Search

Fog computing complemented cloud computing integration services in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the web of real-time interactivity. Fog offers faster computing and other services facilities sitting close to user applications. However, secure data transfer in the fog is still a challenging issue requiring attention and efficient deployment of a secure data security scheme. We present an Identity Based Encryption (IBE) scheme to secure data security and transmission in fog clouds and IoT ecosystems. We devise and develop a four-level Hierarchical Identity Based Architecture for Fog Computing (HIBAF) data security scheme to enhance data security. We also analyze the system’s performance regarding response time, CPU utilization, run-time encryption-decryption, and key generation time in the fog computing paradigm to an increasing number of users data-loads. Moreover, we evaluate our scheme and compare the outcomes with different cryptography structures to discern our scheme’s effectiveness. Furthermore, we also evaluate secret key updating time, re-encrypted key updating time, and file revoking time by launching DDoS attacks both in the cloud and fog computing environment to compare improvements of HIBAF in the fog computing paradigm. Finally, through this overall evaluation, we have found that the developed HIBAF scheme provides a 33% performance enhancement in a fog environment in terms of data processing, provision, and management compared to the cloud environment.

A future-state architectural strategy designed to support chatbot integration with service delivery systems.

To slow down the spread of COVID-19, governments around the world are trying to identify infected people and to contain the virus by enforcing isolation and quarantine. However, it is difficult to trace people who came into contact with an infected person, which causes widespread community transmission and mass infection. To address this problem, we develop an e-government Privacy Preserving Mobile and Fog computing framework entitled PPMF that can trace infected and suspected cases nationwide. We use personal mobile devices with contact tracing app and two types of stationary fog nodes, named Automatic Risk Checkers (ARC) and Suspected User Data Uploader Node (SUDUN), to trace community transmission alongside maintaining user data privacy. Each user's mobile device receives a Unique Encrypted Reference Code (UERC) when registering on the central application. The mobile device and the central application both generate Rotational Unique Encrypted Reference Code (RUERC), which broadcasted using the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. The ARCs are placed at the entry points of buildings, which can immediately detect if there are positive or suspected cases nearby. If any confirmed case is found, the ARCs broadcast pre-cautionary messages to nearby people without revealing the identity of the infected person. The SUDUNs are placed at the health centers that report test results to the central cloud application. The reported data is later used to map between infected and suspected cases. Therefore, using our proposed PPMF framework, governments can let organizations continue their economic activities without complete lockdown., 12 pages, 9 figures, 1 table, 1 algorithm

With the increased use of geospatial datasets across heterogeneous user groups and domains, assessing fitness-for-use is emerging as an essential task. Users are presented with an increasing choice of data from various portals, repositories, and clearinghouses. Consequently, comparing the quality and evaluating fitness-for-use of different datasets presents major challenges for spatial data users. While standardization efforts have significantly improved metadata interoperability, the increasing choice of metadata standards and their focus on data production rather than potential data use and application, renders typical metadata documents insufficient for effectively communicating fitness-for-use. Thus, research has focused on the challenge of communicating fitness-for-use of geospatial data, proposing a more &ldquo, user-centric&rdquo, approach to geospatial metadata. We present the Geospatial User-Centric Metadata ontology (GUCM) for communicating fitness-for-use of spatial datasets to users in the spatial and other domains, to enable them to make informed data source selection decisions. GUCM enables metadata description for various components of a dataset in the context of different application domains. It captures producer-supplied and user-described metadata in structured format using concepts from domain-independent ontologies. This facilitates interoperability between spatial and nonspatial metadata on open data platforms and provides the means for searching/discovering spatial data based on user-specified quality and fitness-for-use criteria.

