Enhancing Service Lifecycle Management - Costing as Part of Service Descriptions

Outsourcing of IT and business processes results in an increased exchange of services. For inter-organizational service exchange to be successful, the participating network players have to establish unified and thus interoperable means of service description. An analysis of contemporary approaches identified a deficit of almost all approaches to address monetary aspects of a service, especially costs. This paper argues that costs are prevalent in almost all stages of a services’ lifecycle, and thus its’ role within Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) is paramount. Recognizing this discrepancy, the paper proposes a basic version of a costing model that allows for a multi-periodic depiction of service-related costs as part of a service description. It is modeled and implemented as an extension of USDL, the Unified Service Description Language. A case example from the financial services industry demonstrates the artifact’s applicability

Semantic web in manufacturing

Advances in manufacturing systems include attempts to create collaborative networks for enterprise integration and information interoperability. To achieve collaboration and sharing effectively, various networking technologies have been proposed in the literature. The web has emerged as a basic entity for interconnecting man and machine and almost all parts of the enterprise Community are being reshaped to exploit the opportunities that it offers. Apart from web technology, there are various other tools and techniques that have attracted research communities for representing data in ways that both machines and humans can understand. Semantic web, the second-generation web technology, is enriched by machine-processable information to support the users in their tasks. This paper presents the vision of the semantic web and describes ontologies and associated metadata as the building blocks of the semantic web. it reviews the literature dealing with the application of the semantic web and ontology in the broad domain of manufacturing. First, brief details about key enablers, i.e. web services, semantic web, semantic services, and ontology, are presented. Then the implementation of these approaches in different sectors of manufacturing is discussed. A knowledge base for all the information resources concerned with the manufacturing domain is also built up in this paper. An ontology model for a knowledge base of information resources is designed in Protege software, which can be used for storing and searching information about authors, journals, blogs, newspapers, and many other sources of information

Data-driven conceptual modeling: how some knowledge drivers for the enterprise might be mined from enterprise data

As organizations perform their business, they analyze, design and manage a variety of processes represented in models with different scopes and scale of complexity. Specifying these processes requires a certain level of modeling competence. However, this condition does not seem to be balanced with adequate capability of the person(s) who are responsible for the task of defining and modeling an organization or enterprise operation. On the other hand, an enterprise typically collects various records of all events occur during the operation of their processes. Records, such as the start and end of the tasks in a process instance, state transitions of objects impacted by the process execution, the message exchange during the process execution, etc., are maintained in enterprise repositories as various logs, such as event logs, process logs, effect logs, message logs, etc. Furthermore, the growth rate in the volume of these data generated by enterprise process execution has increased manyfold in just a few years. On top of these, models often considered as the dashboard view of an enterprise. Models represents an abstraction of the underlying reality of an enterprise. Models also served as the knowledge driver through which an enterprise can be managed. Data-driven extraction offers the capability to mine these knowledge drivers from enterprise data and leverage the mined models to establish the set of enterprise data that conforms with the desired behaviour. This thesis aimed to generate models or knowledge drivers from enterprise data to enable some type of dashboard view of enterprise to provide support for analysts. The rationale for this has been started as the requirement to improve an existing process or to create a new process. It was also mentioned models can also serve as a collection of effectors through which an organization or an enterprise can be managed. The enterprise data refer to above has been identified as process logs, effect logs, message logs, and invocation logs. The approach in this thesis is to mine these logs to generate process, requirement, and enterprise architecture models, and how goals get fulfilled based on collected operational data. The above a research question has been formulated as whether it is possible to derive the knowledge drivers from the enterprise data, which represent the running operation of the enterprise, or in other words, is it possible to use the available data in the enterprise repository to generate the knowledge drivers? . In Chapter 2, review of literature that can provide the necessary background knowledge to explore the above research question has been presented. Chapter 3 presents how process semantics can be mined. Chapter 4 suggest a way to extract a requirements model. The Chapter 5 presents a way to discover the underlying enterprise architecture and Chapter 6 presents a way to mine how goals get orchestrated. Overall finding have been discussed in Chapter 7 to derive some conclusions

