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A Web service specification can be quite complex, including multiple operations and various kinds of message exchange patterns. In this work, we focus on the problem of restructuring a Web service, which contains a process model inside, preserving at the same time its behavior that is shown to the service user. We provide a behavioral signature model for service restructuring. It is considered for Web services to be choreography equivalence if they conform to the same behavioral signature model. Based on behavioral signature models and graph searching technologies, we provide an algorithm for restructuring the process model from within the service while assuring service choreography equivalence. A case study runs throughout the paper to illustrate the feasibility of our work. We have implemented a prototype to demonstrate and evaluate our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In large enterprises, there are an abundance of IT assets which provide employees with the productivity tools necessary to do their jobs. There are also large numbers of applications and services for running the 'back office'. A challenge to all enterprises is cataloging these services, in order that organization can effectively put the services into business use, retire unused services or duplicate services, and build new services to fill gaps in the catalog. Furthermore, it is necessary to understand the relationships among available services in order to combine them into convenient and useful packages/bundles which employees can immediately put into use. In this paper we will describe the process used in the IBM enterprise to create and distribute these bundles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

with the widely application of information technology in the coal mining industry, the number of information systems has grown significantly. However, how to take advantage of the information fully from those heterogeneous systems to provide an integrated service has become a barrier to the development of mine. Meanwhile, the scope of the information services in coal mine is so limited that only those managers can enjoy the information and decision supporting services. Because of these above reasons, most of miners can't enjoy the benefits of informatization. Based on the background, a framework of the context-aware-based intelligent service system for miners is proposed for the coal industry in the paper. In order to construct the system, three key technologies are emphasized, i.e. context information modeling, context information reasoning, and business service calling & composition. In the end, a detailed system implementation is given to illustrate how to apply the framework to establish the context-aware-based service system in the coal industry. The result of application is satisfactory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As Cloud Computing has become more and morepopular, various Cloud Computing architectures or infrastructurehave been defined, given their specific circumstances forthe applications. However, to effectively achieve the potentialof cloud computing, there is need for the definition of systemarchitecture of the software systems involved in the deliveryof cloud computing, so that it can be used as a reference forthe architects or software engineering. In this paper, referencearchitecture of Cloud Computing is proposed. Its objective andprinciples are illustrated. And case studies of a SaaS, PaaSplatform architecture instantiated from CCRA are given. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Business Processes naturally involve long running activities and require transactional behaviour across them. The work presented in this paper is a proposal for a novel autonomous failure handling mechanism for long running nested transactions (LRT) and forms part of a general management and compensation model for long running transactions in workflows. The mechanism is based on propagation of failures through a recursive hierarchical structure of transaction components (nodes and execution paths). The management system of transactions (COMPMOD) is implemented as a reactive system controller, where system components change their states based on rules in response to triggering of events such as activation, failure, force-fail, completion, or compensation events. A notable new feature of the model is the distinction of vital and non-vital components, allowing the process designer to express the cruciality of activities in the workflow with respect to the business logic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IT outsourcing enables companies to contract out IT services, such as infrastructure and application management to external providers. IT services delivery relies on knowledge that is in the collective possession of application and infrastructure specialists. With recent advances in harnessing the expertise of network-connected humans, services businesses have also started to seek strategies to efficiently utilize the collective knowledge of their employees. In this paper, we present the application of collective intelligence to three different service types: 1) automation (translation solution), 2) infrastructure management (asset inventory discovery) and 3) application management (software development). We extrapolate a set of salient properties (i.e., input, output, and size of the collective input) as the key elements for employing collective intelligence within the services business. We discuss some of the differences amongst the disparate collective intelligence services and present the resulting distinctive properties as challenges that may inspire further research in services business. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cost and competitive pressures are forcing business organizations to reuse assets from repositories, rather than develop them from scratch. But this has been hampered by some issues that have not been addressed so far. First, there is a lack of a mechanism for the representation of business process assets as variants and versions in repositories. Second, there is no formal means to compare between different variants and versions of an asset and determine which is the best to select for reuse. Third, there is a lack of a technique to determine the extent to which a business process asset could be customized for reuse. In this paper, we address the above research issues by presenting an integrated approach for modeling, analyzing, and searching business process assets in a repository for enhancing reuse. We demonstrate our approach on a large repository of business process assets in the insurance domain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In service-oriented enterprise architecture, provisioning business services is made on top of IT processes, which should be elastic amid the availability of computing resources and the variation of user demand. In addition, the provisioning depends on human resources utilized and is constrained by the business objectives (e.g. a goal) plus coarse-grained constraints (e.g. an order in which business services take place). This elasticity and constrainedness can best be witnessed on nonfunctional properties of the business services being provisioned. