NEGOSEIO: framework for the sustainability of model-oriented enterprise interoperability

Dissertation to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical and Computer Engineering(Industrial Information Systems)This dissertation tackles the problematic of Enterprise Interoperability in the current globally connected world. The evolution of the Information and Communication Technologies has endorsed the establishment of fast, secure and robust data exchanges, promoting the development of networked solutions. This allowed the specialisation of enterprises (particularly SMEs) and favoured the development of complex and heterogeneous provider systems. Enterprises are abandoning their self-centrism and working together on the development of more complete solutions. Entire business solutions are built integrating several enterprises (e.g., in supply chains, enterprise nesting) towards a common objective. Additionally, technologies, platforms, trends, standards and regulations keep evolving and demanding enterprises compliance. This evolution needs to be continuous, and is naturally followed by a constant update of each networked enterprise’s interfaces, assets, methods and processes. This unstable environment of perpetual change is causing major concerns in both SMEs and customers as the current interoperability grounds are frail, easily leading to periods of downtime, where business is not possible. The pressure to restore interoperability rapidly often leads to patching and to the adoption of immature solutions, contributing to deteriorate even more the interoperable environment. This dissertation proposes the adoption of NEGOSEIO, a framework that tackles interoperability issues by developing strong model-based knowledge assets and promoting continuous improvement and adaptation for increasing the sustainability of interoperability on enterprise systems. It presents the research motivations and the developed framework’s main blocks, which include model-based knowledge management, collaboration service-oriented architectures implemented over a cloud-based solution, and focusing particularly on its negotiation core mechanism to handle inconsistencies and solutions for the detected interoperability problems. It concludes by validating the research and the proposed framework, presenting its application in a real business case of aerospace mission design on the European Space Agency (ESA).FP7 ENSEMBLE, UNITE, MSEE and IMAGINE project

ICU data management - A permissioned blockchain approach

Since its origin in finance, blockchain have been revolutionizing data storage and sharing in many other sensitive areas. Being the focus of Permissioned Blockchains around privacy, confidentiality, immutability, interoperability and reliability, it fits perfectly within the data requisites of healthcare. Even more, with the surge of new iterations of more recent implementations based on smart-contracts/chaincode that has its focus on increasing efficiency and usability and ease of implementation. Intensive Medicine an area with such high data complexity and throughput, and high incidence of medical error and patient injury. As such, it's imperative the continuous research and implementation of new technologies that can make pertinent knowledge available through reliable and accurate data, thus providing appropriate problem-solving skills to physicians. This paper presents a solution, as part of the Intelligence Decision Support Systems for Intensive Medicine (ICDS4IM) project, which objective is to increase accuracy, confidentiality and value to data from vital sensors and monitors by assuring its immutability and controlled oversee.The work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Projects Scope: DSAIPA/DS/0084/2018

An intelligent framework for dynamic web services composition in the semantic web

As Web services are being increasingly adopted as the distributed computing technology of choice to securely publish application services beyond the firewall, the importance of composing them to create new, value-added service, is increasing. Thus far, the most successful practical approach to Web services composition, largely endorsed by the industry falls under the static composition category where the service selection and flow management are done a priori and manually. The second approach to web-services composition aspires to achieve more dynamic composition by semantically describing the process model of Web services and thus making it comprehensible to reasoning engines or software agents. The practical implementation of the dynamic composition approach is still in its infancy and many complex problems need to be resolved before it can be adopted outside the research communities. The investigation of automatic discovery and composition of Web services in this thesis resulted in the development of the eXtended Semantic Case Based Reasoner (XSCBR), which utilizes semantic web and AI methodology of Case Based Reasoning (CBR). Our framework uses OWL semantic descriptions extensively for implementing both the matchmaking profiles of the Web services and the components of the CBR engine. In this research, we have introduced the concept of runtime behaviour of services and consideration of that in Web services selection. The runtime behaviour of a service is a result of service execution and how the service will behave under different circumstances, which is difficult to presume prior to service execution. Moreover, we demonstrate that the accuracy of automatic matchmaking of Web services can be further improved by taking into account the adequacy of past matchmaking experiences for the requested task. Our XSCBR framework allows annotating such runtime experiences in terms of storing execution values of non-functional Web services parameters such as availability and response time into a case library. The XSCBR algorithm for matchmaking and discovery considers such stored Web services execution experiences to determine the adequacy of services for a particular task. We further extended our fundamental discovery and matchmaking algorithm to cater for web services composition. An intensive knowledge-based substitution approach was proposed to adapt the candidate service experiences to the requested solution before suggesting more complex and computationally taxing AI-based planning-based transformations. The inconsistency problem that occurs while adapting existing service composition solutions is addressed with a novel methodology based on Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). From the outset, we adopted a pragmatic approach that focused on delivering an automated Web services discovery and composition solution with the minimum possible involvement of all composition participants: the service provider, the requestor and the service composer. The qualitative evaluation of the framework and the composition tools, together with the performance study of the XSCBR framework has verified that we were successful in achieving our goal

