Web Services Support for Dynamic Business Process Outsourcing

Outsourcing of business processes is crucial for organizations to be effective, efficient and flexible. To meet fast-changing market conditions, dynamic outsourcing is required, in which business relationships are established and enacted on-the-fly in an adaptive, fine-grained way unrestricted by geographic distance. This requires automated means for both the establishment of outsourcing relationships and for the enactment of services performed in these relationships over electronic channels. Due to wide industry support and the underlying model of loose coupling of services, Web services increasingly become the mechanism of choice to connect organizations across organizational boundaries. This paper analyzes to which extent Web services support the dynamic process outsourcing paradigm. We discuss contract -based dynamic business process outsourcing to define requirements and then introduce the Web services framework. Based on this, we investigate the match between the two. We observe that the Web services framework requires further support for cross - organizational business processes and mechanisms for contracting, QoS management and process-based transaction support and suggest ways to fill those gaps

Transfer Pricing of Intangible Assets in the US, the OECD and Australia: Are Profit-Split Methodologies the Way Forward?

In the 21st century, the number one international tax issue of interest to multinational enterprises (MNEs) is undoubtedly transfer pricing. The reason for this is that as global trade increases, so too does the uncertainty of the tax treatment of inter-affiliate transactions across national boundaries and the spectre of double taxation. The Australian Deputy Commissioner of Taxation has outlined the concept of transfer pricing as follows: 'Broadly, transfer pricing relates to the setting of prices by multinationals for the goods and services that they supply to related parties. It also covers the structuring of transactions and financial relationships, and how innovation happens and is rewarded.' The OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and Tax Administrations (the OECD Guidelines) make it clear that the concept of transfer pricing should not be confused with that of tax fraud, or of tax avoidance, even though transfer pricing transactions may be utilised for such purposes. A number of international tax specialists have also stressed that incorrect references to transfer pricing as 'income-shifting' obfuscate a clear analysis. A paper prepared by the United Nations Secretariat in 2001 has described transfer pricing as 'probably the most important tax issue in the world'. Referring to the fact that over 60 percent of international trade is carried out within MNEs, the paper also refers to the impact which intangible property has had on this trade. Both US and Australian tax practitioners have acknowledged that some of the most difficult transfer pricing issues have always been in the area of intangible property. The tax treatment of intangible assets therefore warrants particular attention in the transfer pricing context. In the United States, for purposes of section 482 of the final regulations, the term 'intangible' refers to any item included in one of six broad categories specified in the regulations, provided the item has substantial value independent of the services of any individual. These categories of intangible property include: • Patents, inventions, formulas, processes, designs, patterns or know-how; • Copyrights and literary, musical, or artistic compositions; • Trademarks, trade names, or brand names; • Franchises, licenses, or contracts; • Methods, programs, systems, procedures, campaigns, surveys, studies, forecasts, estimates, customer lists, or technical data; and • Any other similar item that derives its value from its intellectual content rather than its physical attributes. For the purposes of Chapter VI of the OECD Guidelines, 'intangible property' includes rights to use industrial assets, such as patents, trademarks, trade names, designs or models, literary and artistic property rights, and intellectual property such as know-how and trade secrets. Australian Taxation Rulings generally refer to the OECD definitions of intangible assets. The internationally accepted arm's length principle demands that MNEs charge transfer prices in their controlled transactions that are consistent with the prices that would have been charged for the same uncontrolled transaction taking place between unrelated, independent enterprises under the same circumstances. To this end, transfer pricing methodologies are utilised by MNEs in order to establish an arm's length outcome. The transfer pricing methodology adopted by an MNE consequently constitutes a pivotal component of a determination of the arm's length consideration attributable to a transaction involving the intragroup transfer of intangible property. As identical transactions between unrelated enterprises are rare, transfer pricing methodologies tend to focus on comparable rather than identical transactions. So-called 'transactional' methodologies have been espoused by revenue authorities as the most direct way of establishing whether arm's length conditions exist between associated enterprises. These methodologies are reliant on finding either identical transactions, or, where these are not available, similar comparable transactions. There has been a growing realisation that where intangible assets are concerned, there are grave problems in determining even a comparative analysis. This paper will explore the consequent shifting focus to newer, non-traditional methodologies, especially profit-split methodologies, in the US and Australia, and to a lesser extent by the OECD. These methodologies tend to rely in whole or in part on internal data rather than on data derived from comparable uncontrolled transactions. The US final section 482 regulations , the OECD Guidelines and the Australian transfer pricing rulings all permit MNEs to select an appropriate transfer pricing methodology for their inter-affiliate transfers of intangible assets. Different methodologies may be selected under different circumstances. It is necessary to assess a number of variables in determining the correct methodology for a particular transaction. These variables may change over time, necessitating a reconsideration of the methodology to be utilised. Although there are marked similarities in the US, OECD and Australian approaches to choosing a transfer pricing methodology for intangible property transfers, there are also some important differences. While the official position of the US is that its final transfer pricing regulations are consistent with the OECD Guidelines, some OECD member countries disagree. This has had the unfortunate result that MNEs risk antagonising certain revenue authorities if they undertake what appears to be a US transfer pricing approach. Multinational taxpayers are therefore compelled 'to account for multiple and sometime[s] disparate rules when setting, documenting, and defending cross-border transfer prices.

