An Integrated Methodology for Creating Composed Web/Grid Services

This thesis presents an approach to design, specify, validate, verify, implement, and evaluate composed web/grid services. Web and grid services can be composed to create new services with complex behaviours. The BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) standard was created to enable the orchestration of web services, but there have also been investigation of its use for grid services. BPEL specifies the implementation of service composition but has no formal semantics; implementations are in practice checked by testing. Formal methods are used in general to define an abstract model of system behaviour that allows simulation and reasoning about properties. The approach can detect and reduce potentially costly errors at design time. CRESS (Communication Representation Employing Systematic Specification) is a domainindependent, graphical, abstract notation, and integrated toolset for developing composite web service. The original version of CRESS had automated support for formal specification in LOTOS (Language Of Temporal Ordering Specification), executing formal validation with MUSTARD (Multiple-Use Scenario Testing and Refusal Description), and implementing in BPEL4WS as the early version of BPEL standard. This thesis work has extended CRESS and its integrated tools to design, specify, validate, verify, implement, and evaluate composed web/grid services. The work has extended the CRESS notation to support a wider range of service compositions, and has applied it to grid services as a new domain. The thesis presents two new tools, CLOVE (CRESS Language-Oriented Verification Environment) and MINT (MUSTARD Interpreter), to respectively support formal verification and implementation testing. New work has also extended CRESS to automate implementation of composed services using the more recent BPEL standard WS-BPEL 2.0

Exploring ways to improve personalisation: The influence of tourist context on service perception

© 2019 Texas A and M University. The heterogeneity and dynamic nature of tourist needs requires an advanced understanding of their context. This study aims to investigate the effects of observable factors of internaland external contexts on tourist perceptions towards personalised information services performance. An exploratory approach is used to test measurement invariance and the moderating effects of personal, travel, technical and social parameters of the tourist context, when applicable. The findings demonstrate that contextual factors motivate tourists to attribute different meanings to the parameters of the service, that have already been personalised for them. Individually developed personalisation design solutions are required for each travel context

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

What do YOU know? 'Unaware academics'

The awareness of climate change has grown since the first signs of change. The amount of air travelling has also grown dramatically, both for leisure and business, due to aeroplanes providing everybody with a chance to travel faster and longer. We wanted to research if academics, at the Norwegian Hotel School in Stavanger had more knowledge about climate change and the effect traveling had on the environment. In addition, since tourism is the main subject field of the school how the issue affected the academics travel behaviour on a personal level was addresses as well. The research was conducted in a constructivist epistemological approach. 13 in depth interviews were conducted to collect the data in April/May 2013 in Stavanger. The interviews show that the academics had different views on how important climate change was as an issue for their travel behaviour. Some was in a denial stage and had no worries or plans to change. Although a few did acknowledge that it was an issue, most of our participants did not take the issue too seriously

SYMEX: A Systems Theory based Framework for Workflow Modelling and Execution

Workflow management systems enable organisations to deal with all aspects of business process management, including analysis, modelling, execution, and administration. Modelling workflow processes involves transformation of the process logic into a formal representation and it always remains a critical success factor for these systems. Workflow modelling languages provide constructs for capturing high-level descriptions of business processes, which are then have to be transformed and encoded into low-level execution semantics with the use of workflow programming languages. However, maintaining these models separately results in a number of issues, particularly when the various interdependencies between them are managed manually. This primarily creates difficulties in adaptation, in terms of identifying changes in high-level descriptions due to modifications of business conditions, and tracing the impact of those changes on the low-level execution semantics. Moreover, certain information included in the high-level descriptions is either partly encoded or omitted from the low-level execution semantics and at the same time, complicated business rules encoded at the execution level are not included in the high-level descriptions, creating major inconsistencies. The above issues result in high maintenance costs, reducing the overall efficiency and performance of workflow management systems. This thesis addresses the aforementioned problems by proposing a framework named SYMEX. SYMEX addresses the issue of integrating high and low-level descriptions in one unified format, from a Systems Theory perspective. SYMEX models have a mathematically defined formalism capable of capturing both high-level descriptions of business processes and low-level workflow execution semantics. Furthermore, SYMEX offers a concise and easy to learn and communicate set of constructs, allowing business analysts, process designers, and programmers to work on the same model, at different levels of abstraction. Apart from the theoretical framework, an XMLbased approach for the application of SYMEX is proposed, along with a constraint- based inference engine. Additionally, SYMEX models are evaluated in terms of their complexity and prove easier to read, understand, and manage than other traditional workflow modelling approaches. However, further research is required to assess the capability of the framework, with respect to modelling workflow processes in a service-oriented environment, where activities of business processes are essentially web-services exposed on the Internet

