CBProf: Customisable Blockchain-as-a-Service Performance Profiler in Cloud Environments

Blockchain technologies, e.g., Hyperledger Fabric and Sawtooth, have been evolving rapidly during past years and enable potential decentralised innovations in a substantial amount of business applications, e.g. crowd journalism, car-sharing and energy trading. The development of decentralised business applications has to face challenges in selecting suitable blockchain technologies, customising network protocols among distributed peers, and optimising system performance to meet application requirements. Also, manually testing and comparing those different technologies are time-consuming. Therefore, an effective tool is needed for profiling the performance characteristics of blockchain services in different cloud environments. In this paper, we present the Customisable Blockchain-as-a-Service Performance Profiler (CBProf), a tool we developed for automating blockchain deployment and performance profiling in cloud environments. We also provide the implementation and functionality demonstration of this tool

Driving continuous improvement

The quality of improvement depends on the quality of leading and lagging performance indicators. For this reason, several tools, such as process mapping, cause and effect analysis and FMEA, need to be used in an integrated way with performance measurement models, such as balanced scorecard, integrated performance measurement system, performance prism and so on. However, in our experience, this alone is not quite enough due to the amount of effort required to monitor performance indicators at operational levels. The authors find that IT support is key to the successful implementation of performance measurement-driven continuous improvement schemes

A coordination protocol for user-customisable cloud policy monitoring

Cloud computing will see a increasing demand for end-user customisation and personalisation of multi-tenant cloud service offerings. Combined with an identified need to address QoS and governance aspects in cloud computing, a need to provide user-customised QoS and governance policy management and monitoring as part of an SLA management infrastructure for clouds arises. We propose a user-customisable policy definition solution that can be enforced in multi-tenant cloud offerings through an automated instrumentation and monitoring technique. We in particular allow service processes that are run by cloud and SaaS providers to be made policy-aware in a transparent way

Towards a user-friendly webservice architecture for statistical machine translation in the PANACEA project

This paper presents a webservice architecture for Statistical Machine Translation aimed at non-technical users. A workflow editor allows a user to combine different webservices using a graphical user interface. In the current state of this project, the webservices have been implemented for a range of sentential and sub-sentential aligners. The advantage of a common interface and a common data format allows the user to build workflows exchanging different aligners

Component-aware Orchestration of Cloud-based Enterprise Applications, from TOSCA to Docker and Kubernetes

Enterprise IT is currently facing the challenge of coordinating the management of complex, multi-component applications across heterogeneous cloud platforms. Containers and container orchestrators provide a valuable solution to deploy multi-component applications over cloud platforms, by coupling the lifecycle of each application component to that of its hosting container. We hereby propose a solution for going beyond such a coupling, based on the OASIS standard TOSCA and on Docker. We indeed propose a novel approach for deploying multi-component applications on top of existing container orchestrators, which allows to manage each component independently from the container used to run it. We also present prototype tools implementing our approach, and we show how we effectively exploited them to carry out a concrete case study

A Software Suite for the Control and the Monitoring of Adaptive Robotic Ecologies

Adaptive robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices (sensors, actuators, automated appliances) pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they learn to cooperate towards the achievement of complex tasks. While their flexibility makes them an increasingly popular way to improve a system’s reliability, scalability, robustness and autonomy, their effective realisation demands integrated control and software solutions for the specification, integration and management of their highly heterogeneous and computational constrained components. In this extended abstract we briefly illustrate the characteristic requirements dictated by robotic ecologies, discuss our experience in developing adaptive robotic ecologies, and provide an overview of the specific solutions developed as part of the EU FP7 RUBICON Project

Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations: An ontological approach

This is the post-print version of the Paper. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerSupporting public decision making in policy deliberations has been a key objective of eParticipation which is an emerging area of eGovernment. EParticipation aims to enhance citizen involvement in public governance activities through the use of information and communication technologies. An innovative approach towards this objective is exploiting the potentials of semantic web technologies centred on conceptual knowledge models in the form of ontologies. Ontologies are generally defined as explicit human and computer shared views on the world of particular domains. In this paper, the potentials and benefits of using ontologies for policy deliberation processes are discussed. Previous work is then extended and synthesised to develop a deliberation ontology. The ontology aims to define the necessary semantics in order to structure and interrelate the stages and various activities of deliberation processes with legal information, participant stakeholders and their associated arguments. The practical implications of the proposed framework are illustrated.This work is funded by the European Commission under the 2006/1 eParticipation call