Exploiting rules and processes for increasing flexibility in service composition

Recent trends in the use of service oriented architecture for designing, developing, managing, and using distributed applications have resulted in an increasing number of independently developed and physically distributed services. These services can be discovered, selected and composed to develop new applications and to meet emerging user requirements. Service composition is generally defined on the basis of business processes in which the underlying composition logic is guided by specifying control and data flows through Web service interfaces. User demands as well as the services themselves may change over time, which leads to replacing or adjusting the composition logic of previously defined processes. Coping with change is still one of the fundamental problems in current process based composition approaches. In this paper, we exploit declarative and imperative design styles to achieve better flexibility in service composition

A framework for Model-Driven Engineering of resilient software-controlled systems

AbstractEmergent paradigms of Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things expect cyber-physical systems to reliably provide services overcoming disruptions in operative conditions and adapting to changes in architectural and functional requirements. In this paper, we describe a hardware/software framework supporting operation and maintenance of software-controlled systems enhancing resilience by promoting a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) process to automatically derive structural configurations and failure models from reliability artifacts. Specifically, a reflective architecture developed around digital twins enables representation and control of system Configuration Items properly derived from SysML Block Definition Diagrams, providing support for variation. Besides, a plurality of distributed analytic agents for qualitative evaluation over executable failure models empowers the system with runtime self-assessment and dynamic adaptation capabilities. We describe the framework architecture outlining roles and responsibilities in a System of Systems perspective, providing salient design traits about digital twins and data analytic agents for failure propagation modeling and analysis. We discuss a prototype implementation following the MDE approach, highlighting self-recovery and self-adaptation properties on a real cyber-physical system for vehicle access control to Limited Traffic Zones

Size Matters: Microservices Research and Applications

In this chapter we offer an overview of microservices providing the introductory information that a reader should know before continuing reading this book. We introduce the idea of microservices and we discuss some of the current research challenges and real-life software applications where the microservice paradigm play a key role. We have identified a set of areas where both researcher and developer can propose new ideas and technical solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1706.0735

Strategic value of data analytics in interorganizational relationships

Researchers suggest that data analytics (DA) enhance decisions related to interorganizational relationships (IOR) and lead to reduced risk and improved performance. However, and despite this potential, firms face challenges regarding effective use of their DA capabilities to enhance their IORs. The massive investment in DA, as well as the need for an efficient use of DA in IOR settings, create the potential opportunities for two streams of research: a deeper understanding of business value of DA in IOR; and a systematic examination of DA’s strategy for an enhanced alignment with IORs. Despite the published scholarly works in these two research streams, the complexity, diversity, and newness associated with DA technologies make our understanding of the business value of DA in IOR and DA strategy for IOR incomplete. First, our understanding of why and how DA impact IOR performance is inadequate and fragmented. Second, the focus of the preponderance of published empirical papers in understanding the value of DA is at the operational level, and the strategic implications of DA capabilities in IOR are not addressed. Third, the literature fails to consider the inherent heterogeneity among the user base of DA systems, and consequently, the findings are not generalizable. Finally, the literature fails to address the impact of external factors, such as complexity and volatility on DA strategy. In this dissertation, I attempt to contribute to the literature by focusing on these research gaps and investigating them in three studies. In the first study, a holistic value-view of a firm’s supply chain enabled by DA for improved business performance, is presented based on two complementary views of market-oriented coordination and strategic supplier partnership. The study discusses how DA capabilities impact the constituents of this complementary view of supply chain to amplify business performance. I propose a theoretical model of the effect of DA capabilities on a firm’s co-creation of value, with its partners for business performance. Then, I test the model empirically based on a survey of 198 practitioners. My findings show that DA capabilities improve upstream and downstream integration and leverage the co-creation of value. The second study provides a better understanding of the impact of DA on interorganizational collaborations by answering two fundamental research questions: “How does a firm use its DA capabilities to improve collaboration and enhance performance?” and “What is the impact of DA capabilities on a firm’s collaboration and performance?” To answer these questions and to provide a deeper insight from multiple perspectives, I utilized a mixed method research by conducting a thorough content analysis of 34 published case studies, followed by a confirmatory research based on a survey of 210 practitioners to empirically test the insights generated from my content analysis. My findings identify several paths to improved performance using DA capabilities. My analysis suggests that DA capabilities, used appropriately in an interorganizational collaborative environment, lead to reduced costs and the need for required working capital and ultimately better performance through improved collaborative relationships such as planning and scheduling. In the third study, I expand the results of the two prior studies by analyzing the DA strategic focus. I employ an agent-based simulation to test different DA strategies in various business environments that are identified by levels of complexity and dynamism. My findings indicate that optimum DA strategy has a quadratic relationship with the levels of complexity and dynamism, which explains the prior contradictory findings of the IS literature. These three studies contribute to the business value of IT and IS strategy literatures by investigating the business value of DA in IOR settings, identifying impacts of DA on value co-creation in IORs and determining a suitable DA strategy based on various environmental factors