BlogForever D3.2: Interoperability Prospects

This report evaluates the interoperability prospects of the BlogForever platform. Therefore, existing interoperability models are reviewed, a Delphi study to identify crucial aspects for the interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is conducted, technical interoperability standards and protocols are reviewed regarding their relevance for BlogForever, a simple approach to consider interoperability in specific usage scenarios is proposed, and a tangible approach to develop a succession plan that would allow a reliable transfer of content from the current digital archive to other digital repositories is presented

Hub-and-spoke Interoperability: an out of the skies approach for large-scale data interoperability

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresData Interoperability is a key challenge in large-scale heterogeneous environments. In here, interoperability via standards is not feasible or even possible; then, the classic approach, Point-to-Point (P2P) Interoperability, presents here two key problems: the trouble of non-modifiable systems that inhibit full possible interoperability and the excessive quantity of interoperability resources needed for establishing interoperability. A new approach is required for sustaining interoperability in those environments! Laterally thinking, commercial air transportation environments exhibit similar properties and problems to Data Interoperability environments and therefore face comparable difficulties. Outstanding approaches such as scissor-hub operations and the hub-andspoke paradigm have managed to address those challenges in commercial air transportation environments. Which, looking from data interoperability perspective, raises the idea of Mediated Interoperability and Interoperability Compositions. From there, a novel approach for data interoperability is proposed, the Hub-and-Spoke(H&S) Interoperability, as the hypothesis for addressing data interoperability in largescale environments. The H&S Interoperability approach fully solves the interoperability coverage problem and significantly reduces the number of resources needed for realising interoperability, thus outperforming P2P Interoperability. At the end, it is provided a technological realisation of the H&S approach, as the Plug’n’Interoperate solution, built upon plug-and-play principles applied to data interoperability

A Conceptual Framework for Analysis of System Safety Interoperability of United States Navy\u27s Combat Systems

Today\u27s political and military reality requires the optimal use of our legacy systems. The objective is to maximize the effectiveness of our operations by efficient allocation, placement and the use of our forces and war-fighting systems. The synergism drawn from the capabilities of the legacy complex systems enables today\u27s war-fighting needs to be met without substantial increase in cost or resources. This synergism can be realized by the effective integration and interoperation of legacy systems into a larger, more complex system of systems. However, the independently developed legacy systems in this new tactical environment often have different data types, languages, data modeling, operating systems, etc. These differences are impediments to the requirement for interoperability, and can create an environment of confusion, misinformation and certainly un-interoperability, hence hinder the safe interoperation of the metasystem and potentially increase the risk for mishaps. Safe interoperability capability assures that the mission objectives are achieved not only effectively but also safely. The System Safety Interoperability Framework (SSIF) introduced in this dissertation provides the framework for the engineering community to evaluate, from system safety perspective, the interoperability issues between multiple complex systems in the U.S. Navy\u27s system of systems context. SSIF characterization attributes are System of Systems (SoS) tactical environment, SoS Engineering, SoS Safety Engineering, and Safety Critical Data. SSIF is applied to AEGIS Ballistic Missile Defense 3.0 Program to explore and analyze the safety interoperability issues in the overall system, by which the SSIF is further validated as an effective approach in analyzing the safe interoperability capability in Navy\u27s combat systems