Visual understanding industrial workflows under uncertainty on distributed service oriented architectures

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an evolution of distributed computing based on the request/reply design paradigm for synchronous and asynchronous applications. In such architectures, application developers or system integrators can build scenarios by composing one or more services without knowing the services’ underlying implementations. In this paper, we adopt a SOA framework for on-line scheduling complex industrial workflows. The proposed SOA consists of three main layers; the input layer, the benchmarking layer, the prediction layer and the scheduler. The main innovation of our SOA architecture is the prediction layer that supports computer vision tools able to visually observe how an industrial workflow is actually executed. This way, we can automatically estimate the actual execution time for a process. In particular a new self-initialized visual tracker algorithm is proposed in this paper to robustly trace workers’ trajectory in a plant via visual observations. Then, part-to-whole curve matching is presented so as to find correspondences among the traced curve and the ideal one and thus improving scheduler efficiency. The input layer interoperably describes industrial operations using the XPDL (an XML-based) format. The benchmarker evaluates much faster than real-time and in an off-line mode how long it takes for an industrial workflow to be executed on a given resource guaranteeing an almost real-time implementation of the video processing algorithms on the plant. The last component of the proposed SOA is the scheduler with the goal to assign the workflows to the available resources. In this paper, a Maximum Benefit First (MBF) scheduler is presented which maximizes the total gain received by the industry when completing execution of all the beneficial operations with minimum violations of their delivery deadlines (that is with the minimum compensations). Experiments have been conducted on a real-world industrial plant of Nissan Iberica automobile construction indicating the efficiency of the proposed system.     

Industrial application integration using the unification approach to agent-enabled semantic SOA

Within the enterprise, information infrastructure as the mean to bring together different software applications is the key component to enable cooperation and information and knowledge exchange in an open-distributed environment. The paper addresses the issues of industrial application integration in business processes using agent-enabled service-oriented architectures (SOA). In this paper, we show that agent-enabled SOA can play an important role for service integration. Our framework combines Web services (WS) and intelligent agent technologies orchestrated by a business process management system. This framework looks for unification of agent and WS service models, is grounded in a semantic SOA of an agent platform and is supported by the Component Agent Platform Over .NET Framework agent platform tools. We describe the architecture and illustrate the approach by an industrial application scenario from petroleum wells’ drilling.     

Testing services and service-centric systems: challenges and opportunities

This paper provides users and system integrators with an overview of service-oriented architecture (SOA) testing's fundamental technical issues and solutions, focusing on Web services as a practical implementation of the SOA model. The paper discusses SOA testing across two dimensions: testing perspectives, wherein various stakeholders have different needs and raise different testing requirements; and testing level, wherein each SOA testing level poses unique challenges.     

Adaptive Enterprise Service Bus

Modern software systems are usually designed in the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which provides methods for system development and integration of existing, reusable services. Due to the growing com-plexity of such systems, there is a need to design them in a way which enables adaptation to changes in the execution environment. This paper presents the Adaptive ESB framework for adaptive execution of services with the use of statistical models representing knowledge about service execution. Statisti- cal models are exploited in many different areas, but applying them to SOA applications requires specific methods for their identification, updating and processing. A statistical model of service execution represents knowledge of how a complex system behaves as a high-level abstraction of a system related to the problem space.     

Levering object-oriented knowledge for service-oriented proficiency

As more and more enterprise systems endeavour to interconnect seamlessly by using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) a number of challenges are beginning to surface as a result of the differences in understanding between object-orientated programming (OOP) and service-orientation in technical development teams. These differences are thus explored to determine the potential of subsidising gaps in knowledge through relational learning in order to better prepare development environments for service migration. It emerges that the principles of service-oriented programming can be used within OOP by selectively identifying the existing knowledge found within object-orientation and traditional programming methodologies. The benefit of this approach proposes to lever the expertise of object-oriented developers so as to build service-ready computer software and encourage the seamlessness of SOA.     

Deriving a Fault Architecture to Guide Testing

Defect analysis of software components can be used to guide testing, with the goal of focusing on parts of the software that were fault-prone in earlier releases or earlier life cycle phases, such as development. We replicate a study that adapted a reverse architecting technique using defect reports to derive fault architectures. A fault architecture determines and visualizes components that are fault-prone in their relationships with other components, as well as those that are locally fault-prone. Our case study uses defect data from three releases of a large medical record system to identify relationships among system components, based on whether they are involved in the same defect report.We investigate measures that assess the fault-proneness of components and component relationships. Component relationships are used to derive a fault architecture. The resulting fault architecture indicates what the most fault-prone relationships are in a release. We also apply the technique in a new way. Not only do we derive fault architectures for each release, we derive fault architectures for the development, system test and post release phases within each release. Comparing across releases, makes it possible to see whether some components are repeatedly in fault-prone relationships. Comparing across phases, makes it possible to see whether development fault architectures can be used to identify those parts of the software that need to be tested more. We validate our predictions using system test data from the same release. We also use the development and system test fault architectures to identify fault-prone components after release, and validate our predictions using post release data.     

