Schubert L., Kipp A., Koller B. and Wesner S., "Service Oriented Operating Systems: Future Workspaces", Wireless Communications, IEEE Volume: 16 Issue: 3 June 2009.
Most people use more than one computing system for their daily work: an office computer, a corporate laptop for travel, and a private desktop computer. These machines not only differ in their power and resources but also in their environment, including deployed applications, available files, and so on. The current trend is leading to an even greater number of devices and a wider range of capabilities. This presents a major challenge to enabling the vision of the mobile user and worker. This article shows how developments in the area of service-oriented computing, embedded devices, and networking enable user-specific virtual working and private environments on the basis of new approaches toward distributed operating systems. These service-oriented operating systems extend the limited capabilities of local devices with (remote) resource pools, aimed at provisioning identical (or similar) environments in any context and location. As we explain, henceforth, future employee workspaces will concentrate much more on mobility, while the actual resources (computational power, storage, data) will be maintained through dedicated corporate server farms, thus greatly reducing the administration effort and enhancing the user experience.
Schubert L., Kipp A., and Wesner S., "Above the Clouds: From Grids to Resource Fabrics", in print (Future Internet 09), 2009
Over recent years, resource provisioning over the Internet has moved from Grid to Cloud computing. Whilst the capabilities and the ease of use have increased, uptake is still comparatively slow, in particular in the commercial context. This paper discusses a novel resource provisioning concept called Service-oriented Operating Systems and how it differs from existing approaches of Grids and Clouds. The proposed approach aims for making applications and computers more independent of the underlying hardware and increase mobility and performance.The base architecture and functionality will be detailed in this paper, as well as how such operating systems could be deployed in future workspaces.
Ejarque J., De Palol M., Goiri I., Julia F., Guitart J., Badia R., Torres J., “Exploiting semantics and virtualization for SLA-driven resource allocation in service providers”, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 2009
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.
Henar Muñoz Frutos and Ioannis Kotsiopoulos, "BREIN: Business Objective Driven Reliable and Intelligent Grids for Real Business", International Journal of Interoperability in Business Information Systems, Issue 3 (1), 2009.
The Grid adoption inside business environments has not experienced the same uptake as anticipated with respect to the experience in science and academic institutions. Nowadays, they are some examples of Grid implementations for some industrial sectors such as aerospace, automotive or pharmaceuticals, but they involve only single companies which own their infrastructure and high technical and economical resources. Thus, SMEs, which cannot afford high investments, are out of these businesses, while new requirements for developing complex business services by enterprises collaborations are not considered. Thus, BREIN arises in order to address these problems by the introduction of Software as a Service model and by supporting collaborations among enterprises in a dynamic and flexible way. The BREIN project aims to develop a framework, which will extend the Grid possibilities by driving their usage inside new target areas in the business domain. To this end, BREIN deals with the provision of the basic infrastructure these new business models need: enterprise system interoperability, flexible relationships, dynamicity in business processes, security mechanisms and enhanced SLA and contract Management.
BOOK CHAPTERS
Karagiannis D., Woitsch R., Wesner S., "Knowledge Engineering in Business Process Management", Handbook on Business Process Management, Editors: Jan vom Brocke and Michael Rosemann
Business Process Management is commodity today after an evolution from the initial Business Process Reengineering in the 1980ties to a well-established management approach. This chapter proposes three aspects of Knowledge Engineering in Business Process Management. First, Business Process Management can be seen as a domain itself focusing on the BP-Framework that identifies the basic concepts business model, domain, regulation and model processing. Second, Business Processes Management needs to be applied by a management method. Third, Business Process Management needs to be executed within an environment, hence they are deployed. Business Process Management can be the basic concept for corporate knowledge leading to knowledge-sensitive Business Process Management. Studying the knowledge-sensitiveness according four dimensions the (1) form, (2) content, (3) use and (4) interpretation, a Knowledge Engineering and a Knowledge Management support can be distinguished. In the following the focus is on Knowledge Engineering. Knowledge Engineering in BP-Frameworks can be established by models using the meta model approach for integration. Knowledge intensive actions within the BP-Management Method can be supported by Knowledge Engineering techniques that are proposed based on the results of demonstrations in research projects. The deployment of Business Process Management within an execution environment that uses Knowledge Engineering requires consideration of the Knowledge Engineering concepts also in Business Process Management. This chapter therefore argues to support Business Process Management in the three areas BP-Framework, BP-Management Method and BP-Deployment. Knowledge Engineering techniques are proposed, the experiences in demonstration of research projects are described and an outlook on the conceptual and technical integration is given.
Bastian Koller, Eduardo Oliveros, and Alfonso Sánchez-Macián, "Service Level Agreements in the Grid Environment", in Market-Oriented Grid and Utility Computing (Eds: Rajkumar Buyya, Kris Bubendorfer), 2009.
