Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them. In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00

Reforming institutions for service delivery : a framework for development assistance with an application to the health, nutrition, and population portfolio

World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (report no. 17300) argued that institutions-the rules of the game that govern production and exchange-shape a country's prospects for sustained market-led growth. The author provides an institutional framework for service delivery, an essential component of state capability. He applies this framework to an evaluation of Bank support for service delivery in the health, nutrition, and population sector. He argues for greater institutional pluralism in the ways the World Bank does business in infrastructure, rural, and social sectors, but cautions against making efficient service delivery an issue of"state versus market."The Bank and its clients face the challenge of fitting menus of"better practice"delivery options to maps of institutional reality. In the health, nutrition, and population sector, the Bank should (1) unbundle and categorize essential health and clinical services according to goods characteristics and (2) integrate country knowledge into operations through upstream assessments of state, political, and social institutions. Overall, the Bank has made progress toward a"goods characteristics"approach, particularly in infrastructure and some rural services-but it has lagged in the social sectors, where support remains largely technocratic. Cross-sector comparisons reveal four generations of support for service delivery. First-generation support focused mainly on physical implementation of projects. Second-generation interventions, which characterized most social service interventions, focused on improving the financial and organizational viability of implementing agencies through technical assistance. Third-generation support was marked by significant unbundling of service delivery activities and clearer links to goods characteristics. In irrigation (1982-94), telecommunications (1980s-present), and transport (1990s), the one-size-fits-all monopoly model gave way to a range of options based on greater private sector and citizen participation in delivery. These included leases, concessions, outsourcing, and contracting as well as building, operating, transfer, and turnover schemes. Fourth-generation interventions are works-in-progress and represent efforts to develop new governance arrangements that systematically combine competition, voice, and hierarchy in the design, delivery, and monitoring of Bank projects. The Bank has a poor track record building country knowledge of institutional endowments that affect service delivery. The author identifies concepts and tools valuable for sector specialists'operations.Enterprise Development&Reform,Public Health Promotion,Health Economics&Finance,Decentralization,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Governance Indicators,Poverty Assessment,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Economics&Finance

Human machine interface performance and instrumentation for high availability systems

Trabalho de projecto de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Sistemas de Informação), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2010Air Traffic Control (ATC) provides services whose objective is to manage aircrafts to ensure safely orderly and expeditious flows of traffic. The LISATM system has a number of Controller Working Positions equipped with surveillance display applications, the Operator Display System (ODS). Due to redundancy requirements, there are two equivalent applications developed with different technologies. This project focused on the Air Situation Display System (ASD), na application which provides a surveillance display with user-interaction capability and is developed in Java technology. The application integrates the Radar Fallback keeping the looks and feels from the ODS System, only being developed in a different programming language. Thus the present work focused on monitoring the performance of high availability Real-Time Human-Machine Interface applications. Recommendations were endorsed for quantifiable performance, being these activities accompanied by a corresponding demonstration of results suitability for the intended context. Modules were defined in order to instrument applications Human-Machine Interface High Performance and High Availability (HMI-HPHA) with features necessary and sufficient for the pursuit of Real- Time performance analysis. These modules were developed using JAVA technology using the Java Management eXtensions (JMX), to manage the created agents. All the monitoring services run in real-time so it can inform the managers of changes of the application state as soon as it happens. This implies that the information provided needs to be not only concise but also adequate to the context.O Controle de Tráfego Aéreo (ATC) presta serviços, cujo objectivo é direccionar o fluxo de aeronaves para garantir a ordem, rapidez e segurança do tráfego, bem como para dar informações aos pilotos. O sistema LISATM tem um número de postos de trabalho, para os controladores, equipado com aplicações de vigilância radar (Display System Operator - ODS). Devido a requisitos de redundância, existem duas aplicações equivalentes desenvolvidas com diferentes tecnologias. Este projecto focou-se no Air Display System (ASD). Aplicação que fornece vigilância radar com capacidade de interacção com o utilizador, sendo desenvolvido com tecnologia Java. A aplicação integra o Radar Fallback, mantendo o aspecto e mecânica de utilização igual ao Sistema ODS, com a diferença a residir na linguagem de programação. O foco do presente projecto incidiu sobre o desempenho de aplicações de Interface Homem-Máquina em Tempo-Real de elevada disponibilidade. Desta forma foram elaboradas propostas de recomendações de desempenho quantificáveis a serem incorporadas no ciclo de desenvolvimento de aplicações HMI-HPHA (Human-Machine Interface High Performance and High Availability). Estas foram acompanhadas da correspondente demonstração da adequabilidade ao contexto pretendido. Para isso foram definidos e desenvolvidos módulos de forma a instrumentar a aplicação HMIHPHA com as funcionalidades necessárias e suficientes para a persecução da análise de desempenho. Estes módulos foram desenvolvidos com recurso à tecnologia JAVA e às ferramentas de automatização dos mesmos, usando Java Management eXtensions (JMX) para gerir os agentes desenvolvidos. Todos os serviços de monitoria foram executados em Tempo-Real de modo a informar os gestores aquando de alguma mudança de estado da aplicação. Estas informações necessitam não só de ser concisas, mas também adequadas ao contexto

India: Urban Finance and Governance Review - Volume I Executive Summary and Main Report