Conceptual modelling of adaptive web services based on high-level petri nets

Service technology geared by its SOA architecture and enabling Web services is rapidly gaining in maturity and acceptance. Consequently, most worldwide (private and corporate) cross-organizations are embracing this paradigm by publishing, requesting and composing their businesses and applications in the form of (web-)services. Nevertheless, to face harsh competitiveness such service oriented cross-organizational applications are increasingly pressed to be highly composite, adaptive, knowledge-intensive and very reliable. In contrast to that, Web service standards such as WSDL, WSBPEL, WS-CDL and many others offer just static, manual, purely process-centric and ad-hoc techniques to deploy such services. The main objective of this thesis consists therefore in leveraging the development of service-driven applications towards more reliability, dynamically and adaptable knowledge-intensiveness. This thesis puts forward an innovative framework based on distributed high-level Petri nets and event-driven business rules. More precisely, we developed a new variant of high-level Petri Nets formalism called Service-based Petri nets (CSrv-Nets), that exhibits the following potential characteristics. Firstly, the framework is supported by a stepwise methodology that starts with diagrammatical UML-class diagrams and business rules and leads to dynamically adaptive services specifications. Secondly, the framework soundly integrates behavioural event-driven business rules and stateful services both at the type and instance level and with an inherent distribution. Thirdly, the framework intrinsically permits validation through guided graphical animation. Fourthly, the framework explicitly separates between orchestrations for modelling rule-intensive single services and choreography for cooperating several services through their governing interactive business rules. Fifthly, the framework is based on a two-level conceptualization: (1) the modelling of any rule-centric service with CSrv-Nets; (2) the smooth upgrading of this service modelling with an adaptability-level that allows for dynamically shifting up and down any rule-centric behavior of the running business activities

E-commerce in the travel and tourism industry in Sub-Saharan Africa

The e-commerce revolution in business can help African countries expand their tourism industry. Africa, with its great wealth in wildlife and unique resorts, can benefit from the ever increasing user population of the Internet, particularly in the USA and Western Europe where most of the tourists to Africa come from (Internet World Stats, 2004). E-commerce which runs on the backbone of the Internet can help the African tourism industry break into international tourism, thus increasing the flows of the much needed foreign currency. As there was little empirical data on the e-commerce activities in the African tourism industry the researcher first and foremost examined a large number of websites in order to paint a picture of the nature and extent of the e-commerce activities in four -African countries. For comparison, websites of tourism organisations from USA and Western Europe were also examined. The surveys revealed that few of the African organisations are embracing e-commerce and that although some websites were comparable to those of their western counterparts the majority had room for considerable improvement. After examining the websites another survey was carried out to find the current progress of e-commerce adoption and usage from the perspective of the African tourism organisations. Analysis of the data collected showed that e-commerce adoption among the tourism organisations was slow. This led to more surveys being carried out to find the barriers to e-commerce among tourism organisations with information-only websites and those whose websites had limited interactive facilities. These surveys revealed that tourism organisations with information-only websites faced more barriers than those with websites which had limited interactive features. They also revealed that the most common barriers were technological and security and legal barriers. The ultimate survey involved finding out from tourism organisations with fully-fledged e-commerce websites how they overcame the e-commerce barriers. The methods used by these organisations to overcome e-commerce barriers together with recommendations made in the surveys carried out earlier were used to formulate recommendations and guidelines for those organisations intending to adopt and e-commerce. The recommendations and guidelines were tested and results showed that they are helpful and easy to follow

The impact of artificial intelligence on the nature and quality of jobs. Bruegel WORKING PAPER | ISSUE 14/2022 | 27 JULY 2022.

Artificial intelligence (AI), like any workplace technology, changes the division of labour in an organisation and the resulting design of jobs. When used as an automation technology, AI changes the bundle of tasks that make up an occupation. In this case, implications for job quality depend on the (re)composition of those tasks. When AI automates management tasks, known as algorithmic management, the consequences extend into workers’ control over their work, with impacts on their autonomy, skill use and workload. We identify four use cases of algorithmic management that impact the design and quality of jobs: algorithmic work-method instructions; algorithmic scheduling of shifts and tasks; algorithmic surveillance, evaluation and discipline; and algorithmic coordination across tasks. Reviewing the existing empirical evidence on automation and algorithmic management shows significant impact on job quality across a wide range of jobs and employment settings. While each AI use case has its own particular effects on job demands and resources, the effects tend to be more negative for the more prescriptive (as opposed to supportive) use cases. These changes in job design demonstrably affect the social and physical environment of work and put pressure on contractual employment conditions as well. As technology development is a product of power in organisations, it replicates existing power dynamics in society. Consequently, disadvantaged groups suffer more of the negative consequences of AI, risking further job-quality polarisation across socioeconomic groups. Meaningful worker participation in the adoption of workplace AI is critical to mitigate the potentially negative effects of AI adoption on workers, and can help achieve fair and transparent AI systems with human oversight. Policymakers should strengthen the role of social partners in the adoption of AI technology to protect workers’ bargaining power

Subject-Oriented Business Process Management

Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Business Information Systems; Computer Appl. in Administrative Data Processing; Management of Computing and Information System