Managing Evolving Business Workflows through the Capture of Descriptive Information

Business systems these days need to be agile to address the needs of a changing world. In particular the discipline of Enterprise Application Integration requires business process management to be highly reconfigurable with the ability to support dynamic workflows, inter-application integration and process reconfiguration. Basing EAI systems on model-resident or on a so-called description-driven approach enables aspects of flexibility, distribution, system evolution and integration to be addressed in a domain-independent manner. Such a system called CRISTAL is described in this paper with particular emphasis on its application to EAI problem domains. A practical example of the CRISTAL technology in the domain of manufacturing systems, called Agilium, is described to demonstrate the principles of model-driven system evolution and integration. The approach is compared to other model-driven development approaches such as the Model-Driven Architecture of the OMG and so-called Adaptive Object Models.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. Presented at the eCOMO'2003 4th Int. Workshop on Conceptual Modeling Approaches for e-Busines

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Entrepreneurial adaptation: Insights from existing literature and possibilities for new research.

Recent research shows that new ventures have great difficulties in defining a viable business model from the outset and that minor or major adaptations to this initial business model are needed as the venture evolves. Entrepreneurial adaptation or the entrepreneur's willingness and ability to make appropriate adjustments to the business concept become critical. If adaptation is so important for entrepreneurial companies, we need to ask ourselves a number of questions. (1) What causes this need for adaptation? (2a) What is the precise effect of adaptation on a start-up's performance or survival and (2b) is this effect similar for all start-ups? Also, (3) what do we know about the process of adaptation? And (4) what are factors enabling this adaptation process? Finally, we also need to determine (5) how the concept of adaptation in entrepreneurial companies is related to existing concepts of change and adaptation. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of different literature streams that are specifically relevant to entrepreneurial adaptation and the questions listed above, and to point out gaps in the existing literature requiring further investigation. We look at whether and how the existing literature can provide insight into each of those five questions. In a final section, we point out directions for further research.Innovation; Research; Model; Companies; Performance; Startups; Processes; Factors;

Autonomous Agents for Business Process Management

Traditional approaches to managing business processes are often inadequate for large-scale organisation-wide, dynamic settings. However, since Internet and Intranet technologies have become widespread, an increasing number of business processes exhibit these properties. Therefore, a new approach is needed. To this end, we describe the motivation, conceptualization, design, and implementation of a novel agent-based business process management system. The key advance of our system is that responsibility for enacting various components of the business process is delegated to a number of autonomous problem solving agents. To enact their role, these agents typically interact and negotiate with other agents in order to coordinate their actions and to buy in the services they require. This approach leads to a system that is significantly more agile and robust than its traditional counterparts. To help demonstrate these benefits, a companion paper describes the application of our system to a real-world problem faced by British Telecom

