J. Ejarque, M. de Palol, I. Goiri, F. Julia, J. Guitart, R. Badia, and J. Torres , "SLA-Driven Semantically-Enhanced Dynamic Resource Allocator for Virtualized Service Providers", 4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science (e-Science 2008), Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, December 7-12, 2008.

In order to be profitable, service providers must be able to undertake complex management tasks such as provisioning, deployment, execution, and adaptation in an autonomic way. This paper introduces a framework, the Semantically-Enhanced Resource Allocator (SERA), aimed to facilitate service provider management, reducing costs and at the same time fulfilling the QoS agreed with the customers. The SERA assigns resources depending on the information given by service providers according to its business goals and on the resource requirements of the tasks. Tasks and resources are semantically described and these descriptions are used to infer the resource assignments. Virtualization is used to provide a full-customized and isolated virtual environment for each task. In addition, the system supports fine-grain dynamic resource distribution among these virtual environments based on SLAs. The required adaptation is implemented using agents, guaranteeing to each task enough resources to meet the agreed performance goals.

Parkin M., Hasselmeyer P., Koller B., Wieder P., “An SLA Re-Negotiation Protocol”, 2nd Non Functional Properties and Service Level Agreements in Service Oriented Computing Workshop (NFPSLA-SOC'08, Dublin, Ireland) November, 2008

Service Level Agreements are an essential foundation for the realisation of Business Grids as they provide a mechanism for a service provider to charge a customer for meeting an agreed quality of service. However, once a Service Level Agreement has been formed it may need to be re-negotiated as the requirements of the business participants change. This paper describes an abstract, domain-independent protocol for the renegotiation of an agreement, including Service Level Agreements formed using the WS-Agreement standard. The protocol is based on the principles of contract law to make the new agreements formed using it legally compliant. It allows for multi-round re-negotiation in a network environment where messages may be lost, delayed, duplicated and re-ordered.

András Micsik & Paul Karaenke, "Using intelligent agents for service adaptation", Manufacturing 2008, November 2008, Budapest, Hungary.

Services are becoming widely used in the world of engineering and manufacturing as well. Both traditional and computational resources are often encapsulated as Web services, providing the basis for building service-oriented architectures (SOA) based on standards. Services are used on the basis of contractual agreements. A service level agreement (SLA) provides the operational definition of a service as part of a contract between a service provider and a service consumer and includes explicit format statements about the contracted service level. Thus, a SLA contains obligations and guarantees regarding the service in a business relationship. A machine-understandable representation of SLAs enables customers and service providers to monitor the fulfillment of SLAs, and make adaptations in case of SLA violations. The present paper describes a methodology to manage SLA adaptations combining existing techniques of software agents and the Semantic Web.

Schubert, L., & Kipp, A., "Principles of Service Oriented Operating Systems". In Conference Proceedings of ICST GridNets 2008, Beijing, China, October 8-10, 2008.

Grid middleware support and the Web Services domain have advanced significantly over recent years, reaching a point where resource exposition and usage over the web has not only become feasible, but an actual commercial reality. Nonetheless, commercial uptake is still slow and certainly not progressing the same way as other web developments have been taking place - this is mostly due to the fact that usage is still complicated and restrictive. This paper will discuss a new approach towards tackling grid-like networking across organisational boundaries and across different types of resources by moving main parts of the infrastructure to a lower (OS) level. This will allow more intuitive use of Grid infrastructures for current types of users.

Peer Hasselmeyer, Philipp Wieder, Bastian Koller, Lutz Schubert , "Added Value for Businesses through eContract Negotiation", eChallenges '08, October 2008, Stockholm, Sweden.

The growing pervasion of all areas of life with information technology massively influences the way people and companies conduct business. Traditional, “manual” methods are changed or replaced, new opportunities are created, and new business models are developed. Distributed IT infrastructures or Grid systems offer basic functions needed for eBusiness, but they do not yet fulfil a number of essential requirements, e.g. regarding the definition and negotiation of electronic contracts. In this paper we analyse one specific business use case regarding novel requirements to be realised by a distributed IT infrastructure or a Grid system. We compare those requirements with the functions existing infrastructures provide and highlight the gaps which need to be bridged to realise novel business models. Based on previous work executed in European ICT projects, we propose an architecture for a service- based system that exploits Service Level Agreements, semantic techniques, and agents to provide added business values through the negotiation of eContracts.

Robert Woitsch, Hannes Eichner, Wilfrid Utz, "BPM4SOA Business Process Models for Semantic Service-Oriented Infrastructures", eChallenges '08, October 2008, Stockholm, Sweden.

