of intelligent software agents, but has not been adequately studied before. As mobile devices become more powerful, intelligent software agents can now be deployed on these devices and hence also subject to mobility. Thus, MWM systems have to accommodate these requirements as well as the support of heterogeneous platforms. In this paper, we formulate a scalable, flexible, and intelligent multi-agent information system (MAIS) infrastructure for MWM with agent clusters in the context of a large service oriented enterprise. Each agent cluster comprise several types of agents to achieve the goal of each phase of the workforce management process, namely, task formulation, matchmaking, brokering, commuting, and service. We evaluate our approach against different stakeholders' perspective.
15431236
Developing a Distributed e-Monitoring System for Enterprise Website and Web Services: An Experience Report with Free Libraries and Tools
Enterprises value monitoring as it provides dependable e-services, whether it is an interactive Web site or programmatic Web service. However, this task becomes non-trivial when enterprises begin to require support from thousands of servers across geographical areas. How can the communications between a monitoring systems and remote servers be minimized? Could the task be achieved easily based on a readily available technology such as SNMP? How can we monitor thousands of servers powered by, say, Tomcat, which lacks SNMP support? How may a poorly responsive site be identified prior to being reported as a failure by SNMP? In this paper, we propose a unified e-monitoring system that enables system administrators to remotely monitor the health of distributed e-services in both the form of Web site and Web services. We further discuss our implementation experience based on a pragmatic prototype.
29867801
Exploiting automatic analysis of e-commerce protocols
While e-commerce continuously grows prosperous, some advantages e-commerce applications claimed haven't really been gained. More seriously, the availability and reliability of these systems are particularly hard to obtain. The e-commerce protocols, as the core of e-commerce applications, ask for new development approach and techniques to be introduced for their highly reliable and safe design and implementation. This paper describes research on synthesis of extended UML formalism and formal verification techniques for automatic development of e-commerce protocols. In this paper, we refine AUML protocol diagrams for visual modeling, and develop algorithm and rules to translate visually modeled e-commerce protocols into formal models that are then validated using model checking. This approach is applied to the design of an e-commerce protocol, NetBill, as example. Our objective is to create tools that enable designers to automatically develop available and reliable e-commerce protocols.
26950433
Multiple forecasts with autoregressive time series models: case studies
It is indisputable that accurate forecasts of economic activities are vital to successful business and government policies. In many circumstances, instead of a single forecast, simultaneous prediction intervals for multiple forecasts are more useful to decision-makers. For example, based on previous monthly sales records, a production manager would be interested in the next 12 interval forecasts of the monthly sales using for the annual inventory and manpower planning. For Gaussian autoregressive time series processes, several procedures for constructing simultaneous prediction intervals have been proposed in the literature. These methods assume a normal error distribution and can be adversely affected by departures from normality which are commonly encountered in business and economic time series. In this article, we explore the bootstrap methods for the construction of simultaneous multiple interval forecasts. To understand the mechanisms and characteristics of the proposed bootstrap procedures, several macro-economic time series are selected for illustrative purposes. The selected series are fitted reasonably well with autoregressive models which form an important class in time series. As a matter of fact, the major ideas discussed in this paper with autoregressive processes can be extended to other more complicated time series models.
12589493
Automatic analysis of firewall and network intrusion detection system configurations
Given a network that deploys multiple firewalls and network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs), ensuring that these security components are correctly configured is a challenging problem. Although models have been developed to reason independently about the effectiveness of firewalls and NIDSs, there is no common framework to analyze their interaction. This paper presents an integrated, constraint-based approach for modeling and reasoning about these configurations. Our approach considers the dependencies among the two types of components, and can reason automatically about their combined behavior. We have developed a tool for the specification and verification of networks that include multiple firewalls and NIDSs, based on this approach. This tool can also be used to automatically generate NIDS configurations that are optimal relative to a given cost function.
18650610
Modeling multistep cyber attacks for scenario recognition
Efforts toward automated detection and identification of multistep cyber attack scenarios would benefit significantly from a methodology and language for modeling such scenarios. The Correlated Attack Modeling Language (CAML) uses a modular approach, where a module represents an inference step and modules can be linked together to detect multistep scenarios. CAML is accompanied by a library of predicates, which functions as a vocabulary to describe the properties of system states and events. The concept of attack patterns is introduced to facilitate reuse of generic modules in the attack modeling process. CAML is used in a prototype implementation of a scenario recognition engine that consumes first-level security alerts in real time and produces reports that identify multistep attack scenarios discovered in the alert stream.
912870
Video similarity detection with video signature clustering
The proliferation of video content on the Web makes similarity detection an indispensable tool in Web data management, searching, and navigation. We have previously proposed a compact representation of video clips, called video signature, for retrieving similar video clips in large databases. In this paper, we propose a new signature clustering algorithm to further improve retrieval performance. The algorithm treats all the signatures as an abstract threshold graph, where the threshold is determined based on local data statistics. Similar clusters are identified as highly connected regions in the graph. This algorithm outperforms simple thresholding and hierarchical clustering techniques in identifying a set of manually-determined similar clusters from a dataset of 46,356 Web video clips. At 95% precision, our algorithm attains 85% recall while simple thresholding and complete-link hierarchical scheme attain 67% and 75% recall respectively. Applying our algorithm to the entire dataset, 6,900 similar clusters are identified, with an average cluster size of 2.81 video clips. The distribution of cluster sizes follows a power-law distribution, which has been shown to describe many Web phenomena.
6490713
An Architecture for an Adaptive Intrusion-Tolerant Server
We describe a general architecture for intrusion-tolerant enterprise systems and the implementation of an intrusion-tolerant Web server as a specific instance. The architecture comprises functionally redundant COTS servers running on diverse operating systems and platforms, hardened intrusion-tolerance proxies that mediate client requests and verify the behavior of servers and other proxies, and monitoring and alert management components based on the EMERALD intrusion-detection framework. Integrity and availability are maintained by dynamically adapting the system configuration in response to intrusions or other faults. The dynamic configuration specifies the servers assigned to each client request, the agreement protocol used to validate server replies, and the resources spent on monitoring and detection. Alerts trigger increasingly strict regimes to ensure continued service, with graceful degradation of performance, even if some servers or proxies are compromised or faulty. The system returns to less stringent regimes as threats diminish. Servers and proxies can be isolated, repaired, and reinserted without interrupting service.