6226215
Tool interfacing mechanisms for programming-for-the-large and programming-for-the-small
Software development needs to be supported at both the organisational process level (programming-for-the-large) and the detailed coding level (programming-for-the-small). It is critical to close the gap in order to enable effective software integration at both levels in a uniform manner instead of in isolation. This paper is aimed at addressing fundamental issues related to integration techniques for productive software development. In particular, we focus on tool interfacing mechanisms for universally accessible data integration and plug-and-play tool integration to support software development uniformly.
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
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
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.
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.
1161111
Localization in sparse networks using sweeps
Determining node positions is essential for many next-generation network functionalities. Previous localization algorithms lack correctness guarantees or require network density higher than required for unique localizability. In this paper, we describe a class of algorithms for fine-grained localization called Sweeps. Sweeps correctly finitely localizes all nodes in bilateration networks. Sweeps also handles angle measurements and noisy measurements. We demonstrate the practicality of our algorithm through extensive simulations on a large number of networks, upon which it consistently localizes one-thousand-node networks of average degree less than five in less than two minutes on a consumer PC.
1466008
Analyzing the Intel Itanium Memory Ordering Rules Using Logic Programming and SAT
We present a non-operational approach to specifying and analyzing shared memory consistency models. The method uses higher order logic to capture a complete set of ordering constraints on execution traces, in an axiomatic style. A direct encoding of the semantics with a constraint logic programming language provides an interactive and incremental framework for exercising and verifying finite test programs. The framework has also been adapted to generate equivalent boolean satisfiability (SAT) problems. These techniques make a memory model specification executable, a powerful feature lacked in most non-operational methods. As an example, we provide a concise formalization of the Intel Itanium memory model and show how constraint solving and SAT solving can be effectively applied for computer aided analysis. Encouraging initial results demonstrate the scalability for complex industrial designs.
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.
5572574
Distributed Concurrency Control in Real-time Cooperative Editing Systems
Efficient distributed concurrency control is one of the most significant challenges in building real-time cooperative editing systems. In this paper, we focus on the definition and verification of an integrated set of distributed concurrency control schemes based on a novel consistency model for solving three inconsistency problems: divergence, causality-violation, and intention-violation in real-time cooperative editing systems.
6411174
SMILAuthor: An Authoring System for SMIL-Based Multimedia Presentations
In this paper, an authoring tool named SMILAuthor for SMIL-based multimedia presentations is proposed. SMILAuthor adopts standard SMIL language as the format of the presentation to generate reusable and easily accessible presentations. Moreover, powerful editing functions such as cut, copy, and paste are supported by the system in a timeline-based manner. In order to support timeline-based editing functions, the playback duration of each object in the input SMIL script is first calculated by the parsing process of the system. The parsing process extracts and converts the temporal relationship of the input script to Real-Time Synchronization Model (RTSM), and the playback duration of each object in the script is then computed by traversing the RTSM. Editing results are converted to the SMIL format and saved in the output file. Language structure of SMIL is hidden by the system and the temporal information is visualized in the timeline manner to provide users an easy way to understand and control the timing of each object. Implementation of the system provides a friendly WYSIWYG environment and multiple views/windows are provided by the system to help authors compose multimedia presentations efficiently.