Quality-constrained routing in publish/subscribe systems

Routing in publish/subscribe (pub/sub) features a communication model where messages are not given explicit destination addresses, but destinations are determined by matching the subscription declared by subscribers. For a dynamic computing environment with applications that have quality demands, this is not sufficient. Routing decision should, in such environments, not only depend on the subscription predicate, but should also take the quality-constraints of applications and characteristics of network paths into account. We identified three abstraction levels of these quality constraints: functional, middleware and network. The main contribution of the paper is the concept of the integration of these constraints into the pub/sub routing. This is done by extending the syntax of pub/sub system and applying four generic, proposed by us, guidelines. The added values of quality-constrained routing concept are: message delivery satisfying quality demands of applications, improvement of system scalability and more optimise use of the network resources. We discuss the use case that shows the practical value of our concept

Resilient Critical Infrastructure Management using Service Oriented Architecture

Abstract—The SERSCIS project aims to support the use of interconnected systems of services in Critical Infrastructure (CI) applications. The problem of system interconnectedness is aptly demonstrated by ‘Airport Collaborative Decision Making’ (ACDM). Failure or underperformance of any of the interlinked ICT systems may compromise the ability of airports to plan their use of resources to sustain high levels of air traffic, or to provide accurate aircraft movement forecasts to the wider European air traffic management systems. The proposed solution is to introduce further SERSCIS ICT components to manage dependability and interdependency. These use semantic models of the critical infrastructure, including its ICT services, to identify faults and potential risks and to increase human awareness of them. Semantics allows information and services to be described in such a way that makes them understandable to computers. Thus when a failure (or a threat of failure) is detected, SERSCIS components can take action to manage the consequences, including changing the interdependency relationships between services. In some cases, the components will be able to take action autonomously — e.g. to manage ‘local’ issues such as the allocation of CPU time to maintain service performance, or the selection of services where there are redundant sources available. In other cases the components will alert human operators so they can take action instead. The goal of this paper is to describe a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that can be used to address the management of ICT components and interdependencies in critical infrastructure systems. Index Terms—resilience; QoS; SOA; critical infrastructure, SLA

Context-aware adaptation in DySCAS

DySCAS is a dynamically self-configuring middleware for automotive control systems. The addition of autonomic, context-aware dynamic configuration to automotive control systems brings a potential for a wide range of benefits in terms of robustness, flexibility, upgrading etc. However, the automotive systems represent a particularly challenging domain for the deployment of autonomics concepts, having a combination of real-time performance constraints, severe resource limitations, safety-critical aspects and cost pressures. For these reasons current systems are statically configured. This paper describes the dynamic run-time configuration aspects of DySCAS and focuses on the extent to which context-aware adaptation has been achieved in DySCAS, and the ways in which the various design and implementation challenges are met

Execution/Simulation of Context/Constraint-aware Composite Services using GIPSY

For fulfilling a complex requirement comprising of several sub-tasks, a composition of simple web services, each of which is dedicated to performing a specific sub-task involved, proves to be a more competent solution in comparison to an equivalent atomic web service. Owing to advantages such as re-usability of components, broader options for composition requesters and liberty to specialize for component providers, for over two decades now, composite services have been extensively researched to the point of being perfected in many aspects. Yet, most of the studies undertaken in this field fail to acknowledge that every web service has a limited context in which it can successfully perform its tasks, the boundaries of which are defined by the internal constraints placed on the service by its providers. When used as part of a composition, the restricted context-spaces of all such component services together define the contextual boundaries of the composite service as a unit, which makes internal constraints an influential factor for composite service functionality. However, due to the limited exposure received by them, no systems have yet been proposed to cater to the specific verification of internal constraints imposed on components of a composite service. In an attempt to address this gap in service composition research, in this thesis, we propose a multi-faceted solution capable of not only automatically constructing context-aware composite web services with their internal constraints positioned for optimum resource-utilization but also of validating the generated compositions using the General Intensional Programming SYstem (GIPSY) as a time- and cost-efficient simulation/execution environment

A graph-based framework for optimal semantic web service composition

Web services are self-described, loosely coupled software components that are network-accessible through standardized web protocols, whose characteristics are described in XML. One of the key promises of Web services is to provide better interoperability and to enable a faster integration between systems. In order to generate robust service oriented architectures, automatic composition algorithms are required in order to combine the functionality of many single services into composite services that are able to respond to demanding user requests, even when there is no single service capable of performing such task. Service composition consists of a combination of single services into composite services that are executed in sequence or in a different order, imposed by a set of control constructions that can be specified using standard languages such as OWL-s or BPEL4WS. In the last years several papers have dealt with composition of web services. Some approaches treat the service composition as a planning problem, where a sequence of actions lead from a initial state to a goal state. However, most of these proposals have some drawbacks: high complexity, high computational cost and inability to maximize the parallel execution of web services. Other approaches consider the problem as a graph search problem, where search algorithms are applied over a web service dependency graph in order to find a solution for a particular request. These proposals are simpler than their counterparts and also many can exploit the parallel execution of web services. However, most of these approaches rely on very complex dependency graphs that have not been optimized to remove data redundancy, which may negatively affect the overall performance and scalability of these techniques in large service registries. Therefore, it is necessary to identify, characterize and optimize the different tasks involved in the automatic service composition process in order to develop better strategies to efficiently obtain optimal solutions. The main goal of this dissertation is to develop a graph-based framework for automatic service composition that generate optimal input-output based compositions not only in terms of complexity of the solutions, but also in terms of overall quality of service solutions. More specifically, the objectives of this thesis are: (1) Analysis of the characteristics of services and compositions. The aim of this objective is to characterize and identify the main steps that are part for the service composition process. (2) Framework for automatic graph-based composition. This objective will focus on developing a framework that enables the efficient input-output based service composition, exploring the integration with other tasks that are part of the composition process, such as service discovery. (3) Development of optimal algorithms for automatic service composition. This objective focuses on the development of a set of algorithms and optimization techniques for the generation of optimal compositions, optimizing the complexity of the solutions and the overall Quality-of- Service. (4) Validation of the algorithms with standard datasets so they can be compared with other proposals

Service selection with qos correlations in distributed service-based systems

© 2013 IEEE. Service selection is an important research problem in distributed service-based systems, which aims to select proper services to meet user requirements. A number of service selection approaches have been proposed in recent years. Most of them, however, overlook quality-of-service (QoS) correlations, which broadly exist in distributed service-based systems. The concept of QoS correlations involves two aspects: 1) QoS correlations among services and 2) QoS correlations of user requirements. The first aspect means that some QoS attributes of service not only depend on the service itself but also have correlations with other services, e.g., buying service 1 and then getting service 2 with half price. The second aspect means the relationships among QoS attributes of user requirements, e.g., a user can accept a service with fast response time and high service cost or the user can also accept a service with slow response time and low service cost (Fig. 1). These correlations significantly affect user selection of services. Currently, only a few existing approaches have considered QoS correlations among services, i.e., the first aspect, but they still overlook QoS correlations of user requirements, i.e., the second aspect, which are also very important in distributed service-based systems. In this paper, a novel service selection approach is proposed, which not only considers QoS correlations of services but also accounts for QoS correlations of user requirements. This approach, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one which considers QoS correlations of user requirements. Also, this approach is decentralized which can avoid the single point of failure. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach