205225
Ontological Approach Towards E-business Process Automation
This paper discusses the interoperability of e-business processes by using an ontology approach with description logic and agent systems to achieve e-business automation. An innovative e-business process modeling framework is proposed that outlines the building blocks required for Internet-based e-business in order to enable e-business process automation. The framework helps in understanding the role of many proposed standards with respect to the building blocks and in identifying both overlaps and gaps among them. The domain knowledge of e-business processes is conceptualised as an e-business process ontology that enables agents' communication in e-business application sharing and reusing. Several agent-based automation mechanisms are discussed based on the ontology that provides implementation guidelines to e-business process automation
4928164
A service workflow management framework based on peer-to-peer and agent technologies
Service workflow management which consolidates multiple services to achieve business goals has become a critical issue in service-oriented computing. Due to the unique feature of service workflows such as full distribution and high dynamicity, the contemporary workflow technology has exhibited inefficiency, vulnerability, inflexibility and lack of adaptability. Based upon the authors' previous work on peer-to-peer based workflow management and seamless integration of agents and Web services, this paper innovatively presents SwinDeW-A which is a decentralised service workflow management framework based on peer-to-peer and agent technologies. Based on this framework, this paper also discusses how autonomous service level agreement negotiation, decentralised process enactment, and autonomous process adaptation can be achieved. The proposed approach takes advantages of the peer-to-peer computing technology and the agent technology to provide more efficient, reliable, flexible and adaptive service workflow management.
3428244
An Organisational Perspective on Collaborative Business Processes
Business collaboration is about coordinating the flow of information among organisations and linking their business processes. It brings great challenge to keep participating organisations as autonomous entities in integrating business processes of these organisations seamlessly. To address this issue, we develop a new perspective on business collaborations with a novel concept called relative workflow, which defines what a participating organisation can perceive in collaboration. By incorporating a visibility control mechanism, relative workflows allow each organisation to define its own collaboration structure and behaviours. In this paper, we present a formal definition of relative workflows and related algorithms for generating relative workflows, along with a discussion on how to perform tracking over relative workflows.
4924842
Assigning Local Fixed-time Constraints in Grid Workflow Systems
Many complex grid workflow processes often have only one global fixed-time constraint at the last activity. Since grid workflow execution normally lasts a long time, local control is very important to ensure the overall temporal correctness. With only one global fixed-time constraint, we cannot control grid workflow execution locally in terms of time. As a result, for any temporal violations, we must handle them globally with the consideration of all activities. This would impact the overall cost-effectiveness of grid workflow execution. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate how to assign local fixed-time constraints within the global one so that we can control grid workflow execution locally. Corresponding assigning and verification methods are developed. With local fixed-time constraints, we can achieve better cost-effectiveness
1701823
Dynamic checking of temporal constraints for concurrent workflows
At present, workflow management systems have not sufficiently dealt with the issues of time, involving time modelling at build-time and time management at run-time. They are lack of the ability to support the checking of temporal constraints at run-time. Although some approaches have been devised to tackle this problem, they are limited to a single workflow and use only static techniques to verify temporal constraints. In reality, there are multiple workflows executing concurrently in a workflow management system. There may well exist resource constraints between these concurrent workflows, which affect significantly the verification of temporal constraints at run-time. This paper proposes a novel approach for dynamic verification of temporal constraints for concurrent workflows. We first investigate resource constraints in workflow management systems, and then define concurrent workflow executions. Based on these definitions, we propose a verification method by analysing the temporal relationship and resource constraints between activities among concurrent workflows.
14447070
Achieving convergence, causality preservation, and intention preservation in real-time cooperative editing systems
Real-time cooperative editing systems allow multiple users to view and edit the same text/graphic/image/multimedia document at the same time for multiple sites connected by communication networks. Consistency maintenance is one of the most significant challenges in designing and implementing real-time cooperative editing systems. In this article, a consistency model, with properties of convergence, causality preservation, and intention preservation, is proposed as a framework for consistency maintenance in real-time cooperative editing systems. Moreover, an integrated set of schemes and algorithms, which support the proposed consistency model, are devised and discussed in detail. In particular, we have contributed (1) a novel generic operation transformation control algorithm for achieving intention preservation in combination with schemes for achieving convergence and causality preservation and (2) a pair of reversible inclusion and exclusion transformation algorithms for stringwise operations for text editing. An Internet-based prototype system has been built to test the feasibility of the proposed schemes and algorithms
10222228
The third Ramsey numbers for graphs with at most four edges
Abstract With the help of a computer, the Ramsey numbers r 3 ( H ) are obtained for each of the 19 graphs H with at most four edges and no isolated vertices.
12971843
Smooth Playout Control for Video Streaming over Error-Prone Channels
The quality of media streaming over best-effort networks suffers from network delays and packet losses. The latter is more profound for wireless video. To enhance the QoS of streaming services, adaptive media playout (AMP) has been developed to adjust the playout interval. With AMP, the risk of delay and buffer underflow is reduced. However, the smoothness of playback is not guaranteed. In this paper, we propose a novel AMP control that enables smooth playout and meanwhile maintains reliable visual quality. Our AMP control adjusts the playout interval based on an estimation of channel quality, so it is more adaptive than conventional AMP controls that are based on buffer fullness. Experimental results are provided to justify our approach. Even at 20% packet loss rate, the proposed AMP control is still able to provide smooth and reliable playback
17035085
Composable process elements for developing COTS-based applications
Data collected from five years of developing e-service applications at USC-CSE reveals that an increasing fraction have been commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS)-based applications (CBA) projects: from 28% in 1997 to 60% in 2001. Data from both small and large CBA projects show that CBA effort is primarily distributed among the three activities of COTS assessments, COTS tailoring, and glue code development and integration, with wide variations in their distribution across projects. We have developed a set of data-motivated composable process elements, in terms of these three activities, for developing CBA's as well an overall decision framework for applying the process elements. We present data regarding the movement towards CBA's and effort distribution among them; we then proceed to describe the decision framework and to present a real-world example showing how it operates within the WinWin Spiral process model generator to orchestrate, execute, and adapt the process elements to changing project circumstances.
4332805
Stable egress route selection for interdomain traffic engineering: model and analysis
We present a general model of interdomain route selection to study interdomain traffic engineering. In this model, the routing of multiple destinations can be coordinated. Thus the model can capture general traffic engineering behaviors such as load balancing and link capacity constraints. We first identify potential routing instability and inefficiency of interdomain traffic engineering. We then derive a sufficient condition to guarantee convergence. We also show that the constraints on local policies imposed by business considerations in the Internet can guarantee stability without global coordination. Using realistic Internet topology, we evaluate the extent to which routing instability of interdomain traffic engineering can happen when the constraints are violated
17059698
Towards composing information providing services
Composing Web services is an active field of research and development. Recently, many efforts are devoted to process integration on world changing services, e.g. business process composition. We present a solution to compose information providing services to achieve more powerful capabilities and free the user from trivial work. Our work serves as an important complement to the existing research on process integration.