5978696
From BPEL4WS to OWL-S: integrating e-business process descriptions
With the rapid deployment of e-services, many workflow-like e-business process definition languages come into existence. At the same time, ontology Web language for services (OWL-S) aims to build an ontology language to support the integration of various specifications. There has been some work on mapping WSDL (Web services description language) to OWL-S to build a connection between the Web service and service profile. However, in the sense of activity relationships, there has been no effort so far trying to build the OWL-S service model from a workflow process model. Therefore, we design and develop an innovative mapping tool to translate BPEL4WS (business process execution language for Web services) to OWL-S. Through this mapping, semantics in the traditional business process specifications can be enriched significantly to enable more flexible and automatic e-service functions by using existing OWL-S tools such as composition and discovery, especially the execution of workflow-based services.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
14593921
Stochastic link and group detection
Link detection and analysis has long been important in the social sciences and in the government intelligence community. A significant effort is focused on the structural and functional analysis of "known" networks. Similarly, the detection of individual links is important but is usually done with techniques that result in "known" links. More recently the internet and other sources have led to a flood of circumstantial data that provide probabilistic evidence of links. Co-occurrence in news articles and simultaneous travel to the same location are two examples.We propose a probabilistic model of link generation based on membership in groups. The model considers both observed link evidence and demographic information about the entities. The parameters of the model are learned via a maximum likelihood search. In this paper we describe the model and then show several heuristics that make the search tractable. We test our model and optimization methods on synthetic data sets with a known ground truth and a database of news articles.
16851151
UMR: a multi-round algorithm for scheduling divisible workloads
In this paper we present an algorithm for scheduling parallel divisible workload applications. Our algorithm uses multiple rounds to overlap communication and computation between a master and several workers. We use "uniform" rounds, i.e. a fixed amount of work is sent out to all workers at each round. This restriction makes it possible to compute an approximately optimal number of rounds, which was not possible for previously proposed algorithms. In addition, we use more realistic platform models than those used in previous works. We provide an analysis of our algorithm both for homogeneous and heterogeneous platforms and present simulation results.
38612898
Transient behaviors of TCP-friendly congestion control protocols
We investigate the fairness, smoothness, responsiveness, and aggressiveness of TCP and three representative TCP-friendly congestion control protocols: GAIMD, TFRC, and TEAR. The properties are evaluated both analytically and via simulation by studying protocol responses to three network environment changes. The first environment change is the inherent fluctuations in a stationary network environment. Under this scenario, we consider three types of sending rate variations: smoothness, short-term fairness, and long-term fairness. For a stationary environment, we observe that smoothness and fairness are positively correlated. We derive an analytical expression for the sending rate coefficient of variation for each of the four protocols. These analytical results match well with experimental results. The other two environment changes we study are a step increase of network congestion and a step increase of available bandwidth. Protocol responses to these changes reflect their responsiveness and aggressiveness, respectively.
150914
An enhanced model for searching in semantic portals
Semantic Portal is the next generation of web portals that are powered by Semantic Web technologies for improved information sharing and exchange for a community of users. Current methods of searching in Semantic Portals are limited to keyword-based search using information retrieval (IR) techniques, ontology-based formal query and reasoning, or a simple combination of the two. In this paper, we propose an enhanced model that tightly integrates IR with formal query and reasoning to fully utilize both textual and semantic information for searching in Semantic Portals. The model extends the search capabilities of existing methods and can answer more complex search requests. The ideas in a fuzzy description logic (DL) IR model and a formal DL query method are employed and combined in our model. Based on the model, a semantic search service is implemented and evaluated. The evaluation shows very large improvements over existing methods.