A flexible service selection for executing virtual services

[EN] With the adoption of a service-oriented paradigm on the Web, many software services are likely to fulfil similar functional needs for end-users. We propose to aggregate functionally equivalent software services within one single virtual service, that is, to associate a functionality, a graphical user interface (GUI), and a set of selection rules. When an end user invokes such a virtual service through its GUI to answer his/her functional need, the software service that best responds to the end-user s selection policy is selected and executed and the result is then rendered to the end-user through the GUI of the virtual service. A key innovation in this paper is the flexibility of our proposed service selection policy. First, each selection policy can refer to heterogeneous parameters (e.g., service price, end-user location, and QoS). Second, additional parameters can be added to an existing or new policy with little investment. Third, the end users themselves define a selection policy to apply during the selection process, thanks to the GUI element added as part of the virtual service design. This approach was validated though the design, implementation, and testing of an end-to-end architecture, including the implementation of several virtual services and utilizing several software services available today on the Web.This work was partially supported in part by SERVERY (Service Platform for Innovative Communication Environment), a CELTIC project that aims to create a Service Marketplace that bridges the Internet and Telco worlds by merging the flexibility and openness of the former with the trustworthiness and reliability of the latter, enabling effective and profitable cooperation among actors.Laga, N.; Bertin, E.; Crespi, N.; Bedini, I.; Molina Moreno, B.; Zhao, Z. (2013). A flexible service selection for executing virtual services. World Wide Web. 16(3):219-245. doi:10.1007/s11280-012-0184-2S219245163Aggarwal, R., Verma, K., Miller, J., and Milnor, W.: Constraint Driven Web Service Composition in METEOR-S. In Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE international Conference on Services Computing (September 2004). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 23–30.Apple Inc. Apple app store.: Available at: www.apple.com/iphone/appstore/ , accessed on May 22nd, 2012.Atzeni, P., Catarci, T., Pernici, B.: Multi-Channel adaptive information Systems. World Wide Web 10(4), 345–347 (2007)Baresi, L., Bianchini, D., Antonellis, V.D., Fugini, M.G., Pernici, B., Plebani, P.: Context-aware Composition of e-Service. In Technologies for E-Services: Third International Workshop, vol. 2819, 28–41, TES 2003, Berlin, German, 2003.Ben Hassine, A., Matsubara, S., Ishida, T.: In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on The Semantic Web (ISWC’06), Isabel Cruz, Stefan Decker, Dean Allemang, Chris Preist, and Daniel Schwabe (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 130–143 (2006).Blum, N., Dutkowski, S., Magedanz, T.: InSeRt - An Intent-based Service Request API for Service Exposure in Next Generation Networks. In Proceedings of 32nd Annual IEEE Software Engineering Workshop. Porto Sani Resort, Kassandra, Greece, 2008 pp21–30.Boussard, M., Fodor, S., Crespi, N., Iribarren, V., Le Rouzic, J.P., Bedini, I., Marton, G., Moro Fernandez, D., Lorenzo Duenas, O., Molina, B.: SERVERY: the Web-Telco marketplace. ICT-Mobile Summit 2009, Santander (2009)Cabrera, Ó., Oriol, M., Franch, X., Marco, J., López, L., Fragoso, O., Santaolaya, R.: WeSSQoS: A Configurable SOA System for Quality-aware Web Service Selection. CoRR 2011, abs/1110.5574.Casati, F., Ilnicki, S., Jin, L., Krishnamoorthy, V., Shan, M.: Adaptive and Dynamic Service Composition in eFlow. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1789/2000, 13–31, 2000.Cibrán, M. A., Verheecke, B., Vanderperren, W., Suvée, D., and Jonckers, V.: “Aspect-oriented Programming for Dynamic Web Service Selection, Integration and Management.” In Proc. World Wide Web 2007, pp. 211–242.Crespi, N., Boussard, M. Fodor, S.: Converging Web 2.0 with telecommunications. eStrategies Projects, Vol. 10, 108–109. British Publishers, ISSN 1758–2369, June 2009.Dey, A.K., Salber, D., Abowd, G.D.: A conceptual framework and a toolkit for supporting the rapid prototyping of context-aware applications. Hum. Comput. Interact. 16, 1–67 (2001)Ding, Q., Li, X., and Zhou, X.: Reputation Based Service Selection in Grid Environment. In Proceedings of the 2008 international Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering - Volume 03 (December. 2008). CSSE. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 58–61.Fielding, R.T.: Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. Thesis dissertation, 2000.Franch, X., Grünbacher, P., Oriol, M., Burgstaller, B., Dhungana, D., López, L., Marco, J., Pimentel, J.: Goal-driven Adaptation of Service-Based Systems from Runtime Monitoring Data. REFS 2011.Frolund, S., Koisten, J.: QML: A Language for Quality of Service Specification. HP Labs technical reports. Available at http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/98/HPL-98-10.html , accessed on May 22nd, 2012.Google. Android market.: Available at: www.android.com/market/ , accessed on May 22nd, 2012.Google. Intents and Intent Filters.: Available at http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/intents/intents-filters.html , accessed on May 22nd, 2012.Gu, X., Nahrstedt, K., Yuan, W., Wichadakul, D., Xu, D.: An Xml-Based Quality of Service Enabling Language for the Web. Technical Report. UMI Order Number: UIUCDCS-R-2001-2212., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Laga, N., Bertin, E., and Crespi, N.: Building a User Friendly Service Dashboard: Automatic and Non-intrusive Chaining between Widgets. In Proceedings of the 2009 Congress on Services - I (July 06–10, 2009). SERVICES. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 484–491.Laga, N., Bertin, E., and Crespi, N.: Business Process Personalization Through Web Widgets. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE international Conference on Web Services (July 05–10, 2010). ICWS. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 551–558.Liu, Y., Ngu, A. H., and Zeng, L. Z.: QoS computation and policing in dynamic web service selection. In Proceedings of the 13th international World Wide Web Conference on Alternate Track Papers &Amp; Posters (New York, NY, USA, May 19–21, 2004). WWW Alt. ’04. ACM, New York, NY, 66–73.Malik, Z., Bouguettaya, A.: Rater credibility assessment in Web services interactions. World Wide Web 12(1), 3–25 (2009)Martin, D. et al.: OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services. W3C member submission, available at http://www.w3.org/Submission/2004/SUBM-OWL-S-20041122/ , accessed on May 22nd, 2012.Nestler, T., Namoun, A., Schill, A.: End-user development of service-based interactive web applications at the presentation layer. EICS 2011: 197–206.Newcomer, E.: Understanding Web Services: XML, Wsdl, Soap, and UDDI. Addison, Wesley, Boston, Mass., May 2002.O’Reilly, T.: What Is Web 2.0, Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.Piessens, F., Jacobs, B., Truyen, E., Joosen, W.: Support for Metadata-driven Selection of Run-time Services in .NET is Promising but Immature. vol. 3, no. 2, Special issue: .NET: The Programmer’s Perspective: ECOOP Workshop, 27–35. 2003.Rasch, K;, Li, F., Sehic, S., Ayani R., and Dustdar, S.: “Context-driven personalized service discovery in pervasive environments,” in Proc World Wide Web, 2011, pp. 295–319.Reichl, P.: From ‘Quality-of-Service’ and ‘Quality-of-Design’ to ‘Quality-of-Experience’: A holistic view on future interactive telecommunication ser-vices. In 15th International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks, 2007. Soft-COM 2007. Sept. 2007. vol., no.,1–6, 27–29.Rolland, C., Kaabi, R.S., Kraiem, N.: On ISOA: Intentional Services Oriented Architecture. In Advanced Information Systems Engineering, volume 4495/2007, 158–172, June 2007.Sanchez, A., Carro, B., Wesner, S.: Telco services for end customers: European Perspective. In Communications Magazine. IEEE 46(2), 14–18 (2008)Santhanam, G. R., Basu, S., and Honavar, V.: On Utilizing Qualitative Preferences in Web Service Composition: A CP-net Based Approach. In Proceedings of IEEE Congress on Services, Services - Part I, vol., no.,538–544, 2008.Spanoudakis, G., Mahbub, K., Zisman, A.: A Platform for Context Aware Runtime Web Service Discovery. In Proc IEEE ICWS, 2007, pp233-240.Tsesmetzis, D., Roussaki, I., Sykas, E.: Modeling and Simulation of QoS-aware Web Service Selection for Provider Profit Maximization. Simulation 83(1), 93–106 (2007)Wang, P., Chao, K., Lo, C., Farmer, R., and Kuo, P.: A Reputation-Based Service Selection Scheme. In Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international Conference on E-Business Engineering (October 21–23, 2009). ICEBE. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 501–506.Wang, H., Yang, D., Zhao, Y., and Gao, Y.: Multiagent System for Reputation--based Web Services Selection. In Proceedings of the Sixth international Conference on Quality Software (October 27–28, 2006). QSIC. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 429–434.Wholesale Applications Community.: WAC Informational Whitepaper. Available at http://www.wholesaleappcommunity.com/About-Wac/BACKGROUND%20TO%20WAC/whitepaper.pdf , accessed on May 22nd, 2012.Windows Marketplace.: Available at http://marketplace.windowsphone.com/default.aspx , accessed on May 22nd, 2012.Xu, Z., Martin, P., Powley, W., Zulkernine, F.: Reputation-Enhanced QoS-based Web Services Discovery. Web Services, 2007. In proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Web Services, ICWS 2007. 249, 256, 9–13 July 2007.Yu, Q., Bouguettaya,A.: “Multi-attribute optimization in service selection”. In Proc World Wide Web,2012, pp. 1–31.Yu, T., Zhang, Y., Lin, K. Efficient algorithms for Web services selection with end-to-end QoS constraints. ACM Transaction Web 1, 1. Article 6, 26 pages. (May 2007),

InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Cloud service localisation

The essence of cloud computing is the provision of software and hardware services to a range of users in dierent locations. The aim of cloud service localisation is to facilitate the internationalisation and localisation of cloud services by allowing their adaption to dierent locales. We address the lingual localisation by providing service-level language translation techniques to adopt services to dierent languages and regulatory localisation by providing standards-based mappings to achieve regulatory compliance with regionally varying laws, standards and regulations. The aim is to support and enforce the explicit modelling of aspects particularly relevant to localisation and runtime support consisting of tools and middleware services to automating the deployment based on models of locales, driven by the two localisation dimensions. We focus here on an ontology-based conceptual information model that integrates locale specication in a coherent way

Strengthening Out-of-School Time Nonprofits: The Role of Foundations in Building Organizational Capacity

Placing nonprofits in the larger context of city, state, and national policy, explores the capacity-building support nonprofits running afterschool and summer programs need to provide high-impact networks of learning and developmental opportunities

A Framework for Evaluating Model-Driven Self-adaptive Software Systems

In the last few years, Model Driven Development (MDD), Component-based Software Development (CBSD), and context-oriented software have become interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the modularity, flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of software systems. An analysis of these technologies shows them all to include the principle of the separation of concerns, and their further integration is a key factor to obtaining high-quality and self-adaptable software systems. Each technology identifies different concerns and deals with them separately in order to specify the design of the self-adaptive applications, and, at the same time, support software with adaptability and context-awareness. This research studies the development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven development in building self-adaptive software systems. To this aim, this article proposes an evaluation framework for analysing and evaluating the features of model-driven approaches and their ability to support software with self-adaptability and dependability in highly dynamic contextual environment. Such evaluation framework can facilitate the software developers on selecting a development methodology that suits their software requirements and reduces the development effort of building self-adaptive software systems. This study highlights the major drawbacks of the propped model-driven approaches in the related works, and emphasise on considering the volatile aspects of self-adaptive software in the analysis, design and implementation phases of the development methodologies. In addition, we argue that the development methodologies should leave the selection of modelling languages and modelling tools to the software developers.Comment: model-driven architecture, COP, AOP, component composition, self-adaptive application, context oriented software developmen

Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences

To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices