A. Taleb-Bendiab

A Comparative Study into Distributed Load Balancing Algorithms for Cloud Computing

The anticipated uptake of Cloud computing, built on well-established research in Web Services, networks, utility computing, distributed computing and virtualisation, will bring many advantages in cost, flexibility and availability for service users. These benefits are expected to further drive the demand for Cloud services, increasing both the Clouds customer base and the scale of Cloud installations. This has implications for many technical issues in Service Oriented Architectures and Internet of Services (IoS)-type applications; including fault tolerance, high availability and scalability. Central to these issues is the establishment of effective load balancing techniques. It is clear the scale and complexity of these systems makes centralized assignment of jobs to specific servers infeasible; requiring an effective distributed solution. This paper investigates three possible distributed solutions proposed for load balancing; approaches inspired by Honeybee Foraging Behaviour, Biased Random Sampling and Active Clustering.

E-health support services based on service-oriented architecture

This paper discusses an experimental scenario for an e-health monitoring system (EHMS) that uses a service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a model for deploying discovering, integrating, implementing, managing, and invoking e-health services. Such a model could help the healthcare industry to develop cost efficient and dependable healthcare services

Policy-based autonomic control service

Recently, there has been a considerable interest in policy-based, goal-oriented service management and autonomic computing. Much work is still required to investigate designs and policy models and associate meta-reasoning systems for policy-based autonomic systems. In this paper we outline a proposed autonomic middleware control service used to orchestrate self-healing of distributed applications. Policies are used to adjust the systems autonomy and define self-healing strategies to stabilize/correct a given system in the event of failures.

A service-based architecture for in-vehicle telematics systems

The growing needs to access information in remote, mobile environments have sparked interests in so-called In-Vehicle Telematics Systems (IVTS). These relatively new systems have the potential to deliver computing facilitates to road vehicles, which may include in-vehicle infotainment, route-guidance and navigation and the provision of vital information resources used by fleet haulage companies and emergency services (police, fire and ambulance). This paper describes the EmergeITS project, which is concerned with the use of IVTS for emergency fire service applications. In particular, the paper describes a distributed service-based architecture, based on the Jini middleware technology, which can be used to provide fault tolerant application services to remote in-vehicle computers and mobile devices such as Palm devices and WAP phones.

CA-SPA: balancing the crosscutting concerns of governance and autonomy in trusted software

This paper contends that to address and balance the crosscutting concerns of governance and autonomy to produce trusted autonomic systems, a new control policy modelling methodology is required. The paper details the design required which exploit both the design-time specification of baseline policies, and runtime refinements of governance to guarantee and assure correctness, manageability, trust, and dependability for autonomic behaviour. To this end, a concept aided-situation prediction action (CA-SPA) mechanism is specified and implemented to support this design. The paper concludes with general remarks concerning the evaluation and statements for farther works including refinement of the design introduced in this paper

Towards a systemic approach to autonomic systems engineering

An autonomic system is structured as a network of autonomic elements that collaborate to achieve the systems purpose. This paper examines the potential benefit of using well-established systems concepts and techniques in the development of such systems. In particular, it considers the possible role of Checklands Soft Systems Methodology and Beers Viable Systems model in system design. The paper summarizes the relevant aspects of each approach and then assesses both their individual and joint strengths in support of the construction and evaluation of designs. Some practical issues in the use of these approaches are also identified. The discussion is illustrated using aspects of the design of an autonomic operating system.

Autonomic system design based on the integrated use of SSM and VSM

This paper describes an approach to autonomic systems development that involves the integrated use of two general systems design techniques: Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) and the Viable System Model (VSM). The paper summarizes the relevant aspects of each technique and describes how they can be used together to create design models of an autonomic system and its environment. The discussion is illustrated through a consideration of the development of a generic computing system to help manage the technology used in an organisation.

A principled approach to the design of healthcare systems: Autonomy vs. governance

In this paper, we look at decision support for post-operative breast cancer care. Our main concerns are to support autonomy of decision making whilst maintaining the governance and reliability of the decision-making process. We describe the context of our work in the wider medical setting. We then present a set of decision support tools based on the situation calculus as a means of maintaining the integrity of rule bases underlying the decision-making system. The decision support system, Neptune, allows for the authoring, maintenance and delivery of decisions in a self-governing framework. Finally we discuss the implications of our work.

Adjustable deliberation of self-managing systems

In this paper a cybernetics-based viable system architectural model is introduced, which provides a blueprint for high-assurance systems and a meta-control model necessary for the adjustable deliberation and autonomy of self-managing systems. The logical formalism is provided by the Situation Calculus and underpinned by an Enhanced Belief-Desires-Intentions (EBDI) framework to facilitate the representation and reasoning of scaleable autonomic computing systems.

E-Government Information Systems and Cloud Computing (Readiness and Analysis)

A new wave of the IT revolution, e-government, presents a tremendous opportunity to move forward providing higher quality, and cost-effective government services as well as creating a better relationship between citizens and government. The literature review, presented in this paper however, indicated that e-government readiness is a major concern, and that currently there is little availability of comprehensive assessment methods for e-government readiness and most of the assessment frameworks, reviewed for this study, are varied in terms of philosophies, objectives, methodologies, approaches, and results. To this end, this research aims to develop a comprehensive framework of associated guidelines and tools to support E-government Information Systems (EGIS) readiness, with a specific focus on the EGIS migration to the Cloud Computing provisioning model.