Hemant K. Jain

A Comprehensive Model for the Design of Distributed Computer Systems

The availability of micro-, mini-, and supercomputers has complicated the laws governing the economies of scale in computers. A recent study by Ein-Dor [7] concludes that it is most effective to accomplish any task on the least powerful type of computer capable of performing it. This change in cost/performance, and the promise of increased reliability, modularity, and better response time has resulted in an increased tendency to decentralize and distribute computing power. But some economic factors, such as the communication expenses incurred and increased storage with distributed systems are working against the tendency to decentralize. It is clear that in many instances the optimal solution will be an integration of computers of varying power.

Measuring Reliability of Applications Composed of Web Services

Web services represent an alternative basis for the rapid development of application systems. Much of the research on composition and orchestration of Web services centers around functional sufficiency and performance. Non-functional characteristics like reliability and security play an important role in the selection of Web services by system architects. This paper provides a basis for measuring reliability of an application system that is assembled using Web services. It outlines criteria for measuring reliability for individual tasks, specifies combining functions for differently configured tasks, and applies these techniques to a problem which contains various sizes of business processes to demonstrate the efficacy of the approach

State of the Art in Modeling and Deployment of Electronic Contracts

Modeling and deployment of e-contracts is a challenging task because of the involvement of both technological and business aspects. There are several frameworks and systems available in the literature. Some works mainly deal with the automatic handling of paper contracts and others provide monitoring and enactment of contracts. Because contracts evolve, it is useful to have a system that models and enacts the evolution of e-contracts.

Services Computing in Daily Work: Service Engineering vs. Software Engineering

Today, more and more software are augmented with service-oriented packaging. At the same time, more and more business and government services are provided and offered in the form of software. However, there are debates on whether and how much service engineering has in common with software engineering.

Tutorial 5: Business Agility and Process Management

The turbulent modern business environments require firms to be more flexible and agile. This requires ability to quickly integrate and automate intra and inter-organizational business processes. An agile IT architecture is the key to achieving success in this environment. Service oriented architecture and Web services provide means for achieving the business agility. However, significant impediments to wide scale adoption and use of these technologies remain. We will focus on significant challenges in the areas of service identification and design, cataloging and searching for appropriate services, domain specific standardization of service interfaces, matching service functionality with requirements, and service selection based on non functional characteristics. We describe an integrated framework based on standard modeling, design and code generation tools to support development of highly agile application systems. This framework is a result of multi year research effort aimed at developing methodologies and tools for defining business components and Web services, develop schemes for describing components and services in business terms to allow efficient search of appropriate component/services and an environment for assembling application from reusable components and Web services. Specific approaches used to address some of the challenges described above will be discussed

Direct manipulation support for flexible manufacturing systems using an object-oriented model

Though interest in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) has demonstrated a spiraling trend, much of the research in the area tends to be fragmentary, in part due to the complexity of problems in the domain, and the multiplicity of solution strategies employed to address them. This paper proposes a comprehensive model for FMS using an object-oriented representation, that permits addressing of individual problems via heuristic solution procedures. The solution process is enhanced through the use of a direct manipulation interface that permits the designer to intervene and control the functioning of the system with minimal syntactic knowledge.<<ETX>>