A Survey on Service Composition Middleware in Pervasive Environments

The development of pervasive computing has put the light on a challenging problem: how to dynamically compose services in heterogeneous and highly changing environments? We propose a survey that defines the service composition as a sequence of four steps: the translation, the generation, the evaluation, and finally the execution. With this powerful and simple model we describe the major service composition middleware. Then, a classification of these service composition middleware according to pervasive requirements - interoperability, discoverability, adaptability, context awareness, QoS management, security, spontaneous management, and autonomous management - is given. The classification highlights what has been done and what remains to do to develop the service composition in pervasive environments

Cognitively-inspired Agent-based Service Composition for Mobile & Pervasive Computing

Automatic service composition in mobile and pervasive computing faces many challenges due to the complex and highly dynamic nature of the environment. Common approaches consider service composition as a decision problem whose solution is usually addressed from optimization perspectives which are not feasible in practice due to the intractability of the problem, limited computational resources of smart devices, service host's mobility, and time constraints to tailor composition plans. Thus, our main contribution is the development of a cognitively-inspired agent-based service composition model focused on bounded rationality rather than optimality, which allows the system to compensate for limited resources by selectively filtering out continuous streams of data. Our approach exhibits features such as distributedness, modularity, emergent global functionality, and robustness, which endow it with capabilities to perform decentralized service composition by orchestrating manifold service providers and conflicting goals from multiple users. The evaluation of our approach shows promising results when compared against state-of-the-art service composition models.Comment: This paper will appear on AIMS'19 (International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Services) on June 2

A Framework for Design and Composition of Semantic Web Services

Semantic Web Services (SWS) are Web Services (WS) whose description is semantically enhanced with markup languages (e.g., OWL-S). This semantic description will enable external agents and programs to discover, compose and invoke SWSs. However, as a previous step to the specification of SWSs in a language, it must be designed at a conceptual level to guarantee its correctness and avoid inconsistencies among its internal components. In this paper, we present a framework for design and (semi) automatic composition of SWSs at a language-independent and knowledge level. This framework is based on a stack of ontologies that (1) describe the different parts of a SWS; and (2) contain a set of axioms that are really design rules to be verified by the ontology instances. Based on these ontologies, design and composition of SWSs can be viewed as the correct instantiation of the ontologies themselves. Once these instances have been created they will be exported to SWS languages such as OWL-S

A framework for deriving semantic web services

Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario

Enabling Personalized Composition and Adaptive Provisioning of Web Services

The proliferation of interconnected computing devices is fostering the emergence of environments where Web services made available to mobile users are a commodity. Unfortunately, inherent limitations of mobile devices still hinder the seamless access to Web services, and their use in supporting complex user activities. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a distributed, adaptive, and context-aware framework for personalized service composition and provisioning adapted to mobile users. Users specify their preferences by annotating existing process templates, leading to personalized service-based processes. To cater for the possibility of low bandwidth communication channels and frequent disconnections, an execution model is proposed whereby the responsibility of orchestrating personalized processes is spread across the participating services and user agents. In addition, the execution model is adaptive in the sense that the runtime environment is able to detect exceptions and react to them according to a set of rules

A State-of-the-art Integrated Transportation Simulation Platform

Nowadays, universities and companies have a huge need for simulation and modelling methodologies. In the particular case of traffic and transportation, making physical modifications to the real traffic networks could be highly expensive, dependent on political decisions and could be highly disruptive to the environment. However, while studying a specific domain or problem, analysing a problem through simulation may not be trivial and may need several simulation tools, hence raising interoperability issues. To overcome these problems, we propose an agent-directed transportation simulation platform, through the cloud, by means of services. We intend to use the IEEE standard HLA (High Level Architecture) for simulators interoperability and agents for controlling and coordination. Our motivations are to allow multiresolution analysis of complex domains, to allow experts to collaborate on the analysis of a common problem and to allow co-simulation and synergy of different application domains. This paper will start by presenting some preliminary background concepts to help better understand the scope of this work. After that, the results of a literature review is shown. Finally, the general architecture of a transportation simulation platform is proposed