一个面向服务的应用案例研究

本文从一个现有的信息系统出发,通过分析因为业务增长和环境变化而带来的问题,提出需要进行面向服务的改造。根据面向服务系统的基本原则,从请求之问的状态、请求方式、接口的多样性和体系结构等方面阐述了该系统的改造。本文所描述的SOA改造的方法和体系结构设计以及面向服务改造后带来的优点具有普遍的意义。     

Products Used to Secure Networked Macintosh Computers

Abstract

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) have become mainstream in the past year due to their ability to provide business agility and flexibility through integration, productivity, and software reuse. The Web services framework enables composite applications that leverage service- oriented architecture (SOA) design practices, creating more cost-effective distributed architectures. As enterprises adopt SOA, they open their systems, enabling greater agility and easier integration.     

一种面向服务的体系结构参考模型

在对当前的面向服务体系结构研究的基础上,提出了一种用于设计面向服务体系结构的参考模型,深入地阐述了有关概念,详述了参考模型的结构以及其中的服务总线和服务合约的元模型,并提出了一个用于评价面向服务体系结构的成熟度模型．该参考模型为进一步设计面向服务的体系结构奠定了基础．     

基于WebGIS信息整合与利用的林业电子政务

林业电子政务要向社会公众提供专业服务。面向服务的架构和万维网地理信息系统是处理林业电子政务信息资源整合和利用的重要技术工具。文章以林业电子政务中森林火点检测的应用流程为例展示上述技术的运用方法。工作流程可以利用分布式的遥感数据、矢量辅助数据资源、森林火点检测算法和万维网地图发布服务,通过一个网格的基础架构把这些资源集成起来形成林业专业应用。文章展示的试验床用Web服务技术封装了专业算法。网格中间件采用的是自主研制的SIRGE,调度资源的工作流中间件采用的是自主研制的SIGApp,它们的专长是可以处理空间数据。用于通过这个试验床可以访问基于不同来源数据和服务得到的森林火点信息,为林业电子政务服务。     

TaxoPublish: Towards a solution to automatically personalize taxonomies in e-catalogs

Taxonomies are utilized in e-catalogs to facilitate customers navigating through a marketplace with the help of hierarchically structured concepts. However, when entering the e-catalog, each customer is shown the identical taxonomy regardless their individual requirements. Customers are distracted when navigating to preferred concepts as those are siblings of not required concepts. Provided progress in dynamic taxonomies, catalog segmentation, and personalized directories lacks in a fully automatic support for modifying the taxonomy according to the user’s requirements. The existing works need an explicit user-query, are missing information about the domain, or require the modification through the provider. In this paper, TaxoPublish expert system based on logic programming is presented. The proposed system predicts the customers requirements for automatically modifying the taxonomy in B2B context. With TaxoPublish, retailers can now provide personalization in the form of personalized e-catalogs without any human effort, and without missing any information about the domain. TaxoPublish is using knowledge provided through a Customer Relationship Management system for predicting customers preferences, and knowledge of a Product Information Management system for performing taxonomic operations based on two novel types of taxonomic concepts. Through the usage of logic programming and the cross-platform database model, TaxoPublish can be applied as expert system over distributed and heterogeneous data warehouse architectures across various domains. The comprehensive experiments on two public and one private database show that TaxoPublish expert system is capable of fully-automatic taxonomy modification with an accuracy similar to the expert manual modifications.     

A comparative study of GPU programming models and architectures using neural networks

Recently, General Purpose Graphical Processing Units (GP-GPUs) have been identified as an intriguing technology to accelerate numerous data-parallel algorithms. Several GPU architectures and programming models are beginning to emerge and establish their niche in the High-Performance Computing (HPC) community. New massively parallel architectures such as the Nvidia??s Fermi and AMD/ATi??s Radeon pack tremendous computing power in their large number of multiprocessors. Their performance is unleashed using one of the two GP-GPU programming models: Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) and Open Computing Language (OpenCL). Both of them offer constructs and features that have direct bearing on the application runtime performance. In this paper, we compare the two GP-GPU architectures and the two programming models using a two-level character recognition network. The two-level network is developed using four different Spiking Neural Network (SNN) models, each with different ratios of computation-to-communication requirements. To compare the architectures, we have chosen the two extremes of the SNN models for implementation of the aforementioned two-level network. An architectural performance comparison of the SNN application running on Nvidia??s Fermi and AMD/ATi??s Radeon is done using the OpenCL programming model exhausting all of the optimization strategies plausible for the two architectures. To compare the programming models, we implement the two-level network on Nvidia??s Tesla C2050 based on the Fermi architecture. We present a hierarchy of implementations, where we successively add optimization techniques associated with the two programming models. We then compare the two programming models at these different levels of implementation and also present the effect of the network size (problem size) on the performance. We report significant application speed-up, as high as 1095× for the most computation intensive SNN neuron model, against a serial implementation on the Intel Core 2 Quad host. A comprehensive study presented in this paper establishes connections between programming models, architectures and applications.     

