Model-Based Management – Design and Experimental Evaluation

Business Process Models contain a lot of information. They are created with different objectives in mind by people with different background. Many models contain information about an organization’s structure and the application systems or services used within the organization. Several tasks are done by people with different roles using different resources. Identity Management Systems (IDMS) try to offer a way to manage all these information automatically. After introducing an IDMS it is easy to cope with changes in identities (persons) and their roles. However, one main question often remains: How to identify good roles that are capable to ease the task of assigning people to resources? In this article a model-based approach using ratios is presented. Complexity, cohesion and coupling for roles are introduced and evaluated to come to a good set of roles representing what they should represent: a bundle of similar organizational functions and resources

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Addressing the challenges of modern DNS:a comprehensive tutorial

The Domain Name System (DNS) plays a crucial role in connecting services and users on the Internet. Since its first specification, DNS has been extended in numerous documents to keep it fit for today’s challenges and demands. And these challenges are many. Revelations of snooping on DNS traffic led to changes to guarantee confidentiality of DNS queries. Attacks to forge DNS traffic led to changes to shore up the integrity of the DNS. Finally, denial-of-service attack on DNS operations have led to new DNS operations architectures. All of these developments make DNS a highly interesting, but also highly challenging research topic. This tutorial – aimed at graduate students and early-career researchers – provides a overview of the modern DNS, its ongoing development and its open challenges. This tutorial has four major contributions. We first provide a comprehensive overview of the DNS protocol. Then, we explain how DNS is deployed in practice. This lays the foundation for the third contribution: a review of the biggest challenges the modern DNS faces today and how they can be addressed. These challenges are (i) protecting the confidentiality and (ii) guaranteeing the integrity of the information provided in the DNS, (iii) ensuring the availability of the DNS infrastructure, and (iv) detecting and preventing attacks that make use of the DNS. Last, we discuss which challenges remain open, pointing the reader towards new research areas

Coupling as a trade-off in an Enterprise Service Bus

Traditionally, integration problems between IT systems were solved by point-to-point connections. These point-to-point connections pose issues with scalability, reliability, and flexibility. To overcome these issues, companies typically invest in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to integrate the IT systems through a central middleware infrastructure. EAI promises improvement of scalability, reliability, and flexibility by implementing loosely coupled integration solutions to realise loosely coupled IT systems. By wrongly implementing EAI on an ESB IT systems may still be tightly coupled and the issues with point-to-point connections could be recreated on the ESB. Currently there is no out-of-the-box solution to identify the integration solution where tight coupling causes these issues. The goal of this research is to investigate an approach to identify the coupling state in an Enterprise Service Bus and identify the integration solutions on an ESB which have a negative impact on the quality attributes due to tight coupling. The first step in the approach is applying a set of properties on the integration solutions to identify their coupling state. Manually identifying the coupling state is labour intensive, so it is automated by implementing a prototype with the Eclipse MoDisco framework. The second step in the approach is evaluating a trade-off between the risk of being in a certain coupling state and the efficiency loss of migrating to a less risky coupling state. With the outcome of the trade-off it can be ascertained whether or not it is beneficial to migrate to a different coupling state. The result of the approach is a list of integration solutions for which it would be beneficial to migrate to a different coupling state. This gives a concrete measure to be able to determine which integration solutions need to be improved to strive for the optimal balance between quality and the effort needed to realise quality. The approach was validated using the ESB implementation of a large European airport as a case study

Comparative Analysis of XML Schema Languages for Improved Entropy Metric

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a data set to represent data in a format that is both human readable and machine readable. For XML documents to provide understanding about data exchange between applications, XML schema documents should be validated against the schema language. Most existing schema metrics were implemented differently in Document Type Definition (DTD), XML Schema Definition (XSD) and Regular Language for Next Generation (RNG) but never compare XML schema languages on any metric. Hence this paper compared three different schema languages on Improved Entropy Metric (IEM) using the Number of Attributes (NA), Number of Equivalence Class (NEC), Frequency Occurrence of Class (FOCi) and Number of Elements (NE). The proposed metric was applied on real schemas documents data are acquired from Web Service Description Language (WSDL) and implemented in DTD, XSD and RNG. The result showed that RNG reduce complexity of class elements, reflect strong support for class elements to appear in any order which showed more reusability and flexibility traits and overall understanding of the schema documents becomes much easier because RNG can be algorithmically converted and partner with other schema languages therefore this reduces maintenance effort. Keywords— XML Schema Language, Schema Documents, Schema Metric

Framework for a business interoperability quotient measurement model

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova da Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão Industrial (MEGI)Over the last decade the context of Interoperability has been changing rapidly. It has been expanding from the largely technically focused area of Information Systems towards Business Processes and Business Semantics. However, there exists a need for more comprehensive ways to define business interoperability and enable its performance measurement as a first step towards improvement of interoperability conditions between collaborating entities. Through extensive literature reviews and analysis of European Research initiatives in this area, this dissertation presents the State of the Art in Business Interoperability. The objective of this dissertation is to develop a model that closely captures the factors that are responsible for Business Interoperability in the context of Collaborative Business Processes. This Business Interoperability Quotient Measurement Model (BIQMM), developed in this dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to capture the key elements responsible for collaboration performance. Through the quantification of the relevance of each element to the particular collaboration scenario in question, this model enables a quantitative analysis of Business Interoperability, so that an overall interoperability score can be arrived at for enhanced performance measurements.Finally, the BIQMM is applied to a business case involving Innovayt and LM Glassfiber to demonstrate its applicability to different collaboration scenarios

Survey on Additive Manufacturing, Cloud 3D Printing and Services

Cloud Manufacturing (CM) is the concept of using manufacturing resources in a service oriented way over the Internet. Recent developments in Additive Manufacturing (AM) are making it possible to utilise resources ad-hoc as replacement for traditional manufacturing resources in case of spontaneous problems in the established manufacturing processes. In order to be of use in these scenarios the AM resources must adhere to a strict principle of transparency and service composition in adherence to the Cloud Computing (CC) paradigm. With this review we provide an overview over CM, AM and relevant domains as well as present the historical development of scientific research in these fields, starting from 2002. Part of this work is also a meta-review on the domain to further detail its development and structure

Queueing Network Modeling of Human Performance and Mental Workload in Perceptual-Motor Tasks.

Integrated with the mathematical modeling approaches, this thesis uses Queuing Network-Model Human Processors (QN-MHP) as a simulation platform to quantify human performance and mental workload in four representative perceptual-motor tasks with both theoretical and practical importance: discrete perceptual-motor tasks (transcription typing and psychological refractory period) and continuous perceptual-motor tasks (visual-manual tracking and vehicle steering with secondary tasks). The properties of queuing networks (queuing/waiting in processing information, serial and parallel information processing capability, overall mathematical structure, and entity-based network arrangement) allow QN-MHP to quantify several important aspects of the perceptual-motor tasks and unify them into one cognitive architecture. In modeling the discrete perceptual-motor task in a single task situation (transcription typing), QN-MHP quantifies and unifies 32 transcription typing phenomena involving many aspects of human performance--interkey time, typing units and spans, typing errors, concurrent task performance, eye movements, and skill effects, providing an alternative way to model this basic and common activities in human-machine interaction. In quantifying the discrete perceptual-motor task in a dual-task situation (psychological refractory period), the queuing network model is able to account for various experimental findings in PRP including all of these major counterexamples of existing models with less or equal number of free parameters and no need to use task-specific lock/unlock assumptions, demonstrating its unique advantages in modeling discrete dual-task performance. In modeling the human performance and mental workload in the continuous perceptual-motor tasks (visual-manual tracking and vehicle steering), QN-MHP is used as a simulation platform and a set of equations is developed to establish the quantitative relationships between queuing networks (e.g., subnetwork s utilization and arrival rate) and P300 amplitude measured by ERP techniques and subjective mental workload measured by NASA-TLX, predicting and visualizing mental workload in real-time. Moreover, this thesis also applies QN-MHP into the design of an adaptive workload management system in vehicles and integrates QN-MHP with scheduling methods to devise multimodal in-vehicle systems. Further development of the cognitive architecture in theory and practice is also discussed.Ph.D.Industrial & Operations EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/55678/2/changxuw_1.pd