Towards an Enhanced Protocol for Improving Transactional Support in Interoperable Service Oriented Application-Based (SOA-Based) Systems

When using a shared database for distributed transactions, it is often difficult to connect business processes and softwarecomponents running on disparate platforms into a single transaction. For instance, one platform may add or update data, and thenanother platform later access the changed or added data. This severely limits transactional capabilities across platforms. Thissituation becomes more acute when concurrent transactions with interleaving operations spans across different applications andresources. Addressing this problem in an open, dynamic and distributed environment of web services poses special challenges,and still remains an open issue. Following the broad adoption and use of the standard Web Services Transaction Protocols,requirements have grown for the addition of extended protocols to handle problems that exist within the context of interoperableservice-oriented applications. Most extensions to the current standard WS-Transaction Protocols still lack proper mechanisms forerror-handling, concurrency control, transaction recovery, consolidation of multiple transaction calls into a single call, and securereporting and tracing for suspicious activities. In this research, we will first extend the current standard WS-TransactionFramework, and then propose an enhanced protocol (that can be deployed within the extended framework) to improvetransactional and security support for asynchronous applications in a distributed environment. A hybrid methodology whichincorporates service-oriented engineering and rapid application development will be used to develop a procurement system(which represents an interoperable service-oriented application) that integrates our proposed protocol. We will empiricallyevaluate and compare the performance of the enhanced protocol with other conventional distributed protocols (such as 2PL) interms of QoS parameters (throughput, response time, and resource utilization), availability of the application, databaseconsistency, and effect of locking on latency, among other factors.Keywords: Database, interoperability, security, concurrent transaction, web services, protocol, service-oriente

R&D Network and value Creation in SMEs

Research and development functions are fundamental drivers of value creation in technology-based Small and Medium enterprises (SMEs) seemingly successful R&D is a function of innovation processes and R&D networks. There is a perceived lack of understanding regarding the importance of SMEs and their need to continuously enhance their technological capabilities for the purpose of establishing themselves a dominant market position. In this paper R&D network issues from the perspective of their impact on value creation in SMEs have been studied. One very important trend to enable new knowledge creation and transfer in and to SME's is the development of collaborative environments and networks to increase their innovation capabilities as a single unit but also the capabilities of the network as a whole through collective learning. SMEs seem to be appropriate units to behave like network nodes because of their lean structure, adaptability to market evolution, active involvement of versatile human resources, ability to establish sub-contracting relations and good technological level of their products. SMEs not only shape the larger outcome, but also constrain actions of the state and MNCs in demand-responsive, buyer-driven networks. The objective of this paper is the notice to creation of a network of SMEs that are perhaps geographically dispersed but virtually linked so that the participating members focus on their specialized tasks yet also share their knowledge and experience resources to create an agile structured and flexible enterprise.R&D, Network, value Creation, SMEs

A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence

Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches

Open Standard, Open Source and Peer to Peer Methods for Collaborative Product Development and Knowledge Management

Tools such as product data management (PDM) and its offspring product lifecycle management (PLM) enable collaboration within and between enterprises. Large enterprises have invariably been the target of software vendors for development of such tools, resulting in large entralized applications. These are beyond the means of small to medium enterprises (SME). Even after these efforts had been made, large enterprises face numerous difficulties with PLM. Firstly, enterprises evolve, and an evolving enterprise needs an evolving data management system. With large applications, such configuration changes have to be made at the server level by dedicated staff. The second problem arises when enterprises wish to collaborate with a large number of suppliers and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers. Current applications enable collaboration using business-to-business (B2B) protocols. However, these do not take into account that disparate enterprises do not have unitary data models or workflows. This is a strong factor in reducing the abilities of large enterprises to participate in collaborative project

Process capability modelling: a review report of feature representation methodologies

Approximately 150 technical papers on the features methodology have been carefully studied and some selected papers have been commented upon. The abstracts of the comments are documented and attached to this report. The methodologies reviewed are mainly divided into two approaches, ie. feature recognition and design by features. Papers which deal with some specific topics such as feature taxonomies, dimensions and tolerances, feature concepts, etc. are also included in the document