The Management of Manufacturing-Oriented Informatics Systems Using Efficient and Flexible Architectures

Industry and in particular the manufacturing-oriented sector has always been researched and innovated as a result of technological progress, diversification and differentiation among consumers' demands. A company that provides to its customers products matching perfectly their demands at competitive prices has a great advantage over its competitors. Manufacturing-oriented information systems are becoming more flexible and configurable and they require integration with the entire organization. This can be done using efficient software architectures that will allow the coexistence between commercial solutions and open source components while sharing computing resources organized in grid infrastructures and under the governance of powerful management tools.Manufacturing-Oriented Informatics Systems, Open Source, Software Architectures, Grid Computing, Web-Based Management Systems

Runtime Adaptive Hybrid Query Engine based on FPGAs

This paper presents the fully integrated hardware-accelerated query engine for large-scale datasets in the context of Semantic Web databases. As queries are typically unknown at design time, a static approach is not feasible and not flexible to cover a wide range of queries at system runtime. Therefore, we introduce a runtime reconfigurable accelerator based on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which transparently incorporates with the freely available Semantic Web database LUPOSDATE. At system runtime, the proposed approach dynamically generates an optimized hardware accelerator in terms of an FPGA configuration for each individual query and transparently retrieves the query result to be displayed to the user. During hardware-accelerated execution the host supplies triple data to the FPGA and retrieves the results from the FPGA via PCIe interface. The benefits and limitations are evaluated on large-scale synthetic datasets with up to 260 million triples as well as the widely known Billion Triples Challenge

Service Contract Automation

Today’s transition from a product- to a service-oriented economy implies fundamental technical, organizational and economic challenges. The trend of compensating missing core competencies by requesting business services from external providers to be integrated in internal end-to-end processes has recently gained tremendous momentum. Nevertheless, service level agreements between the parties involved are still specified for each service entity that is part of composite business services which results in a managerial overhead generated from multiple contractual relations. The contribution of this paper is threefold: (i) We analyze the fundamental requirements in the context of describing services, quality and agreements as well as their aggregation in a generic manner. Based on the results, we (ii) provide a holistic framework that enables the automation of service contracts for composite business services. Facilitating semantic technologies we provide means for describing service quality from a technical and business-oriented perspective, adequate metrics as well as quality aggregation operations in the context of composite business services. Furthermore, we (iii) evaluate our framework based on an industrial application scenario