Disaggregating non-volatile memory for throughput-oriented genomics workloads

Massive exploitation of next-generation sequencing technologies requires dealing with both: huge amounts of data and complex bioinformatics pipelines. Computing architectures have evolved to deal with these problems, enabling approaches that were unfeasible years ago: accelerators and Non-Volatile Memories (NVM) are becoming widely used to enhance the most demanding workloads. However, bioinformatics workloads are usually part of bigger pipelines with different and dynamic needs in terms of resources. The introduction of Software Defined Infrastructures (SDI) for data centers provides roots to dramatically increase the efficiency in the management of infrastructures. SDI enables new ways to structure hardware resources through disaggregation, and provides new hardware composability and sharing mechanisms to deploy workloads in more flexible ways. In this paper we study a state-of-the-art genomics application, SMUFIN, aiming to address the challenges of future HPC facilities.This work is partially supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the EU Horizon 2020 programme (GA 639595), the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitivity (TIN2015-65316-P) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014-SGR-1051).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Context constraint integration and validation in dynamic web service compositions

System architectures that cross organisational boundaries are usually implemented based on Web service technologies due to their inherent interoperability benets. With increasing exibility requirements, such as on-demand service provision, a dynamic approach to service architecture focussing on composition at runtime is needed. The possibility of technical faults, but also violations of functional and semantic constraints require a comprehensive notion of context that captures composition-relevant aspects. Context-aware techniques are consequently required to support constraint validation for dynamic service composition. We present techniques to respond to problems occurring during the execution of dynamically composed Web services implemented in WS-BPEL. A notion of context { covering physical and contractual faults and violations { is used to safeguard composed service executions dynamically. Our aim is to present an architectural framework from an application-oriented perspective, addressing practical considerations of a technical framework

A coordination protocol for user-customisable cloud policy monitoring

Cloud computing will see a increasing demand for end-user customisation and personalisation of multi-tenant cloud service offerings. Combined with an identified need to address QoS and governance aspects in cloud computing, a need to provide user-customised QoS and governance policy management and monitoring as part of an SLA management infrastructure for clouds arises. We propose a user-customisable policy definition solution that can be enforced in multi-tenant cloud offerings through an automated instrumentation and monitoring technique. We in particular allow service processes that are run by cloud and SaaS providers to be made policy-aware in a transparent way

Extended Fault Taxonomy of SOA-Based Systems

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is considered as a standard for enterprise software development. The main characteristics of SOA are dynamic discovery and composition of software services in a heterogeneous environment. These properties pose newer challenges in fault management of SOA-based systems (SBS). A proper understanding of different faults in an SBS is very necessary for effective fault handling. A comprehensive three-fold fault taxonomy is presented here that covers distributed, SOA specific and non-functional faults in a holistic manner. A comprehensive fault taxonomy is a key starting point for providing techniques and methods for accessing the quality of a given system. In this paper, an attempt has been made to outline several SBSs faults into a well-structured taxonomy that may assist developers to plan suitable fault repairing strategies. Some commonly emphasized fault recovery strategies are also discussed. Some challenges that may occur during fault handling of SBSs are also mentioned

Engineering of service-oriented automation systems: a survey

The evolution of manufacturing systems and the emergence of decentralised control require flexibility at various levels of their lifecycle. New emerging methods, such as multi-agent and service-oriented systems are major research topics in the sense of revitalizing the traditional production procedures. This paper takes an overview of the serviceoriented approach in terms of platform and engineering tools, from the perspective of automation and production systems. From the basic foundation to the more complex interactions, service-oriented architectures and its implementation in form of web services provide diverse and quality proved features that are welcome to different states of the production systems’ life-cycle. Key elements are the concepts of modelling and collaboration, which enhance the automatic binding and synchronisation of individual low-value services to more complex and meaningful structures. Such interactions can be specified by Petri nets, a mathematically well founded tool with features that enhance towards the modelling of systems. The right application of different methodologies together should motivate the development of service-oriented manufacturing systems that embrace the vision of collaborative automation.The authors would like to thank the European Commission and the partners of Network of Excellence “Innovative Production Machines and Systems” (http://www.iproms.org/) and the SOCRADES project (http://www.socrades.eu) for their support.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Engineering of service-oriented automation systems: a survey

The evolution of manufacturing systems and the emergence of decentralised control require flexibility at various levels of their lifecycle. New emerging methods, such as multi-agent and service-oriented systems are major research topics in the sense of revitalizing the traditional production procedures. This paper takes an overview of the serviceoriented approach in terms of platform and engineering tools, from the perspective of automation and production systems. From the basic foundation to the more complex interactions, service-oriented architectures and its implementation in form of web services provide diverse and quality proved features that are welcome to different states of the production systems’ life-cycle. Key elements are the concepts of modelling and collaboration, which enhance the automatic binding and synchronisation of individual low-value services to more complex and meaningful structures. Such interactions can be specified by Petri nets, a mathematically well founded tool with features that enhance towards the modelling of systems. The right application of different methodologies together should motivate the development of service-oriented manufacturing systems that embrace the vision of collaborative automation.The authors would like to thank the European Commission and the partners of Network of Excellence “Innovative Production Machines and Systems” (http://www.iproms.org/) and the SOCRADES project (http://www.socrades.eu) for their support.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications