Shin Jie Lee

A Framework for Composing SOAP, Non-SOAP and Non-Web Services

Recently, there is a trend on developing mobile applications based on service-oriented architecture in numerous application domains, such as telematics and smart home. Although efforts have been made on developing composite SOAP services, little emphasis has been put on invoking and composing a combination of SOAP, non-SOAP, and non-Web services into a composite process to execute complex tasks on various mobile devices. Main challenges are two-fold: one is how to invoke and compose heterogeneous Web services with various protocols and content types, including SOAP, RESTful, and OSGi services; and the other is how to integrate non-Web services, like Web contents and mobile applications, into a composite service process. In this work, we propose an approach to invoking and composing SOAP, non-SOAP, and non-Web services with two key features: an extended BPEL engine bundled with adapters to enable direct invocation and composition of SOAP, RESTful and OSGi services based on Adapter pattern; and two transformation mechanisms devised to enable conversion of Web contents and Android activities into OSGi services. In the experimental evaluations, we demonstrate network traffic and turnaround time of our approach are better than those of the traditional ones.

Integrating Service Composition Flow with User Interactions

Web service technologies are best exploited by composing services, and BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language) is adopted industrial-wide as the defacto service composition standard. However, BPEL is applied mainly in the design of composite services and fully automated processes, and user interaction, that should be included in service delivery, but presently is not included in the BPEL standard. To integrate the composite service flow with user interactions, in this work we propose a framework to extend BPEL to new activities that describe user involvement and user interfaces. An enhanced BPEL engine with a UI rendering engine was accordingly developed.

Dynamic role binding with Agent-centric Contract Net Protocol in agent organizations

As open multi-agents systems are getting increasing attentions in building large-scale software systems, the study on agent organizations - a building block of multi-agents systems, becomes a promising research track. Roles as a first class citizen in agent organizations impose an imperious demand for dealing with the major challenge: how agents bind roles in the formation of agent organizations in which agents can dynamically enter or leave the organizations. This challenge can be further decomposed into four issues: how to discover agents distributed over various organizations, how to select reliable agents to bind roles, how to enable agents to cooperate in roles binding, and how to unbind roles as agents leave an organization. The focus of this paper is on an extension to Contract Net protocol with reputation model to address these four issues related to the life cycle of dynamic role binding, called agent-centric contract net protocol (ACNP), as a negotiation mechanism that agents can adopt to establish agent organizations at run time through roles binding.

Discovering Early Aspects through Goals Interactions

Aspect-oriented approaches have resulted in a great impact on the processing of system properties during the development of software systems. However, a systematic way for eliciting early aspects from requirements is still underdeveloped to better integrate early aspects with the analysis results. As an attempt towards the investigation of the interactions among goals, scenarios, and early aspects, we proposed, in this work, a goal-driven approach to the discovery of early aspects by means of a bidding process that organizes goals into goal clusters for discovering aspectual candidates by exploring the interactions among goals and use cases. By introducing early aspects, the goal-driven approach can be further enhanced to deal with the crosscutting properties in the analysis stage of software development. The proposed approach is illustrated using the problem domains of meeting scheduler system.

Integrating process and work breakdown structure with design structure matrix

∗Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University, Jhongli, Taiwan E-mail: {yjlee, jass, wtlee, jielee}@selab.csie.ncu.edu.tw ∗∗Department of Computer and Information Science, National Taichung University, Taichung, Taiwan E-mail: glenn@mail.ntcu.edu.tw ∗∗∗Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung, Taiwan E-mail: albert@mail.ntou.edu.tw

A possibilistic Petri-Nets-based service discovery

The focus of this paper is to propose a service-oriented multi-agent framework to better integrate Web services and agents. In the making of this framework, there are four main components: (1) a possibilistic Petri-Nets (PPN) based service matchmaking mechanism for service discovery, (2) a service description language based on PPN for describing agent services and Web services, (3) a set of ontologies to facilitate the semantic matchmaking, and (4) an extension of tModels to bridge the Web services registered in UDDI to the PPN matchmaker.

BPEL extensions to user-interactive service delivery

Web Services Business Process Execution Language) is adopted industrial-wide as the de facto service composition standard. However, a BPEL composite service is typically treated as a fully automated service flow that orchestrates multiple web services and involves no user interactions-a desirable feature for service delivery, and is presently not included in the BPEL standard. In this work, we propose an extension to BPEL to infuse user interactions into composite services along three dimensions: (1) to develop two BPEL extension activities to describe the inner workings of user interactions in BPEL service and the rendering of service user interfaces; (2) to provide a wizard-style mechanism to guide the user to interact with the service flow in accordance with the sequence of service execution; and (3) to devise a UI service communication protocol to facilitate secure cross-domain communication among UI services from various domains. An enhanced BPEL engine with a service UI rendering engine has been accordingly developed.

Deliver advanced traveler information services

As the complexity of the requirements for advanced traveler information systems (ATIS) continues to grow, the research towards better and faster development of ATIS is gaining increasing attentions. However, two issues on the delivery of services remain to be addressed: 1) how to quickly build a flexible ATIS to incorporate services that reside in the extant software; and 2) how to perform complex services on the devices of limited resources like on-board PCs. In this paper, we propose a service delivery mechanism based on Web services and agent technology to alleviate these issues. Based on the proposed mechanism, a flexible and extensible ATIS can be developed and its services can be delivered in a systematic manner.

Telematics Services through Mobile Agents

OSGi is considered as one of the fundamental technologies underpinning telematics services, and has attracted both academic and commercial interest. Because of a desire and mandates to deliver telematics services on OSGi environments, professionals have identified a key issue that need to be addressed: the service delivery would suffer from the situation of low bandwidth and unstable links. In this work, we benefit from the inherent characteristics of mobile agents and develop OSGi-Based mobile agents to address this challenge. Furthermore, the mobile agents are enhanced with a Java bytecode extractor which makes a mobile agent partially reside in a contactless smart card for service invocations, and with a risk-enabled reputation model which supports a mobile agent for information filtering to reduce the size of data that need to be carried.

REAL: A Risk-Enabled reputation model for electronic commerce

Recently, a trend to use reputation model for selecting service providers becomes evident in the area of electronic commerce. Most of the effort have been made on providing a reliability value associated with the predicted reputation to interpret how reliable is the reputation. However, the predicted reputation will become ineffective with a low reliability value. Rather than providing a reliability of a reputation, in this paper, we propose a reputation model, called risk-enabled reputation model (REAL), by introducing the notion of risks to better interpret the recent performance of a service provider in e-commerce. The proposed approach has been validated as a better model to reflect a service providers recent performance than given by the extant on-line auctions sites or the models using the technique of adopting mean values.