4914234
SwinDeW-S: extending P2P workflow systems for adaptive composite Web services
SwinDeW, an innovative decentralised workflow management system, has established an underlying framework for peer-to-peer (P2P) based business process coordination environments. SwinDeW-S extends SwinDeW to support adaptive composite service orchestration in the era of service-oriented computing. This paper comprehensively presents features of SwinDeW-S, including the P2P network establishment, the messaging mechanism, the service deployment and enactment, the service discovery and advertisement, and the service flow execution. The prototypical extension of SwinDeW to SwinDeW-S and the advantages of SwinDeW-S are also examined and analysed. With the innovative integration of service and P2P-based enterprise application techniques, SwinDeW-S can support composite service orchestration, deployment and execution.
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
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.
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.
26798727
BANDS: An Inter-domain Internet Security Policy Management System for IPSec/VPN
IPSec/VPN is widely deployed for users to remotely access their corporate data. IPSec policies must be correctly set up for VPN to provide anticipated protection. Manual policy setup is unscalable, inefficient and error-prone. Automated policy generation to comply with and enforce high-level security policies is desired but difficult, especially in an inter-domain environment when a VPN traverses multiple domains. This paper presents a distributed framework and protocol, BANDS, for inter-domain policy negotiation and generation. The BANDS architecture consists of two phases: AS (autonomous system) route path discovery and an inter-domain collaborative protocol for policy negotiation among the autonomous systems discovered in the first phase. Each AS conceptually has one security requirement server responsible for the task of inter-domain policy negotiation. Following this two-step process in BANDS, a set of distributed security policies (for the implementation of policy enforcement) is automatically negotiated/generated based on decentralized and predefined security requirements.
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.
5091874
Integrating Web Services into Ontology-Based Web Portal
With the explosive emerged Web services, the Web becomes a world of information and applications. So portals whose goal is presenting a structured view onto the Web should provide users with a single point access to multiple types of not only information but also services. Recently, many systems have been developed using ontology-driven approaches to automatically generate and manage Web portals. However, all of them lack the integration of Web services. In this paper, we describe SPortS, an OWL-DL(Web Ontology Language-Description Logics) based portal generation system that integrates semantic Web services into generated portals at the presentation level, the data level and the function level. We present the portal generation process, the query decomposition and the service recommendation algorithms through which semantic Web services are integrated tightly into the generated portal.
7655844
Music emotion classification: a fuzzy approach
Due to the subjective nature of human perception, classification of the emotion of music is a challenging problem. Simply assigning an emotion class to a song segment in a deterministic way does not work well because not all people share the same feeling for a song. In this paper, we consider a different approach to music emotion classification. For each music segment, the approach determines how likely the song segment belongs to an emotion class. Two fuzzy classifiers are adopted to provide the measurement of the emotion strength. The measurement is also found useful for tracking the variation of music emotions in a song. Results are shown to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.
2122679
Combining proactive and reactive predictions for data streams
Mining data streams is important in both science and commerce. Two major challenges are (1) the data may grow without limit so that it is difficult to retain a long history; and (2) the underlying concept of the data may change over time. Different from common practice that keeps recent raw data, this paper uses a measure of conceptual equivalence to organize the data history into a history of concepts. Along the journey of concept change, it identifies new concepts as well as re-appearing ones, and learns transition patterns among concepts to help prediction. Different from conventional methodology that passively waits until the concept changes, this paper incorporates proactive and reactive predictions. In a proactive mode, it anticipates what the new concept will be if a future concept change takes place, and prepares prediction strategies in advance. If the anticipation turns out to be correct, a proper prediction model can be launched instantly upon the concept change. If not, it promptly resorts to a reactive mode: adapting a prediction model to the new data. A system RePro is proposed to implement these new ideas. Experiments compare the system with representative existing prediction methods on various benchmark data sets that represent diversified scenarios of concept change. Empirical evidence demonstrates that the proposed methodology is an effective and efficient solution to prediction for data streams.