A First Approach to Build Product Lines of Multi-organizationalWeb Based Systems (MOWS)

From the recent past and current state of the Internet, it is possible to forecast a wide growing of Multi Organizational Web–based Systems (MOWS). Therefore, the reduction of both costs and time–to–market is desirable. On the other hand, the success of building software in Product Lines (PL) is being demonstrated in different contexts reducing both time–to–market and costs. However, research on PL topics has not been oriented to include web–based assets. In this article, we propose a first approach to use PL methodologies to build MOWS.We identify quality aspects as a key point when building Product Lines of MOWS and we give a way to specify quality aspects in PL.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC 2003-02737-C02-0

Organizational Assessment of the Parks and Recreation Department: Jamestown, RI

The objective of this assessment was to identify opportunities for improvement in the operational, organizational and economic efficiency of the Department and practicable opportunities for enhancing the quality of its product and services

An adaptive service oriented architecture:Automatically solving interoperability problems

Organizations desire to be able to easily cooperate with other companies and still be flexible. The IT infrastructure used by these companies should facilitate these wishes. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Autonomic Computing (AC) were introduced in order to realize such an infrastructure, however both have their shortcomings and do not fulfil these wishes. This dissertation addresses these shortcomings and presents an approach for incorporating (self-) adaptive behavior in (Web) services. A conceptual foundation of adaptation is provided and SOA is extended to incorporate adaptive behavior, called Adaptive Service Oriented Architecture (ASOA). To demonstrate our conceptual framework, we implement it to address a crucial aspect of distributed systems, namely interoperability. In particular, we study the situation of a service orchestrator adapting itself to evolving service providers.

An adaptive service oriented architecture: Automatically solving interoperability problems.

Organizations desire to be able to easily cooperate with other companies and still be flexible. The IT infrastructure used by these companies should facilitate these wishes. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Autonomic Computing (AC) were introduced in order to realize such an infrastructure, however both have their shortcomings and do not fulfil these wishes. This dissertation addresses these shortcomings and presents an approach for incorporating (self-) adaptive behavior in (Web) services. A conceptual foundation of adaptation is provided and SOA is extended to incorporate adaptive behavior, called Adaptive Service Oriented Architecture (ASOA). To demonstrate our conceptual framework, we implement it to address a crucial aspect of distributed systems, namely interoperability. In particular, we study the situation of a service orchestrator adapting itself to evolving service providers.

Libya in the modern orientalist world-system: A critical analysis of English Language acquisition (ELA) as a factor in Libya‟s new developmental strategy

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonThis thesis is a critical examination of the „new vision‟ strategies that the Libyan government undertook in order to promote the deeper integration of the Libyan economy into the global economy of the Modern Orientalist World-System (MOWS). This process has been taking place since the lifting of the trade embargo on Libya by President Bush in April 2004. A crucial part of this new vision strategy was the promotion of human capital development amongst the Libyan population and with a particular emphasis upon English Language Acquisition (ELA). The argument, derived from neo-liberal thought, is that for Libya to transform itself it must embrace neo-liberal ideas that will see the government adopt the role of the enabling state, preparing Libyans for employment in a newly established private sector. ELA, the learning of what is called „global English‟, is the central part of the new vision human capital development goals. The assumption here is that by developing the English language skills of Libyans it will enhance their job prospects with foreign firms arriving in Libya. This strategy is being pursued in the aftermath of a state directed ban on the learning of English that was first decreed in 1986 and the consequences of which placed a significant obstacle in the way of the immediate employment prospects of a generation of young Libyan graduates. If the state developmental strategy now embraced by the Libyan government is to be successful then it must promote the rapid improvement in the second language skills of its young people (specifically „global English‟) if they are to take advantage of the opportunities offered by a newly opened economy. However, this strategy is fraught with dangers for the government as liberalising the Libyan economy weakens the control of the state over society. Thus the thesis addresses a number of key questions regarding the relationship between human capital (language skills) and the sociology of development; of human capital as a concept in the „modern Orientalist world-system‟; and the changing nature of state-society relations in Libya as the government attempts to integrate it more firmly into the MOWS. To what extent can the Libyan government transform its economy and society in a way that enhances its position in the MOWS rather than simply rendering it more dependent upon the power of the core?Libyan embassy bureau in Londo

Distributed Management of Grid-based Scientific Workflows

Grids and service-oriented technologies are emerging as dominant approaches for distributed systems. With the evolution of these technologies, scientific workflows have been introduced as a tool for scientists to assemble highly specialized applications, and to exchange large heterogeneous datasets in order to automate and accelerate the accomplishment of complex scientific tasks. Several Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMS) have already been designed to support the specification, execution, and monitoring of scientific workflows. Meanwhile, they still face key challenges from two different perspectives: system usability and system efficiency. From the system usability perspective, current SWfMS are not designed to be simple enough for scientists who have quite limited IT knowledge. What’s more, there is no easy mechanism by which scientists can share and re-use scientific experiments that have already been designed and proved by others. From the perspective of system efficiency, existing SWfMS are coordinating and executing workflows in a centralized fashion using a single scheduler and / or a workflow enactor. This creates a single point of failure, forms a scalability bottleneck, and enforces centralized fault handling. In addition, they don’t consider load balancing while mapping abstract jobs onto several computational nodes. Another important challenge exists due to the common nature of scientific workflow applications, that need to exchange a huge amount of data during the execution process. Some available SWfMS use a mediator-based approach for data transfer where data must be transferred first to a centralized data manager, which is completely inefficient. Other SWfMS apply a peer-to-peer approach via data references. Even this approach is not sufficient for scientific workflows as a single complex scientific activity can produce an extensive amount of data. In this thesis, we introduce SWIMS (Scientific Workflow Integration and Management System) framework. It employs the Web Services technology to originate a distributed management system for data-intensive scientific workflows. The purpose of SWIMS is to overcome the previously mentioned challenges through a set of salient features: i) Support for distributed execution and management of workflows, ii) diminution of communication traffic, iii) support for smart re-run, iv) distributed fault handling and load balancing, v) ease of use, and vi) extensive sharing of scientific workflows. We discuss the motivation, design, and implementation of the SWIMS framework. Then, we evaluate it through the Montage application from the astronomy domain