A knowledge hub to enhance the learning processes of an industrial cluster

Industrial clusters have been defined as ?networks of production of strongly interdependent firms (including specialised suppliers), knowledge producing agents (universities, research institutes, engineering companies), institutions (brokers, consultants), linked to each other in a value adding production chain? (OECD Focus Group, 1999). The industrial clusters distinctive mode of production is specialisation, based on a sophisticated division of labour, that leads to interlinked activities and need for cooperation, with the consequent emergence of communities of practice (CoPs). CoPs are here conceived as groups of people and/or organisations bound together by shared expertise and propensity towards a joint work (Wenger and Suyden, 1999). Cooperation needs closeness for just-in-time delivery, for communication, for the exchange of knowledge, especially in its tacit form. Indeed the knowledge exchanges between the CoPs specialised actors, in geographical proximity, lead to spillovers and synergies. In the digital economy landscape, the use of collaborative technologies, such as shared repositories, chat rooms and videoconferences can, when appropriately used, have a positive impact on the development of the CoP exchanges process of codified knowledge. On the other end, systems for the individuals profile management, e-learning platforms and intelligent agents can trigger also some socialisation mechanisms of tacit knowledge. In this perspective, we have set-up a model of a Knowledge Hub (KH), driven by the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT-driven), that enables the knowledge exchanges of a CoP. In order to present the model, the paper is organised in the following logical steps: - an overview of the most seminal and consolidated approaches to CoPs; - a description of the KH model, ICT-driven, conceived as a booster of the knowledge exchanges of a CoP, that adds to the economic benefits coming from geographical proximity, the advantages coming from organizational proximity, based on the ICTs; - a discussion of some preliminary results that we are obtaining during the implementation of the model.

Felsőoktatási portfolió kompetencia alapon történő tervezése = Design of Higher Education Portfolio

Mind nemzetközi, mind hazai szinten olyan tendenciák érzékelhetők, amelyek a felsőoktatás munkaerő-piaci igényeknek megfelelő átstrukturálását igénylik. A kutatás során kifejlesztett rendszer egy olyan megoldási lehetőségre világított rá, amely a felsőoktatás átstrukturálását érintő, jelenleg is aktuális közigazgatási döntés-előkészítési folyamatot más megközelítésből tudná támogatni, azaz a munkaerőpiac keresleti és kínálati oldalának képzettségre vonatkozó egyezőségeinek, illetve különbözőségeinek a feltárásával. A kompetenciára épülő modellek, valamint a képesítési keretrendszerek átláthatóbbá, tervezhetőbbé teszik mind a szervezeti tevékenységeket, mind a képzési programokat, ezért a kompetencia megfelelő alapot szolgáltat a munkaerőpiac két oldalán megjelenő szakma-, illetve foglalkozási struktúra összehasonlítására. Mivel a szakirodalomban a fogalomnak nincs egyezményes definíciója, attól függően kerül használatba, hogy milyen tevékenység (szerepkörhöz kapcsolódó feladat elvégzése, vagy tanulás) elvégzése érdekében kerül aktiválásra. Ezért a kutatásban, a mögöttes tartalmát legjobban reprezentáló tudás-képesség-attitűd hármasként lett interpretálva, amely valamilyen feladat elvégzéséhez kapcsolódik. A rendszer ontológia alapú megközelítésben történő fejlesztését támasztja alá, az hogy az ontológia konzisztens alapot biztosít az összehasonlításra, valamint az egyes, ugyanerre a kutatási területre irányuló, továbbfejleszteni kívánt rendszerek is ebben a szemléletben készültek el. A kutatás során egy prototípus került kidolgozásra, amely a BCE Gazdaságinformatikus képzésének, valamint a hozzá kapcsolódó IT munkakörök közül a Szoftverfejlesztő munkakör kompetenciatartalmait kívánta összehasonlítani. A rendszer fejlesztése a kétfázisú inkrementális rendszerfejlesztési módszertan lépéseit követi, vagyis minden egyes szakaszban kifejlesztett részrendszer értékelésre került, amelyhez kapcsolódóan, az eredeti követelményeket az ott felmerült igényekkel kiegészítve került sor a második részrendszer előállítására. A kutatás legvégén a jelenleg is zajló döntés-előkészítési folyamatba való beilleszthetőségét vizsgáltam meg