A time efficient and accurate retrieval of range aggregate queries using fuzzy clustering means (FCM) approach

Massive growth in the big data makes difficult to analyse and retrieve the useful information from the set of available data’s. Statistical analysis: Existing approaches cannot guarantee an efficient retrieval of data from the database. In the existing work stratified sampling is used to partition the tables in terms of static variables. However k means clustering algorithm cannot guarantees an efficient retrieval where the choosing centroid in the large volume of data would be difficult. And less knowledge about the static variable might leads to the less efficient partitioning of tables. Findings: This problem is overcome in the proposed methodology by introducing the FCM clustering instead of k means clustering which can cluster the large volume of data which are similar in nature. Stratification problem is overcome by introducing the post stratification approach which will leads to efficient selection of static variable. Improvements: This methodology leads to an efficient retrieval process in terms of user query within less time and more accuracy

Multi-level Autonomic Business Process Management

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38484-4_14Nowadays, business processes are becoming increasingly complex and heterogeneous. Autonomic Computing principles can reduce this complexity by autonomously managing the software systems and the running processes, their states and evolution. Business Processes that are able to be self-managed are referred to as Autonomic Business Processes (ABP). However, a key challenge is to keep the models of such ABP understandable and expressive in increasingly complex scenarios. This paper discusses the design aspects of an autonomic business process management system able to self-manage processes based on operational adaptation. The goal is to minimize human intervention during the process definition and execution phases. This novel approach, named MABUP, provides four well-defined levels of abstraction to express business and operational knowledge and to guide the management activity; namely, Organizational Level, Technological Level, Operational Level and Service Level. A real example is used to illustrate our proposal.Research supported by CAPES, CNPQ and Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.Oliveira, K.; Castro, J.; España Cubillo, S.; Pastor López, O. (2013). Multi-level Autonomic Business Process Management. En Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. Springer. 184-198. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-38484-4_14S184198España, S., González, A., Pastor, Ó.: Communication Analysis: A Requirements Engineering Method for Information Systems. In: van Eck, P., Gordijn, J., Wieringa, R. (eds.) CAiSE 2009. LNCS, vol. 5565, pp. 530–545. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)Ganek, A.G., Corbi, T.A.: The dawning of the autonomic computing era. IBM Systems Journal 42(1), 5–18 (2003)Gonzalez, A., et al.: Unity criteria for Business Process Modelling. In: Third International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science, RCIS 2009, pp. 155–164 (2009)Greenwood, D., Rimassa, G.: Autonomic Goal-Oriented Business Process Management. Management, 43 (2007)Haupt, T., et al.: Autonomic execution of computational workflows. In: 2011 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, FedCSIS, pp. 965–972 (2011)Kephart, J.O., Chess, D.M.: The vision of autonomic computing. IEEE (2003)Lee, K., et al.: Workflow adaptation as an autonomic computing problem. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science, New York, NY, USA, pp. 29–34 (2007)Mosincat, A., Binder, W.: Transparent Runtime Adaptability for BPEL Processes. In: Bouguettaya, A., Krueger, I., Margaria, T. (eds.) ICSOC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5364, pp. 241–255. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Oliveira, K., et al.: Towards Autonomic Business Process Models. In: International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge, SEKE 2012, San Francisco, California, USA (2012)Rahman, M., et al.: A taxonomy and survey on autonomic management of applications in grid computing environments. Concurr. Comput.: Pract. Exper. 23(16), 1990–2019 (2011)Reijers, H.A., Mendling, J.: Modularity in process models: Review and effects. In: Dumas, M., Reichert, M., Shan, M.-C. (eds.) BPM 2008. LNCS, vol. 5240, pp. 20–35. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Rodrigues Nt., J.A., Monteiro Jr., P.C.L., de O. Sampaio, J., de Souza, J.M., Zimbrão, G.: Autonomic Business Processes Scalable Architecture. In: ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Benatallah, B., Paik, H.-Y. (eds.) BPM Workshops 2007. LNCS, vol. 4928, pp. 78–83. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Strohmaier, M., Yu, E.: Towards autonomic workflow management systems. ACM Press (2006)Terres, L.D., et al.: Selection of Business Process for Autonomic Automation. In: 2010 14th IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, pp. 237–246 (October 2010)Tretola, G., Zimeo, E.: Autonomic internet-scale workflows. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Monitoring, Adaptation and Beyond, New York, NY, USA, pp. 48–56 (2010)Vedam, H., Venkatasubramanian, V.: A wavelet theory-based adaptive trend analysis system for process monitoring and diagnosis. In: Proceedings of the 1997 American Control Conference, vol. 1, pp. 309–313 (June 1997)Wang, Y., Mylopoulos, J.: Self-Repair through Reconfiguration: A Requirements Engineering Approach. In: 2009 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pp. 257–268 (November 2009)Yu, T., Lin, K.: Adaptive algorithms for finding replacement services in autonomic distributed business processes. In: Proceedings Autonomous Decentralized Systems, ISADS 2005, pp. 427–434 (2005