CONFERENCES
Kipp A., Schubert L., Geuer-Pollmann C., Dynamic Service Encapsulation, International Conference on Cloud Computing, (CloudComp 2009), October 2009
Service Provisioning over the internet using web service specifications becomes more and more difficult as real business requirements start to shape the community. One of the most important aspects related to dynamic service provisioning: whilst the straight forward web service usage would aim at exposing individual resources according to a fixed description, real organizations would want to expose a flexible description of their complexly aggregated products. This paper presents an approach towards reducing the technological overhead in virtual service exposition over the internet, thus allowing for more flexibility. It therefore introduces a dynamic gateway structure that acts as virtual endpoint to message transactions and can encapsulate complex business process on behalf of the provider.
Schubert L., Wesner S., Kipp A., Arenas A., Self-Managed Microkernels: From Clouds Towards Resource Fabrics, International Conference on Cloud Computing, (CloudComp 2009), October 2009
Cloud Computing provides a solution for remote hosting of applications and processes in a scalable and managed environment. With the increasing number of cores in a single processor and better network performance, provisioning on platform level becomes less of an issue for future machines and thus for future business environments. Instead, it will become a major issue to manage the vast amount of computational resources within the direct environment of each process - across the web or locally. Future resource management will have to investigate in particular into dynamic & intelligent processes (re)distribution according to resource availability and demand. This paper elaborates the specific issues faced in future "cloud environments" and proposes a microkernel architecture designed to compensate these deficits.
Henar Muñoz Frutos, Ioannis Kotsiopoulos, András Micsik, Bastian Koller, Juan Mora, Flexible SLA negotiation using semantic annotations, SOC-LOG 2009, October 2009
Moving towards a global market of services requires flexible infrastructures that will deal with the inevitable semantic heterogeneity that occurs during the negotiation that precedes the trading of a service. In order to reach an agreement, the negotiating parties need to understand the concepts describing the Quality of Service (QoS) terms which are part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The use of semantic annotations can increase the level of flexibility and automation, allowing the two parties to use their own terminology as long as it is related to the commonly understood conceptual model. This paper discusses how SLA negotiation will benefit from the use of a lightweight backwards compatible annotation mechanism.
Bastian Koller, Towards Optimal Creation of Service Level Agreements, eChallenges 2009
With the advent of electronic business, the number of provided solutions for Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management is increasing. At the same time, there is still a lack of mature approaches to the creation of SLAs and current solutions usually bind their users to hard-coded logic. The aim of this paper is to present an approach to overcome this area of inflexibility and to show, based on two use cases, the feasibility and necessity of such a system. At the end, a system will be presented that allows its users to plug-in their preferred method of creating SLAs on the fly during the SLA-creation lifecycle phase.
András Micsik, Paul Karaenke, Agent-supported Service Management and Monitoring for Flexible Inter-Enterprise Cooperation, IFIP International Conference on Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems (Confenis), October 2009
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be used to facilitate technical interoperability over organizational boundaries. This can be extended towards the support of cross-organizational cooperation in heterogeneous distributed environments. This paper presents concepts and an architecture aiming at enhanced service use through the help of multiagent technology. The architecture provides intelligent management and monitoring of services as well as agent supported cooperation in service provision.
Hannes Eichner, András Micsik, Máté Pataki, Robert Woitsch, A Use Case of Service-based Knowledge Management for Software Development, IFIP International Conference on Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems (Confenis), October 2009
Large, international cooperative efforts pose high expectations for knowledge management support. In this paper we present a use case of a knowledge management solution in an international research project, which offers several novel features applicable in other cases as well. The primary goals are to make the implicit knowledge explicit, to organize knowledge objects according to multiple criteria of multiple user roles and to serve this knowledge to users in an interactive way adapting Web 2.0 principles. A Knowledge Management System called the BREIN Roadmap has been realised applying service-based knowledge management using PROMOTE® supporting developers and externals who want to make use of the know-how and software components of the project.
András Micsik, Henar Muñoz Frutos, Ioannis Kotsiopoulos, Bastian Koller, Semantically supported SLA negotiation, Grid 2009, October 2009
The evolution of services market raises the need for automatic support for negotiating service use criteria. In order to reach an agreement, the negotiating parties need to develop a common understanding of the Quality of Service (QoS) terms which are part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The use of semantic annotations together with reasoning can increase the level of flexibility and automation in SLA management. A framework is presented for SLA negotiation allowing the two parties to use their own terminologies.