Authentication is a challenging and emerging issue for Fog-IoT security paradigms. The fog nodes toward large-scale end-users offer various interacted IoT services. The authentication process usually involves expressing users' personal information such as username, email, and password to the Authentication Server (AS). However, users are not intended to express their identities or information over the fog or cloud servers. Hence, we have proposed an Anonymous User Authentication Scheme for Fog-IoT (AUASF) to keep the anonymity existence of the IoT users and detect the intruders. To provide anonymity, the user can send encrypted credentials such as username, email, and mobile number through the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) for registration. IoT user receives the response with a default password and a secret Id from the CSP. After that, the IoT user submits the default password for first-time access to Fog Service Provider (FSP). The FSP assigns a One Time Password (OTP) to each user for further access. The developed scheme is equipped with hash functions, symmetric encryptions, and decryptions for security perceptions across fog that serves better than the existing anonymity schemes.

There has been a growing interest in the literature on the application of deep learning models for predicting business process behaviour, such as the next event in a case, the time for completion of an event, and the remaining execution trace of a case. Although these models provide high levels of accuracy, their sophisticated internal representations provide little or no understanding about the reason for a particular prediction, resulting in them being used as black-boxes. Consequently, an interpretable model is necessary to enable transparency and empower users to evaluate when and how much they can rely on the models. This paper explores an interpretable and accurate attention-based Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) model for predicting business process behaviour. The interpretable model provides insights into the model inputs influencing a prediction, thus facilitating transparency. An experimental evaluation shows that the proposed model capable of supporting interpretability also provides accurate predictions when compared to existing LSTM models for predicting process behaviour. The evaluation further shows that attention mechanisms in LSTM provide a sound approach to generate meaningful interpretations across different tasks in predictive process analytics.

This paper addresses the challenge of automated remodularization of large systems as microservices. It focuses on the analysis of enterprise systems, which are widely used in corporate sectors and are notoriously large, monolithic and challenging to manually decouple because they manage asynchronous, user-driven business processes and business objects (BOs) having complex structural relationships. The technique presented leverages semantic knowledge of enterprise systems, i.e., BO structure, together with syntactic knowledge of the code, i.e., classes and interactions as part of static profiling and clustering. On a semantic level, BOs derived from databases form the basis for prospective clustering of classes as modules, while on a syntactic level, structural and interaction details of classes provide further insights for module dependencies and clustering, based on K-Means clustering and optimization. Our integrated techniques are validated using two open source enterprise customer relationship management systems, SugarCRM and ChurchCRM. The results demonstrate improved feasibility of remodularizing enterprise systems (inclusive of coded BOs and classes) as microservices. Furthermore, the recommended microservices, integrated with ‘backend’ enterprise systems, demonstrate improvements in key non-functional characteristics, namely high execution efficiency, scalability and availability.

Microservice migration is a promising technique to incrementally modernize monolithic legacy enterprise applications and enable them to exploit the benefits of cloud-computing environments. This article elaborates on three challenges of microservice migration: multitenancy, statefulness, and data consistency. The authors show how to identify each of these challenges in legacy code and explain refactoring and architectural pattern-based migration techniques relevant to microservice architectures. They explain how multitenancy enables microservices to be utilized by different organizations with distinctive requirements, why statefulness affects both the availability and reliability of a microservice system, and why data consistency challenges are encountered when migrating legacy code that operates on a centralized data repository to microservices operating on decentralized data repositories. They also explain the interdependencies between multitenancy, statefulness, and data consistency.

Service providers are increasingly exploring the use of conversational agents (CA) or dialogue based systems to support end customers, as a CA promises natural method for users to interact and a convenient channel for customer service. Commercial CAs, excel in addressing specific tasks or functions such as searching for restaurants, providing location directions, or scheduling meetings, with small variations in the user request. Designing a CA for a more complex service system, requires sufficient knowledge of its services such as the service capabilities, their constraints, and effects, in addition to understanding user utterances. The design of a CA is typically an independent activity and its linkages to the service system it supports are left to the designers. In this paper, we study existing work with respect to text-based CAs and identify the conceptual elements of a CA. Further, a linkage between the model elements of a CA and service model of the service system it supports is established and presented. We show that interesting insights can be derived from the linkages, that can be useful to CA designers.