The report makes an in depth analysis of what to expect of future urban population growth in cities across India. Cities play a critical role in India\u27s development. While its one billion-plus population is predominantly rural, over 300 million people live in urban areas. One-third of this population lives in 35 urban agglomerations or cities exceeding one million. Cities\u27 governments are responsible for delivering various public services, yet severe infrastructures shortages in water supply and sanitation, roads, transportation, housing and waste management, and inefficient management have resulted in poor quality services. These inadequate services and worsening environmental conditions affect the poor. Between 1950 and 2000 India\u27s urban population increased from 62 to 288 million. Already strained to provide services and quality of life to existing urban residents, cities will face tremendous challenges in expanding existing infrastructure and avoiding deterioration of living standards due to congestion, pollution, and lack of basic services. A doubling of the population over 30 years means that by 2030 there will be a second Mumbai, a second Calcutta, and a second Bangalore that must be fed, supplied with water, sanitation, electricity, give public and private transportation options; and where garbage must be disposed of. The report concludes by laying out a series of state and local actions over the short-medium and long-term to enhance fiscal sustainability and strengthening institutional capacity building of state and local governments

Vehicle as a Service (VaaS): Leverage Vehicles to Build Service Networks and Capabilities for Smart Cities

Smart cities demand resources for rich immersive sensing, ubiquitous communications, powerful computing, large storage, and high intelligence (SCCSI) to support various kinds of applications, such as public safety, connected and autonomous driving, smart and connected health, and smart living. At the same time, it is widely recognized that vehicles such as autonomous cars, equipped with significantly powerful SCCSI capabilities, will become ubiquitous in future smart cities. By observing the convergence of these two trends, this article advocates the use of vehicles to build a cost-effective service network, called the Vehicle as a Service (VaaS) paradigm, where vehicles empowered with SCCSI capability form a web of mobile servers and communicators to provide SCCSI services in smart cities. Towards this direction, we first examine the potential use cases in smart cities and possible upgrades required for the transition from traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to VaaS. Then, we will introduce the system architecture of the VaaS paradigm and discuss how it can provide SCCSI services in future smart cities, respectively. At last, we identify the open problems of this paradigm and future research directions, including architectural design, service provisioning, incentive design, and security & privacy. We expect that this paper paves the way towards developing a cost-effective and sustainable approach for building smart cities.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure

The path to sustainable mobility systems - 8 theses on a digital mobility transition : a study commissioned by Huawei Technologies Germany GmbH

The transport sector accounts for 20 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions in Germany and it is therefore key to success for German climate policy. At present, however, there is no other sector with a wider gap in missing the trajectory to climate neutrality. The present study, conducted on behalf of Huawei within the project "Shaping the Digital Transformation - Digital Solution Systems for the Sustainability Transition", points out new pathways towards a sustainable and climate friendly transition of the transport sector. The report specifies concrete options to follow up on the ambitious goals of the new coalition agreement to foster clean and digital mobility solutions. The authors refined eight theses on how digitalisation can foster sustainable mobility solutions and how to shape a supporting policy framework, which is aligning the financial and regulatory guardrails for ramping up a sustainable mobility system while gradually phasing down the usage of private cars

Emerging Informatics

The book on emerging informatics brings together the new concepts and applications that will help define and outline problem solving methods and features in designing business and human systems. It covers international aspects of information systems design in which many relevant technologies are introduced for the welfare of human and business systems. This initiative can be viewed as an emergent area of informatics that helps better conceptualise and design new world-class solutions. The book provides four flexible sections that accommodate total of fourteen chapters. The section specifies learning contexts in emerging fields. Each chapter presents a clear basis through the problem conception and its applicable technological solutions. I hope this will help further exploration of knowledge in the informatics discipline

Creating an Agent Based Framework to Maximize Information Utility

With increased reliance on communications to conduct military operations, information centric network management becomes vital. A Defense department study of information management for net-centric operations lists the need for tools for information triage (based on relevance, priority, and quality) to counter information overload, semi-automated mechanisms for assessment of quality and relevance of information, and advances to enhance cognition and information understanding in the context of missions [30]. Maximizing information utility to match mission objectives is a complex problem that requires a comprehensive solution in information classification, in scheduling, in resource allocation, and in QoS support. Of these research areas, the resource allocation mechanism provides a framework to build the entire solution. Through an agent based mindset, the lessons of robot control architecture are applied to the network domain. The task of managing information flows is achieved with a hybrid reactive architecture. By demonstration, the reactive agent responds to the observed state of the network through the Unified Behavior Framework (UBF). As information flows relay through the network, agents in the network nodes limit resource contention to improve average utility and create a network with smarter bandwidth utilization. While this is an important result for information maximization, the agent based framework may have broader applications for managing communication networks

User data dissemination concepts for earth resources

Domestic data dissemination networks for earth-resources data in the 1985-1995 time frame were evaluated. The following topics were addressed: (1) earth-resources data sources and expected data volumes, (2) future user demand in terms of data volume and timeliness, (3) space-to-space and earth point-to-point transmission link requirements and implementation, (4) preprocessing requirements and implementation, (5) network costs, and (6) technological development to support this implementation. This study was parametric in that the data input (supply) was varied by a factor of about fifteen while the user request (demand) was varied by a factor of about nineteen. Correspondingly, the time from observation to delivery to the user was varied. This parametric evaluation was performed by a computer simulation that was based on network alternatives and resulted in preliminary transmission and preprocessing requirements. The earth-resource data sources considered were: shuttle sorties, synchronous satellites (e.g., SEOS), aircraft, and satellites in polar orbits