TECHNOLOGICAL ENABLERS FOR PREVENTING SERVICE FAILURE WITH E-COMMERCE WEBSITES

Problems with digital services still occur at times, even for the most reliable services. Considering the consequences of these failures and their effects on the customer’s overall service quality perception and satisfaction, preventing these failures, and delivering reliable digital services, is a critical business competency. In addition, the fact that digital services are often co-produced by both service providers and their customers, shows the increasing role of both service providers and customers in preventing digital service failures (or service problems). In this study, we view the concept of digital service failure from the perspective of expectation-conformation theory, develop an Archimate architecture model and use it to design a typology of technological enablers (technologies and technological approaches) that can be used by businesses and their customers to prevent service failures at different stages of online purchase via e-commerce websites. The typology is relevant and useful for management information systems (MIS) academics and practitioners, particularly for information technology and digital service management researchers and the practitioner community

Model aware execution of composite web services

In the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) services are computational elements that are published, discovered, consumed and aggregated across platform and organizational borders. The most commonly used technology to achieve SOA are Web Services (WSs). This is due to standardization process (WSDL, SOAP, UDDI standards) and a wide range of available infrastructure and tools. A very interesting aspect of WSs is their composeability. WSs can be easily aggregated into complex workflows, called Composite Web Services (CWSs). These compositions of services enable further reuse and in this way new, even more complex, systems are built.Although there are many languages to specify or implement workflows, in the service-oriented systems BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is widely accepted. With this language WSs are orchestrated and then executed with specialized engines (like ActiveBPEL). While being very popular, BPEL has certain limitations in monitoring and optimizing executions of CWSs. It is very hard with this language to adapt CWSs to changes in the performance of used WSs, and also to select the optimal way to execute a CWS. To overcome the limitations of BPEL, I present a model-aware approach to execute CWSs. To achieve the model awareness the Coloured Petri Nets (CPN) formalism is considered as the basis of the execution of CWSs. This is different than other works in using formal methods in CWSs, which are restricted to purposes like verification or checking of correctness. Here the formal and unambiguous notation of the CPN is used to model, analyze, execute and monitor CWSs. Furthermore this approach to execute CWSs, which is based on the CPN formalism, is implemented in the model-aware middleware. It is also demonstrated how the middleware improves the performance and reliability of CWSs