© 2020 Elsevier Ltd Qualitative researchers in information management research often need to evaluate inter-coder reliability (ICR) to test the trustworthiness of their content analysis. A suitable method of evaluating ICR enables researchers to rigorously assess the degree of agreement among two or more independent qualitative coders. This allows researchers to identify mistakes in the content analysis before the codes are used in developing and testing a theory or a measurement model and avoid any associated time, effort and financial cost. Different methods have been proposed, but little guidance is available on which approach to evaluating ICR should be used. In this paper, we review and compare leading ICR methods that are suitable for qualitative information management research. We propose an approach for selecting and using an ICR method, supported by an illustrative example. The five steps in our proposed approach include: selecting an ICR method based on its characteristics and requirements of a project; developing a coding scheme; selecting and training independent coders; calculating the ICR coefficient and resolving discrepancies; and reporting the process of evaluating ICR and its results.

Enterprise applications are data-centric information systems that are being increasingly deployed as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Cloud offerings. Such service-oriented enterprise applications allow multiple tenants (i.e., groups of service consumers) to share the computational and storage capabilities of a single Cloud application instance. Compared to a more traditional single-tenant application deployment model, a multitenant SaaS architecture promises to lower both deployment and maintenance costs. Such cost reductions motivate architects to reengineer existing enterprise applications to support multitenancy at the application level. However, in order to preserve data integrity and data confidentiality, the reengineering process must guarantee that different tenants allocated to the same application instance cannot access one another's data, including both persistent values stored in databases and transient values created during calculations. This chapter presents a method and a set of architectural patterns for systematically reengineering data-sensitive enterprise applications into secure multitenant software services that can be deployed to public and private cloud offerings seamlessly. Architectural refactoring is introduced as a novel reengineering practice and the necessary steps in multitenant refactoring are described from planning to execution to validation (including testing and code reviews). The method and patterns are validated in a fictitious, but realistic and representative case study that was distilled from real-world requirements and application architectures.

Static analysis techniques can be used to analyse and simplify interfaces of enterprise systems, such as those from SAP, Oracle and FedEx, which becoming more prominent on the internet and vying for new systems integration and extension opportunities. Web services of enterprise systems are notoriously complex, having hundreds of parameters per operation, multiple levels of nesting, leading to ambiguities about valid invocations of operations. To derive valid invocations, which in turn assists service users with invoking services correctly, this paper focuses on a challenging aspect of static interface analysis, namely, the identification of service variants in operations, in which the parameters are subtypes of business entities involved in a service. To efficiently search for which combinations of parameters are for a valid invocation, we have proposed a Monte Carlo method, based on likelihood-free Bayesian sampling, to identify higher probability parameters spaces, from which to test prospective invocations. A significant performance boost was found by extending Monte Carlo sampling with Markov look-up, with validation using a simulated FedEx service interface, whose structural complexity exceeds many web services of enterprise systems available on the internet.

A service-oriented system is a collection of independent services that interact with one another through message exchanges. Languages such as the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) allow developers to capture the interactions in which an individual service can engage, both from a structural and from a behavioral perspective. However, in large service-oriented systems, stakeholders may require a global picture of the way services interact with each other, rather than multiple small pictures focusing on individual services. Such global models are especially useful when a set of services interact in such a way that none of them sees all messages being exchanged, yet interactions between some services may affect the way other services interact. Unfortunately, global models of service interactions may sometimes capture behavioral constraints that cannot be enforced locally. In other words, some global models may not be translatable into a set of local models such that the sum of the local models equals the original global model. Starting from a previously proposed language for global modeling of service interactions, this paper defines an algorithm for determining if a global model is locally enforceable and an algorithm for generating local models from global ones. It also shows how local models are mapped into templates of BPEL process definitions.

In-memory databases have become a mainstay of enterprise computing offering significant performance boosts for OLAP and OLTP workloads as well as improved prospects for application integration through an efficient, shared database layer. Despite significant RaD investments into in-memory data management, limited insights are available on the impacts of middleware platforms for application integration, i.e., How they need to evolve to leverage in-memory database capabilities. This paper provides a first exposition into how in-memory databases impact Business Process Management, as a mission-critical model-driven application integration middleware. Through it, we discuss how in-memory databases will render some prevalent uses cases of BPM middleware obsolete, while opening up prospects for tighter application integration, better process automation performance and some entirely new BPM capabilities such as process-based application customization. To validate the feasibility of an in-memory BPM, we develop a surprisingly simple BPM runtime embedded into SAP HANA and providing for BPMN-based process automation capabilities.

