Nanjangud C. Narendra

What can context do for web services

Context-aware Web service would significantly benefit the interactions between human, applications, and the environment.

Towards service orientation in pervasive computing systems

The emergence of the service-oriented computing paradigm has opened the possibility of using dynamic binding of application requirements to the resources needed to fulfill application tasks. Especially in pervasive computing that is characterized by disconnected operation and mobility, the process of using service specifications and dynamic binding becomes critical. In this paper, we summarize our ongoing work in the area of integrating service orientation into pervasive computing using the notion of specifying service requirements and using these specifications to bind to the available resources dynamically instead of hardwiring them statically. We term these specifications programmable requirements since they can be interpreted at run time to bind to a resource satisfying those specifications. Interestingly this approach also satisfies the basis for two key types of adaptation prevalent in pervasive computing systems - functional and architectural - as we show in this paper.

A reference architecture for managing dynamic inter-organizational business processes

For improving the efficiency and effectiveness of business collaboration, the need emerges to inter-organizationally match e-business services. Recent research activities show heightened attention into that direction with the ecosystems-emergence of service-oriented computing clouds. As this increases the business-, conceptual-, and technical governance complexity, a need exists for using a reference architecture to evaluate and design standard-, and concrete architectures for business-to-business (B2B) collaboration. In this paper, we fill that gap by presenting the eSourcing Reference Architecture eSRA that emerges from B2B-research projects and we check this with a scenario-based validation method. We demonstrate how eSRA enables a quick evaluation of not only research-based B2B-architectures but also of industry application suits. That way, we show the usability and applicability in that with the help of eSRA, system designers directly establish a comprehensive understanding of fundamental B2B concepts and develop higher-quality domain-specific architectures.

Flexible Support and Management of Adaptive Workflow Processes

Workflow management and support has always been a constant challenge for workflow administrators in industry. This is characterized by the need to balance two conflicting goals—the need for control, and the need to provide sufficient flexibility for workflows to adapt to constantly changing business conditions. The traditional centralized and rigid model of workflow no longer suffices provide this balance. What is needed is an approach that provides sufficient flexibility while simultaneously providing an assurance of control for workflow administrators.In this paper, we present such an approach. Our approach is based on two bodies of research work. The first one is the OpenWater approach, wherein workflows meant to be “discovered” on the fly as workflow participants themselves define and execute the workflows. The second one is our earlier work on adaptive workflow, where we have developed a 3-tier architecture that supports adaptive workflow. In our paper, we enhance our 3-tier architecture with some of the OpenWater ideas, in order to develop what we have called a “flexible workflow support and management” architecture. We also demonstrate it on a real-life example in insurance claims processing.

Towards an ontology-based approach for specifying and securing Web services

Abstract With the increasing popularity of Web services and increasing complexity of satisfying needs of users, there has been a renewed interest in Web services composition. Composition addresses the case of a user request that cannot be satisfied by any available Web service, whereas a composite service obtained by integrating Web services might be used. Because Web services originate from different providers, their composition faces the obstacle of the context heterogeneity of Web services. An unawareness or poor consideration of this heterogeneity during Web services composition and execution result in a lack of the quality and relevancy of information that permits tracking the composition, monitoring the execution, and handling exceptions. This paper presents an ontology-based approach for context reconciliation. The approach also focuses on the security breaches that threaten the integrity of the context of Web services, and proposes appropriate means to achieve this integrity.

Using argumentation to model and deploy agent-based B2B applications

This paper presents an agent-based framework for modeling and deploying Business-to-Business (B2B) applications, where autonomous agents act on behalf of the individual components that form these applications. This framework consists of three levels identified by strategic, application, and resource, with focus in this paper on the first two levels. The strategic level is about the common vision that independent businesses define as part of their decision of partnership. The application level is about the business processes that get virtually combined as result of this common vision. As conflicts are bound to arise among the independent applications/agents, the framework uses a formal model based on computational argumentation theory through a persuasion protocol to detect and resolve these conflicts. In this protocol, agents reason about partial information using partial arguments, partial attack, and partial acceptability. Agents can then jointly find arguments that support a new solution for their conflicts, which is not known by any of them individually. Termination, soundness, and completeness properties of this protocol are provided. Distributed and centralized coordination strategies are also supported in this framework, which is illustrated with an online-purchasing example.

