Building and Evaluating a SOA-Based Model for Purchase Order Management in E-Commerce System

E-Commerce systems are characterized by complex Web applications that use different operating systems and different technologies. One of the most popular E-Commerce applications is conducted between businesses (B2B) and between a business and a consumer (B2C) is Purchase Order Management. It consists of components such as Sales, Shipping and Billing. In many cases nowadays Purchase Order Management components use integration approaches that lack interoperability and manageability resulting in customer dissatisfaction, time consumption and excessive costs. In this research, we build a model to overcome shortcomings of current Purchase Order Management system. The model is based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and Web services. They offer many advantages and help achieve the goals of interoperability and manageability. The proposed model is evaluated by using a scenario based software architecture method and proves that it achieves the quality attributes set as goals for the model which are interoperability and manageability. A case study of the model is implemented as a prove-of-concept. A specific usage scenario for the model is discussed and further proves that the model accomplishes its functionality and quality attributes

GUISET: A CONCEPTUAL DESIGN OF A GRID-ENABLED PORTAL FOR E-COMMERCE ON-DEMAND SERVICES

Conventional grid-enabled portal designs have been largely influenced by the usual functional requirements such as security requirements, grid resource requirements and job management requirements. However, the pay-as-you-use service provisioning model of utility computing platforms mean that additional requirements must be considered in order to realize effective grid-enabled portals design for such platforms. This work investigates those relevant additional requirements that must be considered for the design of grid-enabled portals for utility computing contexts. Based on a thorough review of literature, we identified a number of those relevant additional requirements, and developed a grid-enabled portal prototype for the Grid-based Utility Infrastructure for SMME-enabling Technology (GUISET) initiative – a utility computing platform. The GUISET portal was designed to cater for both the traditional grid requirements and some of the relevant additional requirements for utility computing contexts. The result of the evaluation of the GUISET portal prototype using a set of benchmark requirements (standards) revealed that it fulfilled the minimum requirements to be suitable for the utility context

Workload characterization and customer interaction at e-commerce web servers

Electronic commerce servers have a significant presence in today's Internet. Corporations want to maintain high availability, sufficient capacity, and satisfactory performance for their E-commerce Web systems, and want to provide satisfactory services to customers. Workload characterization and the analysis of customers' interactions with Web sites are the bases upon which to analyze server performance, plan system capacity, manage system resources, and personalize services at the Web site. To date, little empirical evidence has been discovered that identifies the characteristics for Web workloads of E-commerce systems and the behaviours of customers. This thesis analyzes the Web access logs at public Web sites for three organizations: a car rental company, an IT company, and the Computer Science department of the University of Saskatchewan. In these case studies, the characteristics of Web workloads are explored at the request level, functionlevel, resource level, and session level; customers' interactions with Web sites are analyzed by identifying and characterizing session groups. The main E-commerce Web workload characteristics and performance implications are: i) The requests for dynamic Web objects are an important part of the workload. These requests should be characterized separately since the system processes them differently; ii) Some popular image files, which are embedded in the same Web page, are always requested together. If these files are requested and sent in a bundle, a system will greatly reduce the overheads in processing requests for these files; iii) The percentage of requests for each Web page category tends to be stable in the workload when the time scale is large enough. This observation is helpful in forecasting workload composition; iv) the Secure Socket Layer protocol (SSL) is heavily used and most Web objects are either requested primarily through SSL or primarily not through SSL; and v) Session groups of different characteristics are identified for all logs. The analysis of session groups may be helpful in improving system performance, maximizing revenue throughput of the system, providing better services to customers, and managing and planning system resources. A hybrid clustering algorithm, which is a combination of the minimum spanning tree method and k-means clustering algorithm, is proposed to identify session clusters. Session clusters obtained using the three session representations Pages Requested, Navigation Pattern, and Resource Usage are similar enough so that it is possible to use different session representations interchangeably to produce similar groupings. The grouping based on one session representation is believed to be sufficient to answer questions in server performance, resource management, capacity planning and Web site personalization, which previously would have required multiple different groupings. Grouping by Pages Requested is recommended since it is the simplest and data on Web pages requested is relatively easy to obtain in HTTP logs