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for modeling and reasoning about them. The framework features a methodology for formally expressing the aforementioned factors in services provisioning, an engine to find solutions and a simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Considering the inherent heterogeneous, autonomous and dynamic nature of Web services, mismatches usually exist between service signatures and behaviors, and mediation is a common approach for service interactions. Current techniques focus on mismatch analysis and automatic synthesis of mediators at development time, but they do not consider the effect that dynamic changes of services bring about for mediators at runtime. Since Web services are continuously evolving, mediators should be equipped with the dynamic adaptation and re-configuration capabilities to avoid being the bottleneck of the adaptability of service interactions. To address this challenge we propose a dynamic management approach for mediated service interactions. In this paper, migration strategies and correctness criteria suitable for the mediator are provided to realize dynamic adjustment of mediators at runtime, which ensures the agility and adaptability of service interactions based on the mediation mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The composition of services allows for achieving complex business requirements on top of already existing functionality, potentially procured from third party providers. Facing a growing market of services, enterprises have to select the most appropriate services to support their service compositions. Beside functional attributes the service selection is driven by nonfunctional properties like the price or the quality of a service. Taken into account quantity discounts, bundle effects, and subscription-based charging, complex service charging models are discussed in the literature of service marketing. Dynamic and complex charging models are expected to play an important role in the future service industry. Therefore, a service selection has to deal with those complex charging models in order to obtain a cost minimizing composition of services. In this paper, we present a cost minimizing service selection model based on mathematical programming that considers complex service charging models found in the literature. In addition to a pure cost minimizing point of view, the proposed model also takes into account end-to-end constrained quality of service (QoS) attributes like the execution time of service compositions. The conducted computational experiments demonstrate that the approach is applicable to solve problem instances of reasonable size. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The need to analyze huge amount of data for various business intelligence applications is well known. However, the rate at which enterprise data is generated now demands periodic migration of older data from the operational data warehouse to magnetic tapes. In this paper, we propose an "Active data archival service" in which the data is seamlessly archived on the cloud while ensuring that the archived data can be queried without any perceptible change to the end-user. This takes the burden of maintaining the archive off the user and shifts it to the archival service. We discuss the architecture of the service, challenges arising therein due to the federation of data brought on by the archival and how we handle these issues. Specifically, we investigate how the relational data needs to be transformed so that storing and retrieving the data from the cloud is efficient and seamless to the end user. We present our insights through an experimental study using TPC-DS benchmark. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Retrieving matchings between process models becomes a significant challenge in many applications. Recent attempts have been done to measure similarity of process models based on graph-edit distance. This problem is known to be difficult and computational complexity of exact algorithms for graph matching is exponential. Thus, heuristics must be proposed to obtain approximations. In this paper, we propose an approach to find relevant process models based on their decomposition into paths of possible execution sequences. Then, we propose a schema to compute the similarity between two process models using the proposed decomposition. Moreover, we give particular attention to the problem of ranking a collection of process models according to a particular query. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Business transaction recovery is the fundamental approach of handling exceptions during execution as well as ensuring transaction features. In this paper context is applied to recovery of the web service business transaction and exceptions are classified into four categories: network exception, physical exception, service exception and user exception. Based on the classifications we define different start points of recovery process to simplify the recovery process of business transaction. Also evaluations on contexts of exceptions are performed to extract the feasible instances of compensation paths and the sensibility weights of path costs are utilized to select the optimal compensation instance. An illustration to recovery scenarios for travel agent is presented to verify our approach and algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mashup Programming is one of the latest trends in web application development. However, different sources still regard that mashup technology is in its infancy despite the mushroom growth of mashup-based applications and technologies. This calls for an in depth analysis of the support available to end users for mashup development. In this paper, we propose a multi-dimensional framework to evaluate existing mashup tools and platforms. The main idea behind this evaluation is to study the state of the art of mashup development from the end-user perspective and critically evaluate the efforts in this regard against a set of criteria to identify the research directions in this field. The idea of evaluation of mashup tools has been tackled