The growth of APIs and Web services on the Internet, especially through larger enterprise systems increasingly being leveraged for Cloud and software-as-a-service opportunities, poses challenges to improving the efficiency of integration with these services. Interfaces of enterprise systems are typically larger, more complex and overloaded, with single operation having multiple data entities and parameter sets, supporting varying requests, and reflecting versioning across different system releases, compared to fine-grained operations of contemporary interfaces. We propose a technique to support the refactoring of service interfaces by deriving business entities and their relationships. In this paper, we focus on the behavioural aspects of service interfaces, aiming to discover the sequential dependencies of operations (otherwise known as protocol extraction) based on the entities and relationships derived. Specifically, we propose heuristics according to these relationships, and in turn, deriving permissible orders in which operations are invoked. As a result of this, service operations can be refactored on business entity CRUD lines, with explicit behavioural protocols as part of an interface definition. This supports flexible service discovery, composition and integration. A prototypical implementation and analysis of existing Web services, including those of commercial logistic systems (Fedex), are used to validate the algorithms proposed through the paper.

We present a novel framework and algorithms for the analysis of Web service interfaces to improve the efficiency of application integration in wide-spanning business networks. Our approach addresses the notorious issue of large and overloaded operational signatures, which are becoming increasingly prevalent on the Internet and being opened up for third-party service aggregation. Extending upon existing techniques used to refactor service interfaces based on derived artefacts of applications, namely business entities, we propose heuristics for deriving relations between business entities, and in turn, deriving permissible orders in which operations are invoked. As a result, service operations are refactored on business entity CRUD which then leads to behavioural models generated, thus supportive of fine-grained and flexible service discovery, composition and interaction. A prototypical implementation and analysis of web services, including those of commercial logistic systems (FedEx), are used to validate the algorithms and open up further insights into service interface synthesis.

We propose a framework to allow the analysis of service interfaces, useful for interoperability in heterogeneous settings such as business networks. The framework supports analysis of large and overloaded operational signatures to derive focal artefacts, namely the underlying business objects of services. A more simplified and comprehensive service interface layer is created based on these, and rendered into semantically normalised interfaces, given an ontology accrued through the framework from service analysis history. This opens up the prospect of supporting capability comparisons across services, and run-time request backtracking and adjustment, as consumers discover new features of a service’s operations through corresponding features of similar services. This paper provides a first exposition of the service interface synthesis framework, describing algorithms for business object derivation and service behavioural interface generation. A prototypical implementation and analysis of web services drawn from commercial logistic systems are used to validate the algorithms and identify open challenges and future research directions.

The convergence of Internet marketplaces and service-oriented architectures has spurred the growth of Web service ecosystems. This paper articulates a vision for Web service ecosystems, discusses early manifestations of this vision, and presents a unifying architecture to support the emergence of larger and more sophisticated ecosystems

Real-time remote sales assistance is an underdeveloped component of online sales services. Solutions involving web page text chat, telephony and video support prove problematic when seeking to remotely guide customers in their sales processes, especially with configurations of physically complex artefacts. Recently, there has been great interest in the application of virtual worlds and augmented reality to create synthetic environments for remote sales of physical artefacts. However, there is a lack of analysis and development of appropriate software services to support these processes. We extend our previous work with the detailed design of configuration context services to support the management of an interactive sales session using augmented reality. We detail the context and configuration services required, presenting a novel data service streaming configuration information to the vendor for business analytics. We expect that a fully implemented configuration management service, based on our design, will improve the remote sales experience for both customers and vendors alike via analysis of the streamed information.

Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web services leverage the technical value of solutions in the areas of distributed systems and cross-enterprise integration. The emergence of Internet marketplaces for business services is driving the need to describe services, not only from a technical level, but also from a business and operational perspective. While, SOA and Web services reside in an IT layer, organizations owing Internet marketplaces are requiring advertising and trading business services which reside in a business layer. As a result, the gap between business and IT needs to be closed. This paper presents USDL (Unified Service Description Language), a specification language to describe services from a business, operational and technical perspective. USDL plays a major role in the Internet of Services to describe tradable services which are advertised in electronic marketplaces. The language has been tested using two service marketplaces as use cases.

The Web Service Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) lacks any standard graphical notation. Various efforts have been undertaken to visualize BPEL using the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). Although this is straightforward for the majority of concepts, it is tricky for the full BPEL standard, partly due to the insufficiently specified BPMN execution semantics. The upcoming BPMN 2.0 revision will provide this clear semantics. In this paper, we show how the dead path elimination (DPE) capabilities of BPEL can be expressed with this new semantics and discuss the limitations. We provide a generic formal definition of DPE and discuss resulting control flow requirements independent of specific process description languages.

We argue that web service discovery technology should help the user navigate a complex problem space by providing suggestions for services which they may not be able to formulate themselves as (s)he lacks the epistemic resources to do so. Free text documents in service environments provide an untapped source of information for augmenting the epistemic state of the user and hence their ability to search effectively for services. A quantitative approach to semantic knowledge representation is adopted in the form of semantic space models computed from these free text documents. Knowledge of the user’s agenda is promoted by associational inferences computed from the semantic space. The inferences are suggestive and aim to promote human abductive reasoning to guide the user from fuzzy search goals into a better understanding of the problem space surrounding the given agenda. Experimental results are discussed based on a complex and realistic planning activity.

This paper proposes a model-based technique for lowering the entrance barrier for service providers to register services with a marketplace broker, such that the service is rapidly configured to utilize the brokerpsilas local service delivery management components. Specifically, it uses process modeling for supporting the execution steps of a service and shows how service delivery functions (e.g. payment points) ldquolocalrdquo to a service broker can be correctly configured into the process model. By formalizing the different operations in a service delivery function (like payment or settlement) and their allowable execution sequences (full payments must follow partial payments), including cross-function dependencies, it shows how through tool support, the non-technical user can quickly configure service delivery functions in a consistent and complete way.

The modelling of B2B scenarios focuses on conversations between key partners to establish a common business context for their collaboration. With the prevalence of Web services, attention has turned to service choreographies as a means of message exchange ordering between collaborating participants, from a global (or shared) understanding. As such, the message ordering in a choreography model can then be used to determine the message ordering behaviour of each participant's process. In this paper, we extend the suitability of choreography modelling for the early phase of analysis, where the participants and the nature of interactions develops under the flux of requirements acquisition. In particular, we develop a structural view of interactions and stepwise refinement, leading to behavioural considerations, reminiscent of classical techniques. In addition, we introduce contextualisation of intent behind message exchanges in the form of speech acts. This, we show, can be used to automatically detect conflicts in conversations, in the business sense, namely negotiation or provision breakdowns - prior to technical implementations of choreographies. Model abstraction and refinement is based on Semantic Object Model (SOM), and a mapping to the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is shown.

Using complex event rules for capturing dependencies between business processes is an emerging trend in enterprise information systems. In previous work we have identified a set of requirements for event extensions for business process modeling languages. This paper introduces a graphical language for modeling composite events in business processes, namely BEMN, that fulfills all these requirements. These include event conjunction, disjunction and inhibition as well as cardinality of events whose graphical expression can be factored into flow-oriented process modeling and event rule modeling. Formal semantics for the language are provided.

Since companies face continuously changing business processes, centralized process repositories and execution engines have been integrated into the heart of enterprise systems. These systems are then able to support repetitive processes. In order to extend the reach of process orientation into more collaborative settings, employees must be given the possibility to adapt and refine the processes to their individual needs. Personalized process templates are applied to tasks and running process instances are subject to massive changes by the participants. These flexible processes require for process management infrastructures of a more peer to peer style. We argue that the concept of Dynamic Routing is a valuable paradigm for supporting highly flexible processes. We identified three patterns for Dynamic Routing and sketch future enterprise system architectures implementing these. We present two case studies where dynamically routed interactions are at the center of attention.