The paper introduces a modelling framework that was developed in the BREIN project to integrate all project related modelling efforts. Based on the project requirements and a state of the art analysis the BREIN related modelling challenges were identified on three levels: syntactical, semantical and contextual. As there are different tools, formats and languages available for the different modelling areas, the key challenge is the integration of the related modelling languages. The paper shows how these challenges are addressed and discusses how business process models can be used for semantic service oriented infrastructures. The implemented modelling framework considers existing standards and establishes a formal integration and transformation among them by realizing a semantic integration service including the syntactical, semantical and contextual level.

Ioannis Kotsiopoulos, Ignacio Soler Juber, Axel Tenschert, Jesus Benedicto Cirujeda, Bastian Koller, "Using Semantic technologies to improve Negotiation of Service Level Agreements", eChallenges '08, October 2008, Stockholm, Sweden.

The need for automation of the negotiation process between Service Providers and costumers requires flexible protocols that address the issue of Semantic Interoperability. In this work, we present an enhancement of the traditional Service Level Agreement Negotiation Protocols using a lightweight annotation framework borrowed from the SAWSDL specification. We present a complete ontological framework that consists of a set of components that assist the negotiating parties to establish an agreement without having to agree on the same metrics. In order to avoid non-deterministic run times we propose the incorporation of the Monte Carlo algorithm in the negotiation protocol. Finally, we illustrate the applicability and the benefits of our work in a business use case.

Robert Woitsch and Andrea Leutgeb, "The BREIN-Roadmap with PROMOTE: A Use-Case Scenario of a Service-Based Knowledge Management Approach", I-Know 08 (International Conference on Knowledge Management), Graz, Austria, 3-5 September 2008.

BREIN is an FP6 EC-Project dealing with the development of an intelligent grid infrastructure. A key knowledge management challenge to be addressed within the project is the distribution of the results from the project to the software development community, in order to foster the usage of the BREIN middleware. Therefore this project introduces the BREIN Roadmap. The Roadmap is realized applying the knowledge management approach PROMOTE® that enables the knowledge transformation and distribution.

Eduardo Oliveros, Henar Muñoz, David Cantelar, Steve Taylor, "BREIN, Towards an Intelligent Grid for Business", Gecon2008, August 2008, published by Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Nowadays companies’ communication is mainly static and does not allow for the flexibility and adaptability required to meet changing requirements or to support unexpected situations. The BREIN project’s main objective is to create an infrastructure that allows companies to collaborate in a dynamic business environment. Moreover, BREIN is strongly focused on SMEs which do not have enough knowledge or resources to participate in this kind of environments. To address this knowledge gap, the BREIN framework reduces relations’ complexity and aims to provide a solution where essential requirements to build this collaborative environment such as self-management capabilities, security, trust and reliability are all integrated into one business network.

L. Schubert, A. Kipp, and S. Wesner, "From Internet to Cross-Organisational Networking", In R. Curran, S. Chou, & A. Trappey Collaborative Product and Service Life Cycle Management for a Sustainable World - Proceedings of th 15th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering (CE2008), August 2008, Belfast, UK. Springer.

The Internet has become a powerful means of communication and interaction and various research projects have shown its potential to revolutionize business models and means of cooperation. Only recently, development has made significant progress in catching up with research and a series of products have been exposed to the market which may well represent the next step to realize this revolution.
This development will allow flexible resource and capability sharing across the net, as if the according capabilities would be locally available — even though this is already possible in principle, new models will allow maintenance of resources & capabilities on an operating system level, making it completely transparent to the average user.
This paper will show how the market is currently changing to host a new range of operating systems and collaboration support that will give rise to complete new capabilities, business models and communities, but at the same time will have us rethink classical approaches to problem solving. The paper will therefore examine recent research approaches to so-called Virtual Organisations and how they contribute to realizing new collaboration modes. It will show how major IT vendors are approaching this vision and where the current development may lead to, and how this will influence future business models.

Jorge Ejarque, Marc de Palol, Iñigo Goiri, Ferran Julia, Jordi Guitart, Jordi Torres and Rosa M. Badia, "Using Semantics for Resource Allocation in Computing Service Providers", SCC2008, July 2008, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

Service providers (SP) business goals require an efficient management of their computational resources in order to perform provisioning, deployment, execution and adaptation which traditionally require human intervention. The semantically-enhanced resource allocator (SERA) is a framework designed to obtain an efficient autonomous service provider management while fulfilling customers' requests. While the efficient dynamic resource management is obtained by means of virtualization and agents, in this paper, we focus on how semantics can help on the task scheduling and resource allocation. In SERA, tasks and resources are semantically described following a resource ontology and resource assignments are inferred by means of a set of rules that define the scheduling policies taking into account the SP business goals.

Dimitris Karagiannis, Robert Woitsch, Wilfrid Utz, Hannes Eichner, Vedran Hrgovcic, "The Business Process as an Integration Platform: Case Studies from the EU-Projects LD-CAST and BREIN", SBPM Workshop, June 2008.