ACTAS: Adaptive Composition and Trading with Agents for Services

Mainly in business domains, the vision of gaining flexible, adaptive service environments is based on the standardization and practical proliferation of (Semantic) Web Services, ontologies, and agents. The standards of Web Services and their Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) became the standard paradigm for software component integration. Dynamic changes and the permanently increasing amount of available e-services of different domains are a challenge of Service Discovery and Composition. Mediation between different approaches and expert knowledge is often necessary for the composition of services of different domains. Semantic enhancements, Autonomic Service Discovery, and the research for more holistic concepts for the classification of e-services are current attempts of overcoming this challenge, in order to reach the ultimate goal of Autonomic SOC

Mobile e-commerce: study and model generation, implementation issues and analysis

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Telecommunication Economics

This book constitutes a collaborative and selected documentation of the scientific outcome of the European COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel "A Telecommunications Economics COST Network" which run from October 2007 to October 2011. Involving experts from around 20 European countries, the goal of Econ@Tel was to develop a strategic research and training network among key people and organizations in order to enhance Europe's competence in the field of telecommunications economics. Reflecting the organization of the COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel in working groups the following four major research areas are addressed: - evolution and regulation of communication ecosystems; - social and policy implications of communication technologies; - economics and governance of future networks; - future networks management architectures and mechanisms

Enhanced matching engine for improving the performance of semantic web service discovery

Web services are the means to realize the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. One of the key tasks of the Web services is discovery also known as matchmaking. This is the act of locating suitable Web services to fulfill a specific goal and adding semantic descriptions to the Web services is the key to enabling an automated, intelligent discovery process. Current Semantic Web service discovery approaches are primarily classified into logic-based, non-logic-based and hybrid categories. An important challenge yet to be addressed by the current approaches is the use of the available constructs in Web service descriptions to achieve a better performance in matchmaking. Performance is defined in terms of precision and recall as well-known metrics in the information retrieval field. Moreover, when matchmaking a large number of Web services, maintaining a reasonable execution time becomes a crucial challenge. In this research, to address these challenges, a matching engine is proposed. The engine comprises a new logic-based and nonlogic- based matchmaker to improve the performance of Semantic Web service discovery. The proposed logic-based and non-logic-based matchmakers are also combined as a hybrid matchmaker for further improvement of performance. In addition, a pre-matching filter is used in the matching engine to enhance the execution time of matchmaking. The components of the matching engine were developed as prototypes and evaluated by benchmarking the results against data from the standard repository of Web services. The comparative evaluations in terms of performance and execution time highlighted the superiority of the proposed matching engine over the existing and prominent matchmakers. The proposed matching engine has been proven to enhance both the performance and execution time of the Semantic Web service discovery

Telecommunication Economics

This book constitutes a collaborative and selected documentation of the scientific outcome of the European COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel "A Telecommunications Economics COST Network" which run from October 2007 to October 2011. Involving experts from around 20 European countries, the goal of Econ@Tel was to develop a strategic research and training network among key people and organizations in order to enhance Europe's competence in the field of telecommunications economics. Reflecting the organization of the COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel in working groups the following four major research areas are addressed: - evolution and regulation of communication ecosystems; - social and policy implications of communication technologies; - economics and governance of future networks; - future networks management architectures and mechanisms

Effective, efficient and reliable postcode alternative system in the context of online shopping for solving the problem of home delivery service in Jordan

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityThe home delivery service is considered as the bottleneck of online shopping and plays an important role in the success of such business application. A lack of postcode system in the developing countries, Jordan specifically, is one of the main challenges that face delivery couriers and e-retailers. The main aim of this PhD project reported in this thesis is the development of a novel postcode alternative system to enable online shopping and home delivery service of purchased goods in Jordan. The system incorporates two modules: the front-end and the back-end module. The front-end module is combined of two platforms: desktop and smart phone platforms and can be used by online shoppers; the back-end module is designed to be used by retailer/delivery courier as the system administrator. Two studies were conducted in this research; the first study was aiming to understand the problems that face e-consumers when shopping online and the work behaviour of the delivery system in Jordan. Whilst; the second study was aiming to evaluate usability of the designed system. Data was collected by conducting an experimental sessions and distributing questionnaires among three samples of people (consumers, retailers, and delivery couriers). The findings of these studies showed that there was a concern from consumers-side in describing their delivery address to the retailer/delivery courier. In addition, there was a concern from retailers and delivery couriers-side in finding the delivery address location. Furthermore, a user testing was conducted on both modules by involving a number of participants according to the relevance of their use of the system to evaluate the usability of the system. In the evaluation, it was demonstrated that the system makes an important contribution for solving the problem of home delivery service and improving online shopping in Jordan