A Development of Database Driven Inventory Management for Saudi Small Enterprises

Nowadays, the changing in business operations among customers is facing huge challenges due to the new competition of adopting technology by businesses today. Most of these challenges can be found among the Saudi Small Enterprise companies (SSEs), which reflects the needs of developing a suitable system for managing and optimizing the business activities in these companies. A number of difficulties were reported during the process of inventory management, which recognized to be one of the most critical operations for any SSEs. Hence, integrating new technology could help to overcome the SSEs difficulties in performing and managing its operations in reliable way. Meanwhile, this research aimed to develop an inventory management system for simplifying and managing SSEs operations in a flexible way based on the utilization of multi agent interface that could add extra advantages in operating the business deals over the internet

ODE-based general moment approximations for PEPA

In this paper we show how the powerful ODE-based fluid-analysis technique for the stochastic process algebra PEPA is an approximation to the first moments of the counting processes in question. For a large class of models this approximation has a particularly simple form and it is possible to make qualitative statements regarding how the quality of the approximation varies for different parameters. Furthermore, this particular point of view facilitates a natural generalisation to higher order moments. This allows modellers to approximate, for instance, the variance of the component counts. In particular, we show how systems of ODEs facilitating the approximation of arbitrary moments of the component counting processes can be naturally defined. The effectiveness of this generalisation is illustrated by comparing the results with those obtained through stochastic simulation for a particular case study

Service discovery and negotiation with COWS

To provide formal foundations to current (web) services technologies, we put forward using COWS, a process calculus for specifying, combining and analysing services, as a uniform formalism for modelling all the relevant phases of the life cycle of service-oriented applications, such as publication, discovery, negotiation, deployment and execution. In this paper, we show that constraints and operations on them can be smoothly incorporated in COWS, and propose a disciplined way to model multisets of constraints and to manipulate them through appropriate interaction protocols. Therefore, we demonstrate that also QoS requirement specifications and SLA achievements, and the phases of dynamic service discovery and negotiation can be comfortably modelled in COWS. We illustrate our approach through a scenario for a service-based web hosting provider

Fluid semantics for passive stochastic process algebra cooperation

Fluid modelling is a next-generation technique for analysing massive performance models. Passive cooperation is a popular cooperation mechanism frequently used by performance engineers. Therefore having an accurate translation of passive cooperation into a fluid model is of direct practical application. We compare different existing styles of fluid model translation of passive cooperation in a stochastic process algebra. We explain why the development of a fluid semantics for passive cooperation is not straightforward and we present an alternative definition which more closely matches the underlying discrete model. Finally, we present quantitative comparisons with a previous version of the fluid semantics in which numerical discrepancies can be observed. © 2008 ICST ISBN

Service Composition for Collective Adaptive Systems

Collective adaptive systems are large-scale resource-sharing systems which adapt to the demands of their users by redistributing resources to balance load or provide alternative services where the current provision is perceived to be insufficient. Smart transport systems are a primary example where real-time location tracking systems record the location availability of assets such as cycles for hire, or fleet vehicles such as buses, trains and trams. We consider the problem of an informed user optimising his journey using a composition of services offered by different service providers

Evaluating fluid semantics for passive stochastic process algebra cooperation

Fluid modelling is a next-generation technique for analysing massive performance models. Passive cooperation is a popular cooperation mechanism frequently used by performance engineers. Therefore having an accurate translation of passive cooperation into a fluid model is of direct practical application. We compare different existing styles of fluid model translation of passive cooperation in a stochastic process algebra and show how the previous model can be improved upon significantly. We evaluate the new passive cooperation fluid semantics and show that the first-order fluid model is a good approximation to the dynamics of the underlying continuous-time Markov chain. We show that in a family of possible translations to the fluid model, there is an optimal translation which can be expected to introduce least error. Finally, we use these new techniques to show how the scalability of a passively-cooperating distributed software architecture could be assessed

Evaluating the scalability of a web service-based distributed e-learning and course management system

Abstract. A growing concern of Web service providers is scalability. An implementation of a Web service may be able at present to support its user base, but how can a provider judge what will happen if that user base grows? We present a modelling approach based on process algebra which allows service providers to investigate how models of Web service execution scale with increasing client population sizes. The method has the benefit of allowing a simple model of the service to be scaled to realistic population sizes without the modeller needing to aggregate or re-model the system.

Studying the effects of adding spatiality to a process algebra model

We use NetLogo to create simulations of two models of disease transmission originally expressed in WSCCS. This allows us to introduce spatiality into the models and explore the consequences of having different contact structures among the agents. In previous work, mean field equations were derived from the WSCCS models, giving a description of the aggregate behaviour of the overall population of agents. These results turned out to differ from results obtained by another team using cellular automata models, which differ from process algebra by being inherently spatial. By using NetLogo we are able to explore whether spatiality, and resulting differences in the contact structures in the two kinds of models, are the reason for this different results. Our tentative conclusions, based at this point on informal observations of simulation results, are that space does indeed make a big difference. If space is ignored and individuals are allowed to mix randomly, then the simulations yield results that closely match the mean field equations, and consequently also match the associated global transmission terms (explained below). At the opposite extreme, if individuals can only contact their immediate neighbours, the simulation results are very different from the mean field equations (and also do not match the global transmission terms). These results are not surprising, and are consistent with other cellular automata-based approaches. We found that it was easy and convenient to implement and simulate the WSCCS models within NetLogo, and we recommend this approach to anyone wishing to explore the effects of introducing spatiality into a process algebra model

Web Services and Formal Methods

none3siThe proceedings contain 18 papers. The topics discussed include: service QoS composition at the level of part names; SCC service centered calculus; semantic querying of mathematical Web service descriptions; verified reference implementations WS-security protocols; translating Orc features into Petri Nets and the join calculus; dynamic constraint-based invocation of Web services; a formal of contracts for Web services; execution semantics for service chreographies; analysis and verification of time requirements applied to the Web services composition; a formal approach to service component architecture; evaluating the scalability of a Web service-based distributed e-learning and course management system; chereography conformance analysis: asynchronous communications and information alignment; and towards a unifying theory for Web services composition.noneM. Bravetti; M. Nunez; G. ZavattaroM. Bravetti; M. Nunez; G. Zavattar