Taylor S., Surridge M., Laria G., Ritrovato P., Schubert L., “Business Collaborations in Grids: The BREIN Architectural Principals and VO Model”, Gecon August 2009
We describe the business-oriented architectural principles of the EC FP7 project “BREIN” for service-based computing. The architecture is founded on principles of how real businesses interact to mutual benefit, and we show how these can be applied to SOA and Grid computing. We present building blocks that can be composed in many ways to produce different value systems and supply chains for the provision of computing services over the Internet. We also introduce the complementary BREIN VO concept, which is centric to, and managed by, a main contractor who bears the responsibility for the whole VO. The BREIN VO has an execution lifecycle for the creation and operation of the VO, and we have related this to an application-focused workflow involving steps that provide real end-user value. We show how this can be applied to an engineering simulation application and how the workflow can be adapted should the need arise.
Goiri I., Julia F., Ejarque J., De Palol M., Badia R., Guitart J., Torres J., “Introducing Virtual Execution Environments for Application Lifecycle Management and SLA-Driven Resource Distribution within Service Providers”, IEEE NCA July 2009
Resource management is a key challenge that service providers must adequately face in order to ensure their profitability. This paper describes a proof-of-concept framework for facilitating resource management in service providers, which allows reducing costs and at the same time fulfilling the quality of service agreed with the customers. This is accomplished by means of virtualization. Our approach provides application-specific virtual environments and consolidates them in order to achieve a better utilization of the providers resources. In addition, it implements self-adaptive capabilities for dynamically distributing the providers resources among these virtual environments based on Service Level Agreements. The proposed solution has been implemented as a part of the Semantically-Enhanced Resource Allocator prototype developed within the BREIN European project. The evaluation shows that our prototype is able to react in very short time under changing conditions and avoid SLA violations by rescheduling efficiently the resources.
Muñoz H., Micsik A., “Supporting SLA Negotiation with Reasoning and Rules”, Semantic Week June 2009
The negotiation of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is an emerging problem area of service-oriented e-business solutions. The comparison and evaluation of bids and offers need to be supported by automated mechanisms. In more and more cases it becomes unfeasible to evaluate offers or bids purely by human inspection. The task gets even harder in the lack of a common language to express service level objectives and metrics. Semantic technologies may provide flexible interoperability solutions in this area. The paper presents a solution using OWL and SWRL to translate incoming SLA documents and match them with the local environment using the local language of service provider.
Muñoz H., “Towards a Semantic Service Broker for Business Grid”, 6th Annual European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2009), June 2009
The increasing number of infrastructure services requires the existence of mechanisms to discover and select services and resources, called service broker, based on customer requirements. This mechanism should improve the interoperability among customer-provider and be a backward compatible and light weight approach. The introduction of semantic annotations in service description (both functional and nonfunctional properties) as well as a conceptual model for business Grid can help to achieve them. Finally, the extension of the semantic Open Grid Service Architecture (S-OGSA) with the incorporation of the semantic service broker can incorporate the required capabilities to the Grid middleware.
Kovacs L., Matetelki P., Pataki B., “Service-oriented Context-aware Framework”, YR-SOC June 2009
Location- and context-aware services are emerging technologies in mobile and desktop environments, however, most of them are difficult to use and do not seem to be beneficial enough. Our research focuses on designing and creating a service-oriented framework that helps location- and context-aware, client-service type application development and use. Location information is combined with other contexts such as the users’ history, preferences and disabilities. The framework also handles the spatial model of the environment (e.g. map of a room or a building) as a context. The framework is built on a semantic backend where the ontologies are represented using the OWL description language. The use of ontologies enables the framework to run inference tasks and to easily adapt to new context types. The framework contains a compatibility layer for positioning devices, which hides the technical differences of positioning technologies and enables the combination of location data of various sources.
Henar Muñoz Frutos, Ioannis Kotsiopoulos, Luis Miguel Vaquero Gonzalez, Luis Rodero Merino "Enhancing Service Selection by Semantic QoS" In: Proceedings of the 6th Annual European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2009) 31 May - 4 June 2009, Heraklion, Greece.
The increasing number of functionally similar services requires the existence of a non-functional properties selection process based on the Quality of Service (QoS). Thus, in this article authors focus on the provision of a QoS model, an architecture and an implementation which enhance the selection process by the annotation of Service Level Agreement (SLA) templates with semantic QoS metrics. This QoS model is composed by a specification for annotating SLA templates files, a QoS conceptual model formed as a QoS ontology and selection algorithm. This approach, which is backward compatible, provides interoperability among customer-providers and a lightweight alternative. Finally, its applicability and benefits are shown by using examples of Infrastructure services.
Vedran Hrgovcic, Robert Woitsch "Enhancing Semantic E-Government Workflows through Service Oriented Knowledge Provision" In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services (ICIW 2009) May 24-28, 2009, Venice/Mestre, Italy.