through different approaches in past, however, in this research we attempt to synthesize additional concepts regarding mashup development and analyse this area against previously ignored factors, such as support for capturing users' requirements and users' goals. This study also includes platforms that have not yet been covered by previous evaluation studies. The framework presented in this study can be used as a guideline to inform future design of mashup development environments for both academic and industrial research. The results of the study reinforce the need of a more user-oriented approach to deal with the inherent issues of end-user mashup programming. The study concludes with the proposal of use of goals as a guiding mechanism to derive the mashup applications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the problem of managing business process changes at the design level within a complex business process repository. We argue that a formal process eco-systems view can provide a particular useful solution to the problem in which their inter-process relationships can be properly described. Our intent is to build a modular infrastructure to support change management in process eco-systems by leveraging a change propagation approach that would maintain the inter-process relationships. This permits us to propagate the changes, made on a particular process, to the rest of the processes for maintaining the relationship equilibrium of such eco-system. Our experimental evaluation suggests that the propagation of change can be efficiently achieved, which suggests that the real source of complexity stems from the redesign of individual models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Business process (BP) can be supported by a large number of resources with evolving contents. In order to receive the support from these resources, the BP must satisfy the authorization policies of these resources. On the other hand, a BP also has its own authorization policies that users must satisfy in order to interact with the BP. Meanwhile, execution policies need to be applied to manage the sequence of tasks invocations in a BP. Therefore, without proper coordination among these policies, BP may not be able to perform correctly, e.g., imperative support from a specific resource could be missing or unauthorized user access can occur. An effective authorization management bringing all types of policies together becomes a must for a BP executing correctly without breaking any authorization and business rules. In this paper, we propose a process model, SOAC-Net that is incorporated with an authorization model, Process-Aware Service-Oriented Authorization Control (PASOAC). PASOAC is an extension of Role Based Access Control (RBAC), which takes both resource and user into account. A set of authorization constraints are designed in PASOAC to coordinate the user access and the resource support in a process environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cloud infrastructure should accommodate changing demands for different types of transactions with heterogeneous requests workload and response time constraints. The multi-layer nature of service computing results in the difficulty of designing an optimal cloud infrastructure. The objective of the paper focuses on enabling clouds infrastructure to provide guaranteed performance in minimum cost. The global SLOs are decomposed into subsystems in different layers according to transaction profile. The performance of cloud infrastructure is described as a multi-station queuing model. The approximation mean-value analysis algorithm is used to get the approximate solution of performance variables. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective, capable of reducing the system cost while improving the performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The cloud computing paradigm moves data across administrative domains to be managed by various outsourced database (ODB) service providers. There needs a means for a data owner to verify the correctness and completeness of query results returned from these ODB services. The process is called query authentication. Existing ODB services do not provide such assurance to customers. This is mainly due to that most techniques in literature are expensive and limited in functionality. This paper proposes to use independent external observers for query result verification. The proposed method requires the ODB service to return a verification object (VO) for each query result set, as most existing methods do. Differing to existing methods, we propose a complement set based VO construction method. The cost of computing complement set based VO is low compared to hash tree based ones commonly seen in existing methods. The proposed method does not require the data owner or the ODB service provider to maintain complex authentication data structures, instead, the workload of data state tracking and VO validation can be distributed among a set of observers. Furthermore, the proposed VO construction method is capable of supporting multi-attribute queries. The method is implemented as a thin wrapper of an ODB service with the support of additional observer services. We evaluate the performance of the system in Amazon EC2 and examine its cost of achieving trustworthiness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we investigate the question of QoS prediction of Web Service Composition (WSC) implementing a business process. We focus on the graph reduction technique and the prediction of the Service Response Time. In the graph reduction technique, we assume that a Web Service Composition can be represented as a graph. The main thesis is that the QoS of such a graph graph can be obtained from a composition of the ones of its nodes. Multiple graph reduction algorithms have been proposed in the literature. Our contribution is twofold. We propose first a fast algorithm based on graph reduction for the prediction of the Service Response Time of a Web Service Composition. In comparison to those existing in the literature, this algorithm uses less memory space and has a better time complexity. The obtained improvements are in particular significant on very large Web Service Composition where the number of services is huge. Our second contribution is an analysis of the graph reduction technique for QoS prediction that takes into account the unfolding of services. In such cases, we show that the prediction of QoS can lead to a NP-complete problem. We also provide an integer programming model for predicting the Service Response Time in this case. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Business process families provide an over-arching representation of the possible business processes of a target domain. They are defined by capturing the similarities and differences among the possible business processes of the target domain. To realize a business process family into a concrete business process model, the variability points of the business process family need to be bounded. The decision on how to bind these variation points boils down to the stakeholders' requirements and needs. Given specific requirements from the stakeholders, the business process family can be configured. This paper formally introduces and empirically evaluates a framework called ConfBPFM that utilizes standard techniques for identifying stakeholders' quality requirements and employs a metaheuristic search algorithm (i.e., Genetic Algorithms) to optimally configure a business process family. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to adapt to the inconstancy of business environments and service requirements, the framework of service-oriented product line development is proposed, which is used to analyze, verify and implement dynamic processes and process changes automatically. In this paper, we present a logical feature model which can model the variability of requirements, and introduce variant points in business process templates defined by petri nets to model dynamic processes. Then, we map compound features in a logical feature model to variant points in a template through propositional logics. At last, the configured process can be verified based on petri net theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BPEL is a popular standard language in SOA enterprise for specifying business process. A developer has to use specific programming technologies to construct process structure and specify Web services inputs and outputs in the process. It is time-consuming to specify every business process from low-level Web services. This paper proposes a semantic extended BPEL model for SOA process generation, and implements the model in a practical BPEL IDE. The new BPEL IDE supports efficient visual design of SOA processes, and helps developers focus more on business logic. A real multimedia conference SOA application is given to demonstrate the efficiency of SOA process generation with semantic extended BPEL model on the new BPEL IDE. And a Load Runner evaluation is given to validate the efficient BPEL process generation has no negative effect on execution efficiency of the generated BPEL code. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

More and more enterprises rely on web services as an important channel for conducing business process and some changes to web services might occur for various reasons, efficiently managing services change becomes crucial. In this paper, we proposes a web service change management framework based on Bayesian Network, which enable representing the inside causal and probabilities semantics of dynamic changes to web services. The framework implement change management effectively in a heuristic way, by analyzing and identifying the detail of change as well as providing some meaningful knowledge to the following reaction. With the continuous evolution of the associated Bayesian Network, the efficiency and applicability of the web service change management network can be improved to a satisfied extent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Software-as-a-service emerges as a new delivery model for the software development and applications. In multi-tenancy applications, tenants can customize and adjust the corresponding services shared by tenants based on their business requirements with strong elasticity and expansibility. As services do not exist independently, the resolving of service dependencies in practical multi-tenancy applications is of great importance. In this paper, we propose an Extended Dependency-aware Hierarchical Service Model (EDHSM) to visually describe hierarchical services and service dependencies. We employ a directed hypergraph to represent the model and resolve service dependencies. Moreover, we apply the service dependencies resolving to dynamic service deployment in optimal placement of tenants and online service migration based on load monitoring for multi-tenancy applications. So application systems can be built quickly and operated stably at a low maintaining cost. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cloud infrastructure services offer elastic computing resources that particularly match the requirements of web transactional applications. Such applications, e.g., e-business applications, have high business value and variable workload patterns and therefore utilizing such elastic cloud resources in a cost-effective way is crucial need for cloud consumers. Defining economic elasticity rules, however, is not trivial as it requires (i) running considerable number of experiments with different parameters/metrics and workloads (ii) collecting appropriate cloud and application cost/performance measurements and (iii) performing cost/performance trade-off analysis. In this paper we introduce our on-going work on elasticity economics platform that supports cloud consumers to achieve the above three requirements. We also discuss the key elements of the elasticity economics platform and our early prototyping experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Semi-structured processes arise extensively in various industries such as government, insurance, banking and healthcare and are characterized by their flexibility and data-driven nature. Case management systems are evolving to handle the growing demand for providing operational support to knowledge workers involved in these processes. While enabling flexibility in human actions is an integral part of these systems, this capability increases the potential for errors in case handling. We propose a new paradigm of case health aimed at providing knowledge workers and supervisors a case health service to continuously and objectively assess both the current state of a case instance and provide a prognosis for the future state of the instance. The case health service is composed of constituent services each of which provide case health indicators and can be combined in flexible ways to determine the overall health of an instance. We have implemented case health with respect to a simulated credit card dispute scenario modeled in IBM Case Manager and evaluated the utility of computing the case health of running instances of the credit card dispute scenario. Results indicate the utility of incorporating case health in a case management system in terms of early detection of undesired outcomes and abnormal execution patterns in running case instances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]