The integration of the business and technical views allows domain experts from the business view to take control over the whole process of service design and delivery. The integration approach of business and technical views presented in this paper is supported by semantic concepts integrating steps for ontology development, maintenance and evolution based upon available high- level business process definitions defined and available at end-users’ scenarios. This approach is evaluated and presented through the use case example from the LD-CAST Project (FP6-ICT-26919) as well as BREIN (IST-FP6-034556).

Joerg Leukel and Stefan Kirn, "A Supply Chain Management Approach to Logistics Ontologies in Information Systems", Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS 2008), May 2008, Poznan, Poland, published by Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Logistics models in information systems describe activities, organi-zations, transportation means, goods, and services being involved in logistics processes. The problem with most current such models, however, is a lack of formal semantics which prevents automated data integration across organi-zational boundaries. In this paper, we take the perspective of supply chain management and employ a well-grounded model which provides core concepts of interorganizational logistics. The contribution is that we (1) propose referring to supply chain management for ontologizing logistics models and (2) provide definitions of core elements of logistics ontologies.

Robert Woitsch, Hannes Eichner, Vedran Hrgovcic, "Modelling Interoperability: The Modelling Framework of BREIN", Workshop on Semantic Interoperability held in Conjunction with I-ESA '08, March 2008.

In BREIN a modelling framework to integrate all project related modelling efforts has been defined. Based on the project requirements and a state of the art analysis the BREIN related modelling challenges were identified on three levels: Syntactical, semantical and contextual. This paper describes the concept of the BREIN Modelling Framework and how the identified modelling challenges are addressed. The contextual challenge is discussed in more detail, introducing how models may be used for the generation of ontologies and how modelling may profit from the use of ontologies.

Paul Karaenke, Thomas Bieser, Michael Schuele and Stefan Kirn, "Towards a Market-Centric OGSA-Compliant Architecture Model", Proceedings of Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik 2008 (MKWI 2008), February 2008, Germany.

The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) provides a high-level framework for service-oriented grid architecture, mostly based on web service standards. The vision of a worldwide computing grid evokes the scenario of electronic markets for grid services. The object of our investigation is a service- oriented grid architecture model that is compliant with the OGSA specification. We address the problem that the OGSA specification does not meet economic requirements of grid markets explicitly, because it has been designed for other, technical objectives. The problem is investigated from an e-business transaction perspective. The contribution of this paper is a market-centric extension that combines OGSA with market services which meet economic requirements revealed from the investigation perspective.

Michael Schuele, Thomas Bieser, Paul Karaenke and Stefan Kirn, "Integration einer Multiagentensimulation in ein Geoinformationssystem", Proceedings of Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik 2008 (MKWI 2008), February 2008, Germany.

Georeferenzierung und damit Geographische Informationssysteme (GIS) finden in vielen Disziplinen außerhalb der Geographie weite Einsatzmöglichkeiten. So sind heute bereits häufig weit mehr als 50% der IT- Anwendungen großer Kommunen auf Geodaten angewiesen. Häufig geht es dabei um Simulationen. Um diese zu realisieren müssen die Analysewerkzeuge eines GIS um eine Simulationskomponente erweitert werden. Dabei muss das im Raum beobachtbare, individuelle und kollektive Verhalten (teil-)autonomer Akteure geeignet abgebildet werden können. Dafür geeignete Konzepte stellt die Multiagententechnologie zur Verfügung. In diesem Beitrag werden die Möglichkeiten der Einbindung von Multiagentensimulationen (MAS) in ein GIS untersucht. Der Lösungsansatz wird aus einer Softwarearchitektur-Perspektive entwickelt und am Beispiel der Simulationen zur Standortplanung umgesetzt sowie validiert.

Axel Tenschert, Ioannis Kotsiopoulos, "Text-Content-Analysis based on the Syntactic Correlations between Ontologies", Workshop on Economic Models for Distributed Systems held in Conjunction with Mardi Gras Conference 2008, January 2008, Louisiana, USA.

The Focus of the work is the development of a SLA-Framework which influences a Method of Text- Content-Analysis. At this the work will refer to the BREIN and the FinGrid project. The Text-Content- Analysis examines the syntactic correlations of several ontologies whose focus lies in the field of mechanical engineering. A method of analysing text and content is developed by this method which refers to the syntactic correlations. Hereby, a syntax and formalisms are needed as well a method for understanding content. This method will be a part of the Text-Content-Analysis. The analysis and methods are embedded in the SLA-Framework which makes the procedure flexible through interaction. The SLA- Framework enables a user to interact with the software as a service by negotiating the user requests. To permit the negotiation a negotiation component is developed to the SLA-Framework. Through the negotiation between user and service the Text-Content-Analysis is enabled to consider the user requests in an intelligent manner. The main focus of the work is the Text-Content-Analysis but the SLA-Framework influences the Procedure of analysing Text and content.