Armando Ordóñez

Automated context aware composition of Advanced Telecom Services for environmental early warnings

This paper presents one of the main components of a framework for automated composition of Advanced Telecom Services for environmental early Warnings. The framework, called AUTO, is composed by three main modules: a request processing module that transforms natural language and context information into a planning instance; the automated planning module, based on PELEA, an architecture for planning and execution; and the Service Execution Environment Advance Telecom Services. This paper focuses on the description of the translation of the user request in natural language and his context into planning instances. These planning instances represent service composition tasks based on Automated Planning. The advantages of this approach, like the automatic inclusion of context and user preferences in the composition of services, will be presented. Also, the current implementation will be described and some experimentation will prove the viability of AUTO.

An Automated User-Centered Planning Framework for Decision Support in Environmental Early Warnings

This paper presents the integration of automated planning in AUTO, a framework able to design plans of composed services for environmental early warning management. AUTO is based on three components: a request processing module that transforms natural language and context information into a planning instance; the automated planning and execution module based on an architecture for planning and execution, PELEA; and the Service Execution Environment for Web and Telco Services. The integration of a planning component provides two basic functionalities: the possibility of customizing the composition of services based on the preferences of the user and a middleware level that interfaces the execution of services in the environment.

Grouping of business processes models based on an incremental clustering algorithm using fuzzy similarity and multimodal search

A model for searching business processes, based on a multimodal approach that integrates textual and structural information.A clustering mechanism that uses a similarity function based on fuzzy logic for grouping search results.Evaluation of search method using internal quality assessment and external assessment based on human criteria. Nowadays, many companies standardize their operations through Business Process (BP), which are stored in repositories and reused when new functionalities are required. However, finding specific processes may become a cumbersome task due to the large size of these repositories. This paper presents MulTimodalGroup, a model for grouping and searching business processes. The grouping mechanism is built upon a clustering algorithm that uses a similarity function based on fuzzy logic; this grouping is performed using the results of each user request. By its part, the search is based on a multimodal representation that integrates textual and structural information of BP. The assessment of the proposed model was carried out in two phases: 1) internal quality assessment of groups and 2) external assessment of the created groups compared with an ideal set of groups. The assessment was performed using a closed BP collection designed collaboratively by 59 experts. The experimental results in each phase are promising and evidence the validity of the proposed model.

Natural language processing based Services Composition for Environmental management

Automated services composition is an active research area nowadays. The application of this technology to specific domains, as well as the use of basic Telecommunications services such as call or SMS, offers new challenges. This paper presents the main components of an architecture for automated composition for Environmental Management. The proposed architecture uses Natural Language processing and AI Planners techniques domains. Although the present architecture is focused in a particular domain, most of the principles discussed here are applicable to similar scenarios.

Dynamic Reconfiguration of Composite Convergent Services Supported by Multimodal Search

Composite convergent services integrate a set of functionalities from Web and Telecommunication domains. Due to the big amount of available functionalities, automation of composition process is required in many fields. However, automated composition is not feasible in practice if reconfiguration mechanisms are not considered. This paper presents a novel approach for dynamic reconfiguration of convergent services that replaces malfunctioning regions of composite convergent services considering user preferences. In order to replace the regions of services, a multimodal search is performed. Our contributions are: a model for representing composite convergent services and a region-based algorithm for reconfiguring services supported by multimodal search.

An Impact Study of Business Process Models for Requirements Elicitation in XP

Many communication problems may appear during requirements elicitation causing that final products do not accomplish client expectations. This paper analyzes the impact of using business processes management notation (BPMN) instead of user stories during requirements analysis in agile methodologies. For analyzing the effectiveness of our approach, we compare the use of user stories vs. BP models in eleven software projects during requirements elicitation phase. Experiments evidence that BPMN models improve quality and quantity of information collected during requirements elicitation and ease that clients specify clearly their needs and business goals.

A framework for SDN integrated management based on a CIM model and a vertical management plane

The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm establishes a typical three-plane architecture (i.e., Data, Control, and Application planes) that facilitates the deployment of network functions and simplifies traditional network management tasks. However, SDN lacks an integrated or standardized framework for managing its architecture. Some investigations have addressed such shortage by proposing different solutions that tackle specific management requirements for particular SDN technology instances. This isolated approach forces network administrators to use multiple frameworks to achieve a complete SDN management that is complex and time-consuming in heterogeneous environments. In this paper, we introduce an information model based on the common information model that establishes a technology-agnostic and consistent characterization of the SDN architecture. Such information model represents the core towards building a Management Plane aimed to facilitate the integrated SDN management in heterogeneous environments. To test our information model, we developed a prototype and conducted a performance evaluation in an SDN configuration scenario that deploys different managing technologies. The obtained results provide directions that corroborate the feasibility of our approach (in terms of time-response and network traffic) for configuring heterogeneous SDNs.

Towards automated composition of convergent services: A survey

Abstract A convergent service is defined as a service that exploits the convergence of communication networks and at the same time takes advantage of features of the Web. Nowadays, building up a convergent service is not trivial, because although there are significant approaches that aim to automate the service composition at different levels in the Web and Telecom domains, selecting the most appropriate approach for specific case studies is complex due to the big amount of involved information and the lack of technical considerations. Thus, in this paper, we identify the relevant phases for convergent service composition and explore the existing approaches and their associated technologies for automating each phase. For each technology, the maturity and results are analysed, as well as the elements that must be considered prior to their application in real scenarios. Furthermore, we provide research directions related to the convergent service composition phases.

Multimodal Indexing and Search of Business Processes Based on Cumulative and Continuous N-Grams

Reuse of business processes may contribute to the efficient deployment of new services. However, due to the large volume of process repositories, finding a particular process may become a difficult task. Most of the existing works in processes search are focused on textual information and graph matching. This paper presents a multimodal indexing and search model of business processes based on cumulative and continuous n–grams. The present method considers linguistic and behavior information represented as codebooks. Codebooks describe structural components based on the n-gram concept. Obtained results outperform the precision, recall and F-Measure of previous approaches considerably.

Ontology based monitoring and error detection in converged telecommunication processes

Some approaches for automated reconfiguration of telecommunication convergent processes have been proposed recently. However, mechanisms for monitoring and error detection are focused mostly in subjacent layers without considering high level errors. The present work presents an approach for monitoring and error detecting in convergent processes based on semantic technologies both to represent services and to define rules for monitoring, taking the concept of event from ITIL. Furthermore, the approach is included in the monitoring module of the AUTO framework and tested in Telecom servers using a rule based engine. Preliminary experimentation is also presented.