Quality-of-Service-Aware Service Selection in Mobile Environments

The last decade is characterized by the rise of mobile technologies (UMTS, LTE, WLAN, Bluetooth, SMS, etc.) and devices (notebooks, tablets, mobile phones, smart watches, etc.). In this rise, mobiles phones have played a crucial role because they paved the way for mobile pervasion among the public. In addition, this development has also led to a rapid growth of the mobile service/application market (Statista 2017b). As a consequence, users of mobile devices nowadays find themselves in a mobile environment, with (almost) unlimited access to information and services from anywhere through the Internet, and can connect to other people at any time (cf. Deng et al. 2016; Newman 2015). Additionally, modern mobile devices offer the opportunity to select the services or information that best fit to a user’s current context. In this regard, mobile information services support users in retrieving context and non-context information, such as about the current traffic situation, public transport options, and flight connections, as well as about real-world entities, such as sights, museums, and restaurants (cf. Deng et al. 2016; Heinrich and Lewerenz 2015; Ventola 2014). An example of the application of mobile information services is several users planning a joint city day trip. Here, the users could utilize information retrieved about real-world entities for their planning. Such a trip constitutes a process with multiple participating users and may encompass actions such as visiting a museum and having lunch. For each action, mobile information services (e.g., Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google Places) can help locate available alternatives that differ only in attributes such as price, average length of stay (i.e., duration), or recommendations published by previous visitors. In addition, context information (e.g., business hours, distance) can be used to more effectively support the users in their decisions. Moreover, because multiple users are participating in the same trip, some users want to or must conduct certain actions together. However, decision-makers (e.g., mobile users) attempting to determine the optimal solution for such processes – meaning the best alternative for each action and each participating user – are confronted with several challenges, as shown by means of the city trip example: First, each user most likely has his or her own preferences and requirements regarding attributes such as price and duration, which all must be considered. Furthermore, for each action of the day trip, a huge number of alternatives probably exist. Thus, users might face difficulties selecting the optimal alternatives because of an information overload problem (Zhang et al. 2009). Second, taking multiple users into account may require the coordination of their actions because of potential dependencies among different users’ tours, which, for example, is the case when users prefer to conduct certain actions together. This turns the almost sophisticated decision problem at hand into a problem of high complexity. The problem complexity is increased further when considering context information, because this causes dependencies among different actions of a user that must be taken into account. For instance, the distance to cover by a user to reach a certain restaurant depends on the location of the previously visited museum. In conclusion, it might be impossible for a user to determine an optimal city trip tour for all users, making decision support by an information system necessary. Because the available alternatives for each action of the process can be denoted as (information) service objects (cf. Dannewitz et al. 2008; Heinrich and Lewerenz 2015; Hinkelmann et al. 2013), the decision problem at hand is a Quality-of-Service (QoS)-aware service selection problem. This thesis proposes novel concepts and optimization approaches for QoS-aware service selection regarding processes with multiple users and context information, focusing on scenarios in mobile environments. In this respect, the developed multi user context-aware service selection approaches are able to deal with dependencies among different users’ service compositions, which result from the consideration of multiple users, as well as dependencies within a user’s service composition, which result from the consideration of context information. Consequently, these approaches provide suitable support for decision-makers, such as mobile users

Digital service problems: Prevention and user persistence in solving them

The service sector is an important and consistently growing sector of the world economy. It is estimated that the sector will make up two thirds of the total world Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Information Technology (IT) has been an important contributor to the fast and high grow of the sector by increasingly digitising the production, delivery and use of services. IT has enabled multiple parties, including user support service staff, employees (internal IT users) and customers (external IT users) of an organisation, to engage in the production, delivery and use of digital services. Consequently, both users and user support service staff of the organisations have an increased responsibility to both prevent IT problems from occurring, and solve them when they do occur. Problems with ITs can occur at different stages of a digital service value chain (i.e. sequential steps/stages required to produce and deliver a digital service), and may lead to a service failure in the user’s mind. Examples include problems with a self-check-out machine at a library, problems with an online registration system that occurs for university students, or a website that does not include an online payment functionality a user expects. Numerous studies in both Information Systems (IS) and service literature have focused on the role of the service staff in both preventing and solving digital service failures, but few have considered the user’s role in these. This thesis includes four original articles. The first article emphasises that prevention from digital service failures must be considered before establishing effective approaches to solving the problems. The article presents a typology of technologies and technological approaches that customers and businesses can use to support prevention from these failures. The rest of the articles consider situations where an IT-related service problem has occurred, and address the user’s behaviour of persistence in solving their own IT problem. From the user’s perspective, their persistence in solving the problem contributes to achieving a satisfactory outcome, and from the organisational perspective, such an outcome is important for maintaining their user satisfaction. User persistence is important both when trying to solve an IT problem alone, and when using support services. Studying user persistence can help organisations to design their user support services in a way that encourages user persistence, resolves the problems more efficiently and cheaply; and maintains their user satisfaction. The study of user persistence included the use of focus groups for data collection purposes. Surprisingly, qualitative methodology literature has little to say on analytical approaches to focus group data – particularly interactive participant data. Therefore, a focus group analysis framework was designed (presented in the second article) and was used in the analysis phase of the user persistence study. The third article uses the framework in its analysis phase, and (a) presents a conceptual clarification of user persistence in IT problem solving, (b) identifies the factors that contribute to user persistence, (c) develops a theory to explain that why a user decides to persist with a method of solving IT problems, and (d) develops a theory to explain that why the user decides to persist with the overall process (collective methods) of solving the problem. The fourth article presents the results of evaluating the robustness of the two theories and shows that the two theories are confirmed. The thesis concludes with the ‘contributions and conclusion’ chapter where it presents a summary of the contributions of the four articles to IS theory, methodology and practice