Policies for context-driven transactional web services

This paper presents an approach that uses policies to manage contextdriven transactional Web services. Context feeds policies with details on Web services like current status, which permits aligning the behavior of these Web services to the transactional properties they need to satisfy. Context refers here to any information on the interactions a Web service initiates with peers and external environment. Three types of transactional properties are used namely pivot, compensatable, and retriable. Each property satisfaction calls for a set of policies that are specified with a policy language like WSPL. This paper also presents the adaptation strategy that supports developing context-driven transactional Web services. A prototype that implements this strategy is discussed in the paper, too.

Cloud Pricing Models: A Survey and Position Paper.

In recent years, cloud computing has emerged as a successful mode of delivery for Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings and more generically anything as a service (XaaS) offerings. Cloud computing is, an evolutionary paradigm shift in the ways computing platforms and services are made available to the consumers, and this has been made possible due to numerous technology enablers, along with changing business strategies. These changes have contributed significantly in achieving the market shift from differentiated to undifferentiated price models, thereby helping the market movements from monopolistic to perfect competition, and resulting in converting traditional enterprise class software tools and hardware platforms into a commodity. This paper, is a survey on pricing strategies and schemes employed in cloud offerings wherein we study various mechanisms currently being used. The literature survey encompasses market trends on cloud pricing with specific focus on emerging market scenario of India. Based on the need of providing flexible pricing, we discuss our position on a revenue framework wherein cloud pricing strategy is a function of periodic resource utilization analysis, and provide details of our revenue generation model that depends on cross over of different pricing schemes.

Morpheus: Semantics-based Incremental Change Propagation in SOA-based Solutions

SOA-based solutions are typically modeled as business processes composed of loosely coupled services. Such an approach promises the flexibility to more easily customize the solution functionality in line with constantly changing customer requirements. The research issue that we address in this paper, therefore, is how to best accomplish this customization. Current approaches are typically manual and rather ad-hoc, involving repeated attempts to synchronize between (higher-level) design artifacts and (lower-level) source code to determine the configuration points. Alternatively, we propose a framework, Morpheus, which uses design artifacts to locate points of change in an SOA based solution via multi-level change propagation. First, we formally define the structure and semantics of the design artifacts, and the relationships among them. Second, we use these relationships to enumerate all possible changes in each design artifact; if two design artifacts share a relationship,then we also map a change in one design artifact to related changes in the other. Third, using these change relationships,we present an algorithm to traverse the design artifacts so as to propagate changes based on change requirements, ultimately resulting in the modifications needed to support the changed requirements. We illustrate our ideas on a simple yet realistic example in the insurance domain, and also present a prototype implementation.

Goal-Driven business process derivation

Solutions to the problem of deriving business processes from goals are critical in addressing a variety of challenges facing the services and business process management community, and in particular, the challenge of quickly generating large numbers of effective process designs (often a bottleneck in industry-scale deployment of BPM). The problem is similar to the planning problem that has been extensively studied in the artificial intelligence (AI) community. However, the direct application of AI planning techniques places an onerous burden on the analyst, and has proven to be difficult in practice. We propose a practical yet rigorous (semi-automated) algorithm for business process derivation from goals. Our approach relies on being able to decompose process goals to a more refined collection of sub-goals whose ontology is aligned with that of the effects of available tasks which can be used to construct the business process. Once process goals are refined to this level, we are able to generate a process design using a procedure that leverages our earlier work on semantic effect annotation of process designs. We illustrate our ideas throughout this paper with a real-life running example, and also present a proof-of-concept prototype implementation.