Bogdan Franczyk

COSMA --- An Approach for Managing SLAs in Composite Services

Service provisioning is largely built on agreements specifying the mutual responsibilities of service providers and their customers with respect to functional and non-functional parameters. Current SLA management approaches, i.e. WSLA, WS-Agreement, or WSOL, provide extensive SLA language formalizations and management frameworks. However, they focus on bi-lateral service requester/provider constellations neglecting the SLA management requirements of composite service providers, i.e. managing SLAs with atomic service providers and with composite service requesters and aligning both with each other. A SLA management solution for composite services has to consider the contribution of sourced services - formalized in their (atomic) SLAs (ASLA) - in the management of the provided service - formalized in its respective (composite) SLA (CSLA). This paper presents the novel COmposite Sla MAnagement (COSMA) approach for an integrated management of atomic and composite SLAs during their entire lifecycle. It can be utilized for controlling the relationships between ASLAs/CSLAs and thus serves as the basis for managing and optimizing the SLAs involved in composite services.

Evaluating New Approaches of Big Data Analytics Frameworks

The big data topic will be one of the leading growth markets in information technology in the next years. One problem in this area is the efficient computation of huge data volumes, especially for complex algorithms in data mining and machine learning tasks. This paper discuss new processing frameworks for big and smart data in distributed environments and presents a benchmark between two frameworks - Apache Flink and Apache Spark - based on a mixed workload with algorithms from different analytic areas with different real-world datasets.

InterMarket - towards intelligent mobile agent e-marketplaces

This paper presents work-in-progress towards the development of an intelligent mobile agent-based e-marketplace system called InterMarket. InterMarket aims at enabling mobile access and automated trading in e-marketplaces based on integration of mobile agents and intelligent decision-making agents offered as an add-on component to a commercial e-marketplace platform. The paper overviews the proposed solution and approach for InterMarket, and relates it to the existing research on mobile e-commerce agents and intelligent agent-mediated e-commerce.

Integration of Service Models - Preliminary Results for Consistent Logistics Service Management

The logistics industry is characterized by a high level of collaboration between logistics customers and providers. In fact, sophisticated, knowledge-intense business models such as 4th party logistics providers that are responsible for planning, coordination, and monitoring entire supply chains across logistics companies can be observed. However, integrated approaches for engineering and management of fourth party logistics are rather in its infancy. The Logistics Engineering and Management platform is a service-oriented approach for the development and management of long and mid-term logistics contracts. It serves as a collaboration platform and integrates services from different logistics providers. In this paper a core feature of the platform is presented, a service repository as a single point of truth coping with the complexity of miscellaneous service descriptions and models. Central idea behind this repository is the integration of different specialized service models and the construction of a comprehensive model, which supports direct implementation of services as concrete logistics tasks. In this article we present preliminary results of the service repositorys development and realization and an outlook for future research.

An Approach for Matching Functional Business Requirements to Standard Application Software Packages via Ontology

In recent years many efforts were dedicated to the elicitation and definition of requirements for software development projects. However, by concentrating requirement discussions on software development there is a tendency to neglect the predominant role of standard application software (SAS) in enterprises. The process of choosing a SAS product is poorly understood, frequently ill-structured, and performed in an inefficient and ineffective way leading to suboptimal results. Focusing functional aspects, this paper suggests an approach for describing business requirements and software characteristics in terms of ontologies. This way a formal representation of both, requirements and software features, becomes available and can be used for semi-automated reasoning about the suitability of a certain product. The paper contributes directly to the requirements engineering research and addresses a widely ignored topic by suggesting a solution proposal for the above sketched problem.

Towards an Integrated Simulation Approach for Planning Logistics Service Systems

The planning of complex logistics service systems is increasingly characterized as a collaborative process with various participants involved. The planning process of a logistics service system can be rendered by a Fourth Party Logistics Service Provider (4PL) together with an existing network of logistics partners. Simulation can be used to improve the decision-making process in the planning phase and to detect errors that can become cost intensive in the future. This paper outlines how simulation is integrated into a planning approach for a 4PL. The focus is on the derivation of goals and requirements from the specific characteristics of a 4PL. Based on these goals and requirements an initial integrated planning and simulation procedure is presented.

The Logistics Service Engineering and Management Platform: Features, Architecture, Implementation

The logistics service sector is faced with a growing complexity which needs to be handled by cooperating logistics providers aligning their services in a network. This paper introduces the Logistics Service Engineering and Management platform supporting the Fourth Party Logistics Provider business model that aims at establishing a coordinator of such a network. Hence the idea to employ the service oriented design paradigm at the software and at the business level along with the main features of the platform is presented. Furthermore the basic architecture is explained and a closer look at some implementation details is presented.

Towards Real-Time Data Acquisition for Simulation of Logistics Service Systems

Driven by rising competition pressure companies began to outsource at least parts of their logistics functions to specialized logistics providers in order to concentrate on the core competences. Hence, new business models emerged like the fourth party logistics provider who acts like a coordinator of arising logistics networks. One of the main tasks of the provider is the planning of such logistics networks, which have a very collaborative and dynamic character. In this paper an efficient way to integrate process modeling and simulation as part of the planning phase is introduced. Furthermore, an integrated approach is introduced for supporting the planning by a better data acquisition in order to provide reliable results at an affordable effort using simulation techniques. Therefore, complex event processing is used to gather real-time data and provides the data as service profiles for simulation.

Managing Dynamics of Composite Service Level Agreements with COSMA

Service provisioning is largely built on agreements specifying the mutual responsibilities of service providers and their customers with respect to functional and non-functional parameters. However, the dynamics that result from the service-oriented computing paradigm in particular in composite services place new challenges onto the management of composite service level agreements which could not be achieved yet. This paper discusses the management of SLAs involved in composite services using the COSMA approach. After introducing the COSMA approach, the usage of COSMAdoc instances for negotiating SLAs in composite services is presented in detail.

An unadjusted size measurement of embedded software system families and its validation

Embedded software systems have become the driving force in many areas of technology, like the automotive industry. Functions for the control of cars, driver assistance as well as systems for information and entertainment are accomplished by software driven control units. Owing to the high complexity and development effort of embedded systems, these resources have to be reused. Software system families (SSF) are a promising solution to achieve cost reduction by reusing common software assets in different variants of an automobile. To support the economic management of this developmental approach, we need software metrics to estimate the effort of building embedded software system families. Techniques of size measurement and cost estimation for software system families are highly insufficient, in general, and do not exist for the automotive domain. Therefore, this article describes a conglomeration of innovative metrics to measure the size of a system family oriented software development. These size metrics analyze a real-time and a process focused perspective of embedded software system families in the automotive domain. A combination of both viewpoints describes the unadjusted size of software driven control units to indicate and estimate their development costs. Copyright