Nikolay Mehandjiev

Meta-design: a manifesto for end-user development

End-user development (EUD) activities range from customization to component configuration and programming. Office software, such as the ubiquitous spreadsheet, provides customization facilities, while the growth of the Web has added impetus to end-user scripting for interactive functions in Web sites. In scientific and engineering domains, end users frequently develop complex systems with standard programming languages such as C++ and Java. However, only a minority of users adapt commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software products. Indeed, composing systems from reusable components, such as enterprise resource planing (ERP) systems, defeats most end users who resort to expensive and scarce expert developers for implementation.

Dynamic business network process management in instant virtual enterprises

Nowadays, business supply chains for the production of complex products or services are likely to involve a number of autonomous organizations. The competitive market requires that these supply chains are highly agile, effective and efficient. Agility and effectiveness are obtained by forming highly dynamic virtual enterprises within supplier networks. We call these instant virtual enterprises (IVEs). The required efficiency of creating and operating IVEs can only be obtained by automated support for design, setup and enactment of business processes within these IVEs. This process support involves the dynamic composition of local processes of network members into global processes at the IVE level. This functionality goes significantly beyond traditional approaches for interorganizational workflow management. The approach, architecture and technology required for this dynamic network process management in IVEs are outlined in this paper. We show how the developed approach is applied in the automotive industry in the context of the CrossWork IST project.

Agent-based optimisation of logistics and production planning

Abstract Manufacturing and logistics service provision enterprises are currently moving towards open virtual enterprise collaboration networks to meet the needs of the Global Economy. In such networks, manufacturing and logistics planning and scheduling is challenging due to the difficulties in integrating information from different partners and in exploring a large and dynamically changing number of planning and scheduling alternatives. Agent-based technology is considered suitable to support planning and scheduling in such enterprises because agents can dynamically adapt their behaviour to changing requirements and they can reduce the number of planning and scheduling alternatives via negotiation. This paper presents an agent-based approach for supporting logistics and production planning, taking into account not only production schedules but also availability and cost of logistic service providers. This is achieved through efficient negotiation mechanisms based on an extended contracting protocol. The agent infrastructure is being developed within the context of Agentcities, a successful EU-funded initiative to build a world-wide distributed and open platform which provides agent-based services. The proposed approach is illustrated in a case study concerning optimisation of production planning of a virtual manufacturing enterprise in relation to sub-contracted logistic services used to transport materials between the enterprise units.

Seeking Quality of Web Service Composition in a Semantic Dimension

Ranking and optimization of web service compositions represent challenging areas of research with significant implications for the realization of the “Web of Services” vision. “Semantic web services” use formal semantic descriptions of web service functionality and interface to enable automated reasoning over web service compositions. To judge the quality of the overall composition, for example, we can start by calculating the semantic similarities between outputs and inputs of connected constituent services, and aggregate these values into a measure of semantic quality for the composition. This paper takes a specific interest in combining semantic and nonfunctional criteria such as quality of service (QoS) to evaluate quality in web services composition. It proposes a novel and extensible model balancing the new dimension of semantic quality (as a functional quality metric) with a QoS metric, and using them together as ranking and optimization criteria. It also demonstrates the utility of Genetic Algorithms to allow optimization within the context of a large number of services foreseen by the “Web of Services” vision. We test the performance of the overall approach using a set of simulation experiments, and discuss its advantages and weaknesses.

Dynamic Business Process Formation for Instant Virtual Enterprises

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Towards Scalability of Quality Driven Semantic Web Service Composition

Optimizating semantic web service compositions is known to be NP-hard, so most approaches restrict the number of services and offer poor scalability. We address the scalability issue by selecting compositions which satisfy a set of constraints rather than attempting to produce an optimal composition. Firstly, we define constraints within an innovative and extensible quality model designed to balance semantic fit (or functional quality) with quality of service (QoS) metrics. The semantic fit criterion evaluates the quality of semantic links between the semantic description of Web services parameters, whilst QoS focuses on non-functional criteria of services. Coupling these criteria allows us to further constrain and select valid compositions. To allow the use of this model in the context of millions of services as foreseen by the strategic EC-funded project SOA4All, we i) formulate the selection problem as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem and ii) test the use of a stochastic search method. Finally we compare the latter with state-of-the-art approaches.

Internet-based support for process-oriented instant virtual enterprises

The ever-increasing complexity of contemporary products and services demands business supply chains that ultimately involve a large number of autonomous organizations. Competitive markets require these chains to be highly agile, effective, and efficient, which organizations can achieve by forming dynamic virtual enterprises within supplier networks, called instant virtual enterprises (IVEs). The authors present the CrossWork system, which helps these organizations efficiently create and operate IVEs by providing automated, Internet-based support for the composition, setup, and execution of global business processes. This article uses the automotive domain to illustrate the systems optimal use.

Engineering Environment-Mediated Multi-Agent Systems

The increasingly complex and dynamic nature of contemporary markets demands that a business engages in an ongoing dialogue with all aspects of its environment, including other cooperative and competitive businesses. Whilst the concept of a business ecosystemcaptures the essence of such a domain, the lack of a convincing software architecture for its support has resulted in solutions which only partially leverages the potential of the forementioned concept. In this paper, we present an architecture for a business ecosystem supporting application based on Dynamic Agent-based Ecosystem Model (DAEM:) a novel and promising approach to support business ecosystems and their adaptation capabilities where the environment plays an identifiable mediating role.

Assisted Service Composition for End Users

Involving people who do not have programming background in assembling and tailoring service-based applications promises to open up access to the creativity of millions of users. An increasing number of development environments aim to do this by offering drag-and-drop visual representations connecting different service components into an assembly. In contrast to the majority of these, we did not start with the technology but with the users - service producers and consumers, and studied the core issues which should be resolved before people who are not programmers can start to assemble services into meaningful applications, over and above the presentation-level integration offered by current mash-up environments. The result is an assisted approach to service composition for end users, which uses semantic technologies to shield users from the irrelevant complexity of service technology and from the need to manually resolve dependencies between services. The approach was evaluated by a focus group of non-technical users, who ranked it highly and provided valuable suggestions for further improvements and supporting features.

A Conceptual Architecture Based on Intelligent Services for Manufacturing Support Systems

The contribution of this paper is a conceptual architecture based on intelligent services for manufacturing support systems. Current approaches cannot cope with the dynamism inherent in the manufacturing domain, where unexpected and drastic changes occur at any time and affect cross-boundary systems. Our approach alleviates these issues and focuses on the need for supporting real-time automatic negotiation, planning, scheduling and optimisation, intra and across factories. We present an execution example of our approach in the aerospace industry, instantiating the conceptual architecture using different technologies. With this we push forward a new definition of Intelligent Services and indicate future work in the area.