基于VB.NET的无线电设备综合测试平台

无线电设备的测试需要较多的专业知识,而且步骤繁琐.为简化无线电设备的测试过程和缩短测试时间,以VB.NET为基础研究了一种无线电设备综合测试平台.该平台能够自动控制各种无线电通信设备,实现各种参数的自动测量和处理,并自动完成数据的记录及报表的生成.使用该平台可以极大地简化人工操作的复杂度、缩短测量时间并进一步提高测试结果的准确性和权威性.     

Towards true linguistic modelling through optimal numerical solutions

This paper is concerned with both the problems of quantitative and qualitative modelling of complex systems by using fuzzy techniques. A unified approach for the identification and subsequent extraction of linguistic knowledge of systems using fuzzy relational models is addressed. This approach deals with the identification problem by means of optimal numerical solutions based on weighted least squares and quadratic programming formulations. The linguistic knowledge is extracted in the form of consistent fuzzy rules that describe linguistically the behaviour of the identified system. A new methodology for the simplification of the extracted rules is derived by using a pruning criterion based on the representability matrix concept introduced in previous work. Several numerical aspects concerning the proposed optimization schemes and a covering discussion about the linguistic interpretation of the resulting models are also included together with illustrative examples in the contexts of pattern classification and dynamic systems identification. The paper also provides an overview of fuzzy modelling techniques that intends to situate the relational models among other fuzzy model architectures typically adopted in the literature, highlighting their main advantages and drawbacks.     

Customer order management in service oriented holonic manufacturing

One of the most important problems when considering the design of manufacturing systems based on SOA paradigms is the integration of shop floor devices in the business processes at the enterprise level. This paper presents the design and implementation of the Customer Order Management (COM) module based on SOA architecture in the context of holonic manufacturing systems. The COM module is integrating with SOA enabled shop floor devices using industry standards. The implementation leverages a multi agent system suited for industrial applications integrated in a SOA environment capable of dynamic BPEL workflow generation and execution. The prototype consists in a SCA application for core COM module functionality and an extension for NetLogo MAS platform for SOA integration. The COM module interacts with the MES layer using real time events handled by the BPEL process implementation in the execution stage. A web based portal frontend for the COM module has been developed to allow real time tracking of customer orders, providing data about product batch execution and individual progress of each product on the production line.     

Augmented reality-assisted robot programming system for industrial applications

Robots are important in high-mix low-volume manufacturing because of their versatility and repeatability in performing manufacturing tasks. However, robots have not been widely used due to cumbersome programming effort and lack of operator skill. One significant factor prohibiting the widespread application of robots by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is the high cost and necessary skill of programming and re-programming robots to perform diverse tasks. This paper discusses an Augmented Reality (AR) assisted robot programming system (ARRPS) that provides faster and more intuitive robot programming than conventional techniques. ARRPS is designed to allow users with little robot programming knowledge to program tasks for a serial robot. The system transforms the work cell of a serial industrial robot into an AR environment. With an AR user interface and a handheld pointer for interaction, users are free to move around the work cell to define 3D points and paths for the real robot to follow. Sensor data and algorithms are used for robot motion planning, collision detection and plan validation. The proposed approach enables fast and intuitive robotic path and task programming, and allows users to focus only on the definition of tasks. The implementation of this AR-assisted robot system is presented, and specific methods to enhance the performance of the users in carrying out robot programming using this system are highlighted.     

Mathcad软件用于固定床反应器拟均相二维模型的数值解

为了提高化学反应工程课程的教学质量，采用了Mathcad软件编程求解固定床反应器拟均相二维模型的数值解。除了它的易使用和功能强大的工具盒的特点外，更重要的是它的编程语言的数学表达形式很接近传统的数学书写风格。使较为复杂的工业反应过程的计算问题能得以在课堂上进行生动有效的讲解，实时生成可改变操作条件的二维或三维的组成(转化率)、温度或反应速率的分布图，取得了令人满意的教学效果。     

SOA adoption in business networks: do service-oriented architectures really advance inter-organizational integration?

The emergence of the Internet as a global communication infrastructure has dramatically reduced interaction costs within and across organizations, with significant impact on inter-organizational relationships, vertical industry structures, and markets. More recently, service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services have introduced the next paradigm shift and foster the idea of dynamic business networks with quick connect and disconnect relationships. However, little research has systematically analyzed how companies leverage SOA to improve their inter-organizational relationships and reshape their business networks. In addition, the mature research stream on inter-organizational information systems (IOS) has not yet sufficiently considered SOA. In order to close this gap, our research seeks to improve the fundamental understanding of how SOA is applied in business networks and how it differs from prior forms of IOS. Using an exploratory research approach, we investigate 33 SOA cases to identify focus areas and patterns of SOA adoption in business networks. Our case analysis builds on a multi-dimensional classification scheme which we derived from prior literature. While our empirical findings do not confirm all promising propositions related to SOA, they underline the specific contribution of SOA compared to prior forms of IOS. We conclude by suggesting five clusters of SOA adoption in the inter-organizational domain, each of those introducing new aspