QoS-Aware Middleware for Web Services Composition

The paradigmatic shift from a Web of manual interactions to a Web of programmatic interactions driven by Web services is creating unprecedented opportunities for the formation of online Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations. In particular, the creation of value-added services by composition of existing ones is gaining a significant momentum. Since many available Web services provide overlapping or identical functionality, albeit with different Quality of Service (QoS), a choice needs to be made to determine which services are to participate in a given composite service. This paper presents a middleware platform which addresses the issue of selecting Web services for the purpose of their composition in a way that maximizes user satisfaction expressed as utility functions over QoS attributes, while satisfying the constraints set by the user and by the structure of the composite service. Two selection approaches are described and compared: one based on local (task-level) selection of services and the other based on global allocation of tasks to services using integer programming

A survey of QoS-aware web service composition techniques

Web service composition can be briefly described as the process of aggregating services with disparate functionalities into a new composite service in order to meet increasingly complex needs of users. Service composition process has been accurate on dealing with services having disparate functionalities, however, over the years the number of web services in particular that exhibit similar functionalities and varying Quality of Service (QoS) has significantly increased. As such, the problem becomes how to select appropriate web services such that the QoS of the resulting composite service is maximized or, in some cases, minimized. This constitutes an NP-hard problem as it is complicated and difficult to solve. In this paper, a discussion of concepts of web service composition and a holistic review of current service composition techniques proposed in literature is presented. Our review spans several publications in the field that can serve as a road map for future research

JEERP: Energy Aware Enterprise Resource Planning

Ever increasing energy costs, and saving requirements, especially in enterprise contexts, are pushing the limits of Enterprise Resource Planning to better account energy, with component-level asset granularity. Using an application-oriented approach we discuss the different aspects involved in designing Energy Aware ERPs and we show a prototypical open source implementation based on the Dog Domotic Gateway and the Oratio ER

Search based software engineering: Trends, techniques and applications

© ACM, 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is available from the link below.In the past five years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), an approach to Software Engineering (SE) in which Search-Based Optimization (SBO) algorithms are used to address problems in SE. SBSE has been applied to problems throughout the SE lifecycle, from requirements and project planning to maintenance and reengineering. The approach is attractive because it offers a suite of adaptive automated and semiautomated solutions in situations typified by large complex problem spaces with multiple competing and conflicting objectives. This article provides a review and classification of literature on SBSE. The work identifies research trends and relationships between the techniques applied and the applications to which they have been applied and highlights gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.EPSRC and E

Multi-Criteria Optimal Planning for Energy Policies in CLP

In the policy making process a number of disparate and diverse issues such as economic development, environmental aspects, as well as the social acceptance of the policy, need to be considered. A single person might not have all the required expertises, and decision support systems featuring optimization components can help to assess policies. Leveraging on previous work on Strategic Environmental Assessment, we developed a fully-fledged system that is able to provide optimal plans with respect to a given objective, to perform multi-objective optimization and provide sets of Pareto optimal plans, and to visually compare them. Each plan is environmentally assessed and its footprint is evaluated. The heart of the system is an application developed in a popular Constraint Logic Programming system on the Reals sort. It has been equipped with a web service module that can be queried through standard interfaces, and an intuitive graphic user interface.Comment: Accepted at ICLP2014 Conference as Technical Communication, due to appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP