Jong-Yih Kuo

A Survey on Automated Service Composition Methods and Related Techniques

As a promising, low-cost, and agile way to develop software, in recent years automatic service composition has been a popular research topic receiving a lot of attentions. For this topic, upon our long-term study and paper reviewed, we present technical survey and observation in this paper, including indispensable background and preliminary knowledge. The survey assumes under traditional composition context. Moreover, following the survey and observation, we suggest two approach patterns and point out possible future challenge as well as direction, especially to the influence of the mature of mobile devices and environment.

Structuring requirement specifications with goals

Abstract One of the foci of the recent development in requirements engineering has been the study of conflicts and vagueness encountered in requirements. However, there is no systematic way in the existing approaches for handling the interactions among nonfunctional requirements and their impacts on the structuring of requirement specifications. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to formulate the requirement specifications based on the notion of goals along three aspects: (1) to extend use cases with goals to guide the derivation of use cases; (2) to analyze the interactions among nonfunctional requirements; and (3) to structure fuzzy object-oriented models based on the interactions found. The proposed approach is illustrated using the problem domain of a meeting scheduler system.

New approach to requirements trade-off analysis for complex systems

We propose a faceted requirement classification scheme for analyzing heterogeneous requirements. The representation of vague requirements is based on L.A. Zadehs (1986) canonical form in test score semantics and an extension of the notion of soft conditions. The trade-off among vague requirements is analyzed by identifying the relationship between requirements, which could be either conflicting, irrelevant, cooperative, counterbalance, or independent. Parameterized aggregation operators, fuzzy and/or, are selected to combine individual requirements. An extended hierarchical aggregation structure is proposed to establish a four-level requirements hierarchy to facilitate requirements and criticalities aggregation through the fuzzy and/or. A compromise overall requirement can be obtained through the aggregation of individual requirements based on the requirements hierarchy. The proposed approach provides a framework for formally analyzing and modeling conflicts between requirements, and for users to better understand relationships among their requirements.

A note on current approaches to extending fuzzy logic to object-oriented modeling

In this study, we have attempted a survey of current approaches carried out in the confluence of the two technologies, fuzzy set theory and object‐oriented technology, that could provide a powerful tool for enhancing database management systems, software modeling, and knowledge representation in artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Possible types of fuzziness are discussed and key features related to different kinds of fuzzy software systems are also pinpointed. In a nutshell, fuzzy theory, as a modeling mechanism, is especially useful in tackling real world applications whose complexity demands are growing intensively. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Towards a Genetic Algorithm Approach to Automating Workflow Composition for Web Services with Transactional and QoS-Awareness

Service-oriented architecture implemented by Web Services is one of the most popular and promising software development paradigm that has brought some challenging research issues today. One of the most important issues is how to automate web service composition at design phase. Currently, there are many researchers concentrating on service composition problem that can be partitioned into three parts, dynamic workflow composition, QoS-aware, and transaction-aware service selection. This paper addresses the issue of automatic composing Web Services into an executable workflow not only according to user¡¦s functional requirements but also to their transactional properties and QoS characteristics. We propose an automatic composition approach through genetic algorithm to satisfy user¡¦s functional requirements, QoS criteria, and transactional requirements automatically at the same time. Experimental results are presented.

A document-driven agent-based approach for business processes management

Abstract Due to the development of Internet and the desire of almost all departments of business organizations to be interconnected and to make data accessible at any time and any place, more and more workflow management systems are applied to business process management. In this paper, a mobile, intelligent and document-driven agent framework is proposed to model business process management system. Each mobile agent encapsulates a single document, which includes a set of business logic. It can achieve (1) trace ability: a function that enables administrators to monitor document processes easily, (2) document life cycle: a feature using agent life cycle to manage document life cycle and concurrent processing, and (3) dynamic scheduling: a document agent can dynamically schedule its itinerary, and a document control agent can dynamically schedule its services. We also implemented an official document management system explaining our approach by Aglets.

Genetic algorithm for QoS-aware dynamic web services composition

Nowadays, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as well as orchestration technology becomes trend of software development. The benefit of SOA is that we will save cost and time extremely due to the services utilized are already exist and reuse those services as well as integrate them. Currently, the main issues of SOA are how to define workflow as well as how to select the suitable services to perform this workflow with QoS. Many approaches separate workflow defined and services with QoS selected, therefore, will sacrifice the users feasibility. In this paper, we provide an approach to deal with the dynamic service composition issue based on the genetic algorithm and cases-based reasoning. This approach can support the flexible service workflow according to the users requirements and compose the workable services to complete this workflow.

Object-oriented design: A goal-driven and pattern-based approach

In recent years, the influences of design patterns on software quality have attracted increasing attention in the area of software engineering, as design patterns encapsulate valuable knowledge to resolve design problems, and more importantly to improve the design quality. One of the key challenges in object-oriented design is how to apply appropriate design patterns during the system development. In this paper, design pattern is analyzed from different perspectives to see how it can facilitate design activities, handle non-functional requirement, solve design problems and resolve design conflicts. Based on the analysis, various kinds of applicability of design patterns are explored and integrated with a goal-driven approach to guiding developers to construct the object-oriented design model in a systematic manner. There are three benefits to the proposed approach: making it easy to meet requirements, helping resolve design conflicts, and facilitating improvement of the design quality.

Verifying scenarios with time Petri-nets

Recently, a substantial amount of research activities has been focused on a user-oriented perspective to the development of software systems. One of the key elements in this perspective is the notion of scenarios: a description of what people do and experience as they try to make usage of computer systems and applications. A variety of applications of scenarios has been proposed, for example, to elicit user requirements, or to validate requirements specifications. As scenarios are useful for the lifecycle of requirements engineering, it is important to enable verification of these scenarios, especially, to detect any wrong information and missing information that are hidden in scenarios. However, scenarios are usually stated in an informal way, which impedes the easiness for verification. The focus of this paper is on the use of time Petri-nets (TPNs) to serve as the verification mechanism for the acquired scenarios. Use cases are used to elicit the user needs and to derive the scenarios. Each of the use cases is described from a users perspective and depicts a specific flow of events in the system. After specifying all possible scenarios, each of them can be transformed into its correspondent time Petri-nets model. Through the analysis of these TPNs models, wrong information and missing information in scenarios can be detected. The proposed approach is illustrated by means of a course registration problem domain.

Modeling imprecise requirements with XML

Fuzzy theory is suitable to capture and analyze the informal requirements that are imprecise in nature, meanwhile, XML is emerging as one of the dominant data formats for data processing on the Internet. In this paper, we attempt to markup the fuzzy objects with XML, and provide conversion rules to define the mapping from fuzzy objects model and fuzzy objects specification into XML schema and XML documents, respectively.