We provide precise high-level models for eight fundamental service interaction patterns, together with schemes for their composition into complex service-based business process interconnections and interaction flows, supporting software-engineered business process management in multi-party collaborative environments. The mathematical nature of our models provides a basis for a rigorous execution-platform-independent analysis, in particular for benchmarking web services functionality. The models can also serve as accurate standard specifications, subject to further design leading by stepwise refinement to implementations.

Contemporary specification languages of workflow management systems focus on capturing process execution semantics. Constructs are offered that allow the specification of sequential execution, iteration, choice, parallelism and synchronisation. While in workflow modelling it is absolutely imperative that exceptions are dealt with properly, virtually no support for the specification of exception handling is offered at the conceptual level. Typically, exceptions and recovery strategies need to be defined using the programming primitives of the specific workflow management systems used. We propose a number of conceptual modelling primitives that can be used for the specification of exception handling in workflows. These primitives are illustrated using some real-life examples. A formal semantics is assigned to precisely define their meaning and demonstrating how they can be incorporated in a typical process modelling language.

The ODP Enterprise Language concept of Role provides a useful abstraction for behaviour in a context that is independent of how the behaviour is enacted in a run time system. In CORBA implementations of ODP systems a client object reference variable is analogous to a Role – it is a placeholder for an object whose behaviour is specified by an IDL type. The DSTC UML Profile for Enterprise Distributed Object Computing expresses the Role concept as a UML Action, which is a placeholder for behaviour in UML, and has an attribute representing constraints on the objects that may perform the behaviour (fill the Role). CORBA Object reference variables are assigned to object references using some “bootstrapping mechanism”, implemented by a programmer, perhaps using a Trader or Naming Service to locate suitable objects. For the first time in UML, the DSTC EDOC Profile allows designers to specify Roles independent of the class of objects that may perform the Roles. Designers also specify which objects are appropriate for filling which Roles. Furthermore the mapping of this Profile to CORBA technology allows automatic generation of Trader query code to bootstrap the object references of a distributed application according to the high-level design, not the whims of the programmer.

Business processes exhibit concurrent execution, where different and sometimes inter-dependent parts, are isolated and run in parallel. In current workflow tools, this requirement is supported through a synchronisation mechanism allowing for the convergence of parallel paths of execution. In this paper we argue that more sophisticated forms of inter-process communication are necessary for increased workflow automation. In particular three extensions which preserve the parallelisation of execution paths are proposed: the adaption of synchronous and asynchronous messaging for data/document flow across execution paths, aborts of related execution paths, and exclusive, i.e. atomic, execution of nested processes. Illustrations from an industrial case study show how these constructs combine with classical workflow constructs to capture complex but common themes of business processing. To precisely impart the ramifications for workflow execution, we show how a formal semantics can be assigned for the constructs.

With increased sophistication and standardization of modeling languages and execution platforms supporting business process management (BPM) across traditional boundaries, has come the need for consolidated insights into their exploitation from a business perspective. Key technology developments in BPM bear this out, with several web services-related initiatives investing significant effort in the collection of compelling use cases to heighten the exploitation of BPM in multi-party collaborative environments. In this setting, we present a collection of patterns of service interactions which allow emerging web services functionality, especially that pertaining to choreography and orchestration, to be benchmarked against abstracted forms of representative scenarios. Beyond bilateral interactions, these patterns cover multilateral, competing, atomic and causally related interactions. Issues related to the implementation of these patterns using established and emerging web services standards, most notably BPEL, are discussed.

International audience; We present Aeolus Blender (Blender in the following), a software product for the automatic deployment and configuration of complex service-based, distributed software systems in the " cloud ". By relying on a configuration optimiser and a deployment planner, Blender fully automates the deployment of real-life applications on OpenStack cloud deployments , by exploiting a knowledge base of software services provided by the Mandriva Armonic tool suite. The final deployment is guaranteed to satisfy not only user requirements and relevant software dependencies , but also to be optimal with respect to the number of used virtual machines.