Tong Mo

SMDA: A Service Model Driven Architecture

As service industry has gradually been the domination of world economy, research and practice on service and service system development is now flourishing as a hotspot in both academia and industry. Service engineering, referring to the methodology for service system modeling, development and deployment with the support of information technologies, has great significance to improve the quality and efficiency of service enterprises. However, until today there are still lack of enough attentions on such methodology. To address this issue, in this paper we present a service-oriented model driven architecture named SMDA, which extends UML to USML to describe service model and support the interoperability between heterogeneous service model, uses service component to build service system and adopts a QFD based service evaluation method to evaluate the service models and service system. This paper is to provide solution for establishing service systems to respond customer requirements in an “agile” style.

A Service System Theory Frame Based on Ecosystem Theory

Rudimentary scientific understanding of modern service system not fits service development trend, and service science is proposed to resolve this problem. Socialized division of labor and information technology transforms traditional service into a cooperative, distributed and social system. The relationships between multi-partners and operation mechanism of service system are familiar with ecosystem. Based on ecosystem theory, new service system theory frame is proposed to study service system. Borrowed concepts of population and community from ecosystem, two new concepts: s-population and s-community are proposed to study the composition and static structure of service system. Corresponding with food chain and community succession, value net and service system succession are used to show service systems dynamic mechanism, and a new method ordination of service system is also discussed to analysis service system and service succession. This paper is to provide an essential theoretical framework for service system.

An Event Driven Model for Context-Aware Service

Context-aware service is a new service mode that can provide appropriate service automatically to improve service level based on context information. In context-aware service, service is provided based on the current scene of customer. The scene is identified by context, and scene transition is caused by the change of context. Current research focuses on modeling service with context directly. However, the fact is that the vast majority of context change does not cause the change of scene, and monitoring context to determine the scene directly is inefficient, especially of the multi-context application. We use event which is defined by context as the motivation of scene change and propose an event driven model of context-aware service: EDM. A case of smart home service is discussed to show how to use EDM to do the requirement analysis, design, and implementation of context-aware service. Experimental results show that this approach can effectively reduce the number of scene determination in multi-context application.

A Service Behavior Model for Description of Co-Production Feature of Services

In order to ensure better service quality during service design and execution, requirements raised by service customers need to be fully and rightly gathered, understood and described as models. Co-production between service providers and customers is a key feature of services, however until today there still lack of proper methods to address this issue. In this paper, state of the art of service models in literatures are firstly summarized, then several key aspects of service models are analyzed in details, e.g., roles, interactive behaviors, value and risk, etc. Subsequently, a new service behavior model named “Service-Provider-Customer (SPC)” is presented, including its graphical representations and attribute-based semantics descriptions. To validate this model, a case study on ocean logistics services is put forward, and a qualitative comparison between SPC and some other service models from literatures is shown.

A Context-Source Abstraction Layer for Context-aware Middleware

Context-aware applications demand for a distributed middleware that can collect, aggregate and deliver contextual data for applications. This paper presents one of the main components, Context-Sources Abstraction (CSA), in a middleware for building context-aware applications. The CSA component includes a set of query interfaces and an event notification mechanism to applications. In this way, the access to the hardware are encapsulated by the middleware and virtualized to the end-point applications. The architecture of the CSA and the common functions of CSA are discussed.

CABS3: Context-Awareness Based Smart Service System

Using context-awareness to obtain information and giving proper services automatically is the future way of smart life. Attention to the context limits the overall vision of smart service system. Three main concepts: context, scene and content are abstracted from the whole process of providing smart service. Based on them, a framework of smart service system CABS3 is naturally presented. CABS3 contains basic modules to build a smart service system based on context-aware methods. A sample application is also prepared to show how to use CABS3 to provide smart airport service with Bluetooth technology. This paper aims to provide an empirical framework for building smart services system.

Architectural Design of BIRIS-Based Marine Logistics Service Platform and Related Interoperability Issues

Marine logistics service is one of the fundamental production services to support importing and exporting business. There are so many types of service providers (e.g., ship owners, freight forwarders, docks, warehouses, trucking companies, etc) interacting with each other to co-produce value to customers (i.e., cargo owners). Designing an IT-enabled service system to support such complex co-production and improve service quality is quite necessary. Based on investigation of current states and business requirements of this domain, we import BIRIS (bilateral resource integration service) as the mode of the marine logistics service platform. Architectural design of BIRIS-based platform is presented. Key business services are listed and a set of softwarized web services and their choreographic scenarios that support implementation of business services are illustrationally demonstrated. Several interoperability issues concerned in this platform are summarized and briefly discussed.

Service Composition Based Software Solution Design: A Case Study in Automobile Supply Chain

Service composition and Web mash-up are promising for meeting specific business requirements by integrating multiple distributed services and SaaS (Software as a Service) has become a popular way of software development and delivery paradigm. An application that meets the business challenges the customer faces in managing its supply chain by integrating two existing SaaS offerings into a newly developed technology presented to validate the service composition technologies. This paper contributes with a practice of a light weight approach of the problems that are inevitable in SaaS integration such as data synchronization, process control, and identification. The purpose of this paper tries to provide a reference for researchers and engineers in this domain.

Deep and Shallow Model for Insurance Churn Prediction Service

Churn prediction is very important to the insurance industry. Therefore, there is a big value to investigate how to improve its performance. More importantly, a good model can be used by a common service provider and benefit many companies. State-of-the-art methods either use 1) shallow models such as logistic regression, with sophisticated feature engineering, or 2) deep models that learn features and classification models simultaneously. In terms of performance, shallow models can memorize better while deep models can generalize better but may under-generalize with insufficient data. Therefore, we propose a combined Deep &amp, Shallow model (DSM) to take the strengths of both memorization and generalization in one model by jointly training shallow models and deep models. The experiment results show that for insurance churn prediction, joint training can significantly improve the performance and the DSM earns better performance than both shallow-only and deep-only models. In our real-life dataset, the DSM performs better than CNN, LSTM, Stochastic Gradient Descent, Linear Discriminant Analysis, Quadratic Discriminant Analysis, Gaussian Naive Bayes, AdaBoost, Random Forest, and Gradient Tree Boosting. In addition, the DSM can also be applied to other prediction services.

A Study of the Education Practice of Software Service Engineering as a Discipline

In 2011, the Ministry of Education of China designated software service engineering (SSE) as a discipline. In this paper, we attempt to provide a clearer understanding of SSE and propose a curriculum for it. We will analyze the main concepts of SSE, and discuss the knowledge and skills required by SSE. We will also suggest a curriculum for SSE by taking a balanced business and IT approach. To illustrate the usage of the curriculum, we further discuss the practice of service engineering education at Peking University.