Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems

The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Innovation in manufacturing through digital technologies and applications: Thoughts and Reflections on Industry 4.0

The rapid pace of developments in digital technologies offers many opportunities to increase the efficiency, flexibility and sophistication of manufacturing processes; including the potential for easier customisation, lower volumes and rapid changeover of products within the same manufacturing cell or line. A number of initiatives on this theme have been proposed around the world to support national industries under names such as Industry 4.0 (Industrie 4.0 in Germany, Made-in-China in China and Made Smarter in the UK). This book presents an overview of the state of art and upcoming developments in digital technologies pertaining to manufacturing. The starting point is an introduction on Industry 4.0 and its potential for enhancing the manufacturing process. Later on moving to the design of smart (that is digitally driven) business processes which are going to rely on sensing of all relevant parameters, gathering, storing and processing the data from these sensors, using computing power and intelligence at the most appropriate points in the digital workflow including application of edge computing and parallel processing. A key component of this workflow is the application of Artificial Intelligence and particularly techniques in Machine Learning to derive actionable information from this data; be it real-time automated responses such as actuating transducers or informing human operators to follow specified standard operating procedures or providing management data for operational and strategic planning. Further consideration also needs to be given to the properties and behaviours of particular machines that are controlled and materials that are transformed during the manufacturing process and this is sometimes referred to as Operational Technology (OT) as opposed to IT. The digital capture of these properties and behaviours can then be used to define so-called Cyber Physical Systems. Given the power of these digital technologies it is of paramount importance that they operate safely and are not vulnerable to malicious interference. Industry 4.0 brings unprecedented cybersecurity challenges to manufacturing and the overall industrial sector and the case is made here that new codes of practice are needed for the combined Information Technology and Operational Technology worlds, but with a framework that should be native to Industry 4.0. Current computing technologies are also able to go in other directions than supporting the digital ‘sense to action’ process described above. One of these is to use digital technologies to enhance the ability of the human operators who are still essential within the manufacturing process. One such technology, that has recently become accessible for widespread adoption, is Augmented Reality, providing operators with real-time additional information in situ with the machines that they interact with in their workspace in a hands-free mode. Finally, two linked chapters discuss the specific application of digital technologies to High Pressure Die Casting (HDPC) of Magnesium components. Optimizing the HPDC process is a key task for increasing productivity and reducing defective parts and the first chapter provides an overview of the HPDC process with attention to the most common defects and their sources. It does this by first looking at real-time process control mechanisms, understanding the various process variables and assessing their impact on the end product quality. This understanding drives the choice of sensing methods and the associated smart digital workflow to allow real-time control and mitigation of variation in the identified variables. Also, data from this workflow can be captured and used for the design of optimised dies and associated processes

Service-oriented architecture for device lifecycle support in industrial automation

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores Especialidade: Robótica e Manufactura IntegradaThis thesis addresses the device lifecycle support thematic in the scope of service oriented industrial automation domain. This domain is known for its plethora of heterogeneous equipment encompassing distinct functions, form factors, network interfaces, or I/O specifications supported by dissimilar software and hardware platforms. There is then an evident and crescent need to take every device into account and improve the agility performance during setup, control, management, monitoring and diagnosis phases. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is currently a widely endorsed approach for both business and enterprise systems integration. SOA concepts and technology are continuously spreading along the layers of the enterprise organization envisioning a unified interoperability solution. SOA promotes discoverability, loose coupling, abstraction, autonomy and composition of services relying on open web standards – features that can provide an important contribution to the industrial automation domain. The present work seized industrial automation device level requirements, constraints and needs to determine how and where can SOA be employed to solve some of the existent difficulties. Supported by these outcomes, a reference architecture shaped by distributed, adaptive and composable modules is proposed. This architecture will assist and ease the role of systems integrators during reengineering-related interventions throughout system lifecycle. In a converging direction, the present work also proposes a serviceoriented device model to support previous architecture vision and goals by including embedded added-value in terms of service-oriented peer-to-peer discovery and identification, configuration, management, as well as agile customization of device resources. In this context, the implementation and validation work proved not simply the feasibility and fitness of the proposed solution to two distinct test-benches but also its relevance to the expanding domain of SOA applications to support device lifecycle in the industrial automation domain

Proceedings of the First PhD Symposium on Sustainable Ultrascale Computing Systems (NESUS PhD 2016)

Proceedings of the First PhD Symposium on Sustainable Ultrascale Computing Systems (NESUS PhD 2016) Timisoara, Romania. February 8-11, 2016.The PhD Symposium was a very good opportunity for the young researchers to share information and knowledge, to present their current research, and to discuss topics with other students in order to look for synergies and common research topics. The idea was very successful and the assessment made by the PhD Student was very good. It also helped to achieve one of the major goals of the NESUS Action: to establish an open European research network targeting sustainable solutions for ultrascale computing aiming at cross fertilization among HPC, large scale distributed systems, and big data management, training, contributing to glue disparate researchers working across different areas and provide a meeting ground for researchers in these separate areas to exchange ideas, to identify synergies, and to pursue common activities in research topics such as sustainable software solutions (applications and system software stack), data management, energy efficiency, and resilience.European Cooperation in Science and Technology. COS