KPI-related monitoring, analysis, and adaptation of business processes

In today's companies, business processes are increasingly supported by IT systems. They can be implemented as service orchestrations, for example in WS-BPEL, running on Business Process Management (BPM) systems. A service orchestration implements a business process by orchestrating a set of services. These services can be arbitrary IT functionality, human tasks, or again service orchestrations. Often, these business processes are implemented as part of business-to-business collaborations spanning several participating organizations. Service choreographies focus on modeling how processes of different participants interact in such collaborations. An important aspect in BPM is performance management. Performance is measured in terms of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which reflect the achievement towards business goals. KPIs are based on domain-specific metrics typically reflecting the time, cost, and quality dimensions. Dealing with KPIs involves several phases, namely monitoring, analysis, and adaptation. In a first step, KPIs have to be monitored in order to evaluate the current process performance. In case monitoring shows negative results, there is a need for analyzing and understanding the reasons why KPI targets are not reached. Finally, after identifying the influential factors of KPIs, the processes have to be adapted in order to improve the performance. %The goal thereby is to enable these phases in an automated manner. This thesis presents an approach how KPIs can be monitored, analyzed, and used for adaptation of processes. The concrete contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach for monitoring of processes and their KPIs in service choreographies; (ii) a KPI dependency analysis approach based on classification learning which enables explaining how KPIs depend on a set of influential factors; (iii) a runtime adaptation approach which combines monitoring and KPI analysis in order to enable proactive adaptation of processes for improving the KPI performance; (iv) a prototypical implementation and experiment-based evaluation.Die Ausführung von Geschäftsprozessen wird heute zunehmend durch IT-Systeme unterstützt und auf Basis einer serviceorientierten Architektur umgesetzt. Die Prozesse werden dabei häufig als Service Orchestrierungen implementiert, z.B. in WS-BPEL. Eine Service Orchestrierung interagiert mit Services, die automatisiert oder durch Menschen ausgeführt werden, und wird durch eine Prozessausführungsumgebung ausgeführt. Darüber hinaus werden Geschäftsprozesse oft nicht in Isolation ausgeführt sondern interagieren mit weiteren Geschäftsprozessen, z.B. als Teil von Business-to-Business Beziehungen. Die Interaktionen der Prozesse werden dabei in Service Choreographien modelliert. Ein wichtiger Aspekt des Geschäftsprozessmanagements ist die Optimierung der Prozesse in Bezug auf ihre Performance, die mit Hilfe von Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) gemessen wird. KPIs basieren auf Prozessmetriken, die typischerweise die Dimensionen Zeit, Kosten und Qualität abbilden, und evaluieren diese in Bezug auf die Erreichung von Unternehmenszielen. Die Optimierung der Prozesse in Bezug auf ihre KPIs umfasst mehrere Phasen. Im ersten Schritt müssen KPIs durch Monitoring der Prozesse zur Laufzeit erhoben werden. Falls die KPI Werte nicht zufriedenstellend sind, werden im nächsten Schritt die Faktoren analysiert, die die KPI Werte beeinflussen. Schließlich werden auf Basis dieser Analyse die Prozesse angepasst um die KPIs zu verbessern. In dieser Arbeit wird ein integrierter Ansatz für das Monitoring, die Analyse und automatisierte Adaption von Prozessen mit dem Ziel der Optimierung hinsichtlich der KPIs vorgestellt. Die Beiträge der Arbeit sind wie folgt: (i) ein Ansatz zum Monitoring von KPIs über einzelne Prozesse hinweg in Service Choreographien, (ii) ein Ansatz zur Analyse von beeinflussenden Faktoren von KPIs auf Basis von Entscheidungsbäumen, (iii) ein Ansatz zur automatisierten, proaktiven Adaption von Prozessen zur Laufzeit auf Basis des Monitorings und der KPI Analyse, (iv) eine prototypische Implementierung und experimentelle Evaluierung

Vacant Land, Buildings and Facilities Asset Management Project

The purpose of the Vacant Land, Buildings and Facilities Asset Management Project (Project) is to develop recommendations for the sustainable, economical and productive conservation, development and management of vacant land, buildings and facilities throughout the City of Buffalo. The Vacant Land, Buildings and Facilities report is a product of an effort designed to provide an overview of an array of related subjects and issues deemed important by Project participants. The results are intended for use as a starting point for continuing dialogue, setting priorities, exploring solutions and selecting actions for change and improvements to the urban environment