A resource-oriented architecture for business process systems

Background: The REpresentational State Transfer (REST) design principles treat all concepts in the world as link-connected resources, and support ROA (Resource-Oriented Architecture) for the Web applications. REST and ROA are responsible for the adaptability achieved in the Web. Some design approaches of Web-based business process systems recently evolved towards RESTful to inherit adaptability. However, none of the approaches can improve the adaptability of the produced systems. Aims: Propose a systematic approach for design and execution of Web-based business processes to improve adaptability of the produced systems. Methods: This research followed an empirical research methodology, which evaluates research solutions with real-world cases. On one hand, the research solution was derived by 1) tailoring the REST principles towards business process systems; 2) proposing REST annotations on existing business process modelling; 3) mapping the concepts of business process to HTTP/URI specifications; and 4) designing a format for process context information. On the other hand, the research solution was evaluated through three real-world case studies. Two of the case studies conducted comparative analysis in terms of adaptability of the systems produced by the proposed approach and two alternatives, namely, SOA and MEST (MESsage Transfer). The analysis is based on metrics, including LOC difference, change locality, coupling and cohesion, and an analysis framework called BASE. Results: The research solution is ROA4BP, which includes 1) an architecting approach for design and implementation of Web-based business processes to provide a development guideline; 2) a set of REST-related annotations on existing process modelling to ensure the compatibility with existing techniques; 3) A systematic mapping between business process and HTTP/URI specifications to utilize the advanced mechanisms provided by the Web infrastructure; and 4) a communication format to exchange structured process context information during runtime among process participants. A modelling tool, a programming API and a runtime engine were implemented to support the approach and simplify the implementation of case studies. The case studies demonstrated that ROA4BP can produce more adaptable business process systems compared to the other two alternatives. Conclusion: ROA4BP can help to design and execute RESTful business process systems with better adaptability at design-time and runtime

Recent Developments in Smart Healthcare

Medicine is undergoing a sector-wide transformation thanks to the advances in computing and networking technologies. Healthcare is changing from reactive and hospital-centered to preventive and personalized, from disease focused to well-being centered. In essence, the healthcare systems, as well as fundamental medicine research, are becoming smarter. We anticipate significant improvements in areas ranging from molecular genomics and proteomics to decision support for healthcare professionals through big data analytics, to support behavior changes through technology-enabled self-management, and social and motivational support. Furthermore, with smart technologies, healthcare delivery could also be made more efficient, higher quality, and lower cost. In this special issue, we received a total 45 submissions and accepted 19 outstanding papers that roughly span across several interesting topics on smart healthcare, including public health, health information technology (Health IT), and smart medicine

Spécification, validation et satisfiabilité [i.e. satisfaisabilité] de contraintes hybrides par réduction à la logique temporelle

Depuis quelques années, de nombreux champs de l'informatique ont été transformés par l'introduction d'une nouvelle vision de la conception et de l'utilisation d'un système, appelée approche déclarative. Contrairement à l'approche dite impérative, qui consiste à décrire au moyen d'un langage formelles opérations à effectuer pour obtenir un résultat, l'approche déclarative suggère plutôt de décrire le résultat désiré, sans spécifier comment ce «but» doit être atteint. L'approche déclarative peut être vue comme le prolongement d'une tendance ayant cours depuis les débuts de l'informatique et visant à résoudre des problèmes en manipulant des concepts d'un niveau d'abstraction toujours plus élevé. Le passage à un paradigme déclaratif pose cependant certains problèmes: les outils actuels sont peu appropriés à une utilisation déclarative. On identifie trois questions fondamentales qui doivent être résolues pour souscrire à ce nouveau paradigme: l'expression de contraintes dans un langage formel, la validation de ces contraintes sur une structure, et enfin la construction d'une structure satisfaisant une contrainte donnée. Cette thèse étudie ces trois problèmes selon l'angle de la logique mathématique. On verra qu'en utilisant une logique comme fondement formel d'un langage de « buts », les questions de validation et de construction d'une structure se transposent en deux questions mathématiques, le model checking et la satisfiabilité, qui sont fondamentales et largement étudiées. En utilisant comme motivation deux contextes concrets, la gestion de réseaux et les architectures orientées services, le travail montrera qu'il est possible d'utiliser la logique mathématique pour décrire, vérifier et construire des configurations de réseaux ou des compositions de services web. L'aboutissement de la recherche consiste en le développement de la logique CTLFO+, permettant d'exprimer des contraintes sur les données, sur la séquences des opérations\ud d'un système, ainsi que des contraintes dites «hybrides». Une réduction de CTL-FO+ à la logique temporelle CTL permet de réutiliser de manière efficace des outils de vérification existants. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Méthodes formelles, Services web, Réseaux

Forschungsbericht Universität Mannheim 2006 / 2007

Sie erhalten darin zum einen zusammenfassende Darstellungen zu den Forschungsschwerpunkten und Forschungsprofilen der Universität und deren Entwicklung in der Forschung. Zum anderen gibt der Forschungsbericht einen Überblick über die Publikationen und Forschungsprojekte der Lehrstühle, Professuren und zentralen Forschungseinrichtungen. Diese werden ergänzt um Angaben zur Organisation von Forschungsveranstaltungen, der Mitwirkung in Forschungsausschüssen, einer Übersicht zu den für Forschungszwecke eingeworbenen Drittmitteln, zu den Promotionen und Habilitationen, zu Preisen und Ehrungen und zu Förderern der Universität Mannheim. Darin zeigt sich die Bandbreite und Vielseitigkeit der Forschungsaktivitäten und deren Erfolg auf nationaler und internationaler Ebene