Reliable scientific service compositions

Abstract. Distributed service oriented architectures (SOAs) are increas-ingly used by users, who are insufficiently skilled in the art of distributed system programming. A good example are computational scientists who build large-scale distributed systems using service-oriented Grid comput-ing infrastructures. Computational scientists use these infrastructure to build scientific applications, which are composed from basic Web ser-vices into larger orchestrations using workflow languages, such as the Business Process Execution Language. For these users reliability of the infrastructure is of significant importance and that has to be provided in the presence of hardware or operational failures. The primitives avail-able to achieve such reliability currently leave much to be desired by users who do not necessarily have a strong education in distributed sys-tem construction. We characterise scientific service compositions and the environment they operate in by introducing the notion of global scien-tific BPEL workflows. We outline the threats to the reliability of such workflows and discuss the limited support that available specifications and mechanisms provide to achieve reliability. Furthermore, we propose a line of research to address the identified issues by investigating auto-nomic mechanisms that assist computational scientists in building, exe-cuting and maintaining reliable workflows.

Managing at the Speed of Light: Improving Mission-Support Performance

The House and Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittees requested this study to help DOE's three major mission-support organizations improve their operations to better meet the current and future needs of the department. The passage of the Recovery Act only increased the importance of having DOE's mission-support offices working in the most effective, efficient, and timely manner as possible. While following rules and regulations is essential, the foremost task of the mission-support offices is to support the department's mission, i.e., the programs that DOE is implementing, whether in Washington D.C. or in the field. As a result, the Panel offered specific recommendations to strengthen the mission-focus and improve the management of each of the following support functions based on five "management mandates":- Strategic Vision- Leadership- Mission and Customer Service Orientation- Tactical Implementation- Agility/AdaptabilityKey FindingsThe Panel made several recommendations in each of the functional areas examined and some overarching recommendations for the corporate management of the mission-support offices that they believed would result in significant improvements to DOE's mission-support operations. The Panel believed that adopting these recommendations will not only make DOE a better functioning organization, but that most of them are essential if DOE is to put its very large allocation of Recovery Act funding to its intended uses as quickly as possible

Exploring a framework for advanced electronic business transactions

With the emergence of service-oriented computing technology, companies embrace new ways of carrying out business transactions electronically. Since the parties involved in an electronic business transaction (eBT) manage a heterogeneous information-systems infrastructure within their organizational domains, the collaboration complexity is considerable and safeguarding an interorganizational collaboration with an eBT is difficult, but of high significance. This paper describes a conceptual framework that pays attention to the complexities of an eBT and its differentiating characteristics that go further than traditional database transactions. Since the eBT is a framework that comprises separate levels, pre-existing transaction concepts are explored for populating the respective levels. To show the feasibility of the described eBT framework, industry initiatives that are aspiring to become business-transaction standards, are checked for eBT compatible characteristics. Since realizing an eBT framework raises many tricky issues, the paper maps out important research areas that require scientific attention. Essentially, it is required to investigate how the business semantics influences the nature of an eBT throughout its lifecycle.Peer reviewe

The emerging role of banks in e-commerce

How is the banking industry responding to the rapid development of on-line commerce? Evidence suggests that many banks are beginning to deliver credit and deposit products electronically. In addition, some large banks are developing products designed exclusively for e-commerce. As banks venture into the electronic arena, however, they are finding that new opportunities bring new operational and strategic risks.Electronic commerce ; Banks and banking - Customer services

A TxQoS-aware business transaction framework

In this thesis, we propose a transaction framework to provide comprehensive and flexible transaction support for contract-driven, service-oriented business processes. The research follows the research method outlined below. Initially, a thorough investigation on current state of affairs was made. Afterwards, we carried out a case study, which we utilized to identify the problems that are likely to occur during the execution of business processes. As the result of the solution design, the concepts, scenarios, life cycles, reference architectures, and mechanisms were proposed to address the problems. The design took place on the conceptual level, while the coding/programming and implementation is out of the scope of this thesis. The business-oriented solution design allows for transaction qualities to be specified and guaranteed by a contractual approach named as TxQoS (Transactional Quality of Service). The technology-oriented design enables flexible composition of ATCs (Abstract Transaction Constructs) as a transaction schema to support the execution of complex processes. As the last step of research, we validated the feasibility of our design by a utility study conducted in a large telecom project, which has complex processes that are service-oriented and contract-driven. Finally, we discussed the contributions and limitations of the research. The main contribution of the thesis is the BTF (Business Transaction Framework) that addresses process execution reliability. The TxQoS approach enables the specification of transaction qualities in terms of FIAT (Fluency, Interference, Alternation, Transparency) properties. This businessfriendly approach allows the providers and users to agree on transaction qualities before process execution time. The building blocks of the proposed framework, ATCs, are reusable and configurable templates, and are abstracted and generalized from existing transaction models. The various transaction requirements of sub-processes and process chunks can be represented by corresponding ATCs, which allow for a flexible composition. Integrated, the TxQoS and ATC approaches work together to form a TxQoS-aware business transaction framework

A Calculus for Orchestration of Web Services

Service-oriented computing, an emerging paradigm for distributed computing based on the use of services, is calling for the development of tools and techniques to build safe and trustworthy systems, and to analyse their behaviour. Therefore, many researchers have proposed to use process calculi, a cornerstone of current foundational research on specification and analysis of concurrent, reactive, and distributed systems. In this paper, we follow this approach and introduce CWS, a process calculus expressly designed for specifying and combining service-oriented applications, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. We show that CWS can model all the phases of the life cycle of service-oriented applications, such as publication, discovery, negotiation, orchestration, deployment, reconfiguration and execution. We illustrate the specification style that CWS supports by means of a large case study from the automotive domain and a number of more specific examples drawn from it