This paper follows two goals, first, to provide an insight on the research in the area of semantic workflows for public administrations, and second to present an on-demand service oriented approach on knowledge provisioning for actors in the E- Government processes. Results of the research in the area of semantic workflows will be presented in application scenarios of two EC E-Government research projects, whereas the knowledge provisioning approach will be presented conceptually within an EC E-Learning research project, and as an initial prototype in the EC Business Grids research project.
András Micsik, Péter Pallinger, Achim Klein "SOAP based Message Transport for the Jade Multiagent Platform" In: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2009) May 10-15, 2009, Budapest, Hungary.
The combination of multiagent technology and Web Services has been a challenge since several years, as the flexibility of autonomous software agents is to be enriched with standards based, industrial strength, open and secure Web Service technology. The contribution of this paper is a SOAP-based message transport implementation for the Jade multiagent platform. This message transport is transparent for agents and allows for enacting Web Service specifications on inter-organizational multiagent communication, to facilitate the advantages of both technologies in a single environment. The message transport is evaluated in an industrial setting.
Pataki M., Micsik A., “Web and business model based knowledge presentation”, Networkshop April 2009
In this paper we present a case study of applying a knowledge management toolset during the lifetime of an EU funded research and development project. The name of this project is BREIN, and its participants are from 17 organizations of 6 countries, including MTA SZTAKI. The BREIN project takes the e-business concept developed in recent Grid research projects, namely the concept of so-called "dynamic virtual organizations" towards a more business-centric model, by enhancing the system with methods from artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, semantic web etc. During this work, software architecture issues are discussed and evaluated, software components are implemented and tested, use-case environments are planned and integrated. These activities require and produce knowledge very extensively. Usually all the knowledge needed to perform these activities exist at some project partners, but it is often implicit and distributed over different sources. The knowledge is not easily accessible, so our goal is to organize it and facilitate the usage of the BREIN knowledge space for the project consortium and in the end also for externals who want to make use of the BREIN platform.
P. Karaenke, A. Micsik, S. Kirn. "Adaptive SLA Management along Value Chains for Service Individualization" In: Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Services Science (ISSS 2009), Leipzig, Germany, March 23-25, 2009.
The object of our investigation is a software architecture for adaptive Service Level Agreement (SLA) management in value chains for service individualization. We address the problem that current SLA management is not capable to represent the full complexity of SLAs existing in real-world service industries. The problem is investigated from a functional-analytical supply chain perspective. The solution is developed from a software architecture modeling perspective according to the design science paradigm. The contribution of this paper is a software architecture that facilitates SLA negotiation and SLA-based resource management in complex agreement hierarchies. The architecture is validated in an application scenario from the airport logistics domain.
Gaeta, M., Loia, V., Paolozzi, S., Ritrovato, P., Veniero, M., “Towards an Architectural Pattern for Automatic Web Service Discovery and Selection in Business Marketplace”, 3rd International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems (CISIS-2009), March 2009.
Schuele M., Karaenke P., Klein A., Bieser T. "Georeferenzierung in der Logistik." In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Business Informatics (Wirtschaftsinformatik 2009), Vienna, Austria, February 25-27, 2009.
Georeferenzierung und Geographische Informationssysteme (GIS) finden in vielen Disziplinen außerhalb der Geographie weite Einsatzmöglichkeiten. So werden bereits heute viele ITAnwendungen durch Georeferenzierung unterstützt. In diesem Beitrag wird der Einsatz von Geoinformationen zur Individualisierung von Logistikleistungen untersucht. Geoinformationen stehen in direkter Beziehung zur räumlichen Adaptivität von Wertschöpfungssystemen. Als Anwendungsszenario werden logistische Leistungen des Passagiertransports an Flughäfen betrachtet. Es wird eine das Lieferkettenmodell unterstützende Softwarearchitektur vorgeschlagen und im Rahmen einer Simulationsstudie evaluiert.
I. Goiri, F. Julia, and J. Guitart,"Efficient Data Management Support for Virtualized Service Providers", 17th Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-based Processing (PDP'09) (Short Paper), Weimar, Germany, February 18-20, 2009.
Virtualization has been lately introduced for supporting and simplifying service providers management with promising results. Nevertheless, using virtualization introduces also new challenges that must be considered. One of them relates with the data management in the provider. This paper proposes an innovative approach for performing efficiently all the data-related processes in a virtualized service provider, namely VM creation, VM migration and data stage-in/out. Our solution provides a global repository where clients can upload the task input files and retrieve the output files. In addition, the provider implements a distributed file system (using NFS) in which each node can access its own local disk and the disk of the other nodes. As demonstrated in the evaluation, this allows efficient VM creation and task execution, but also task migration with minimum overhead, while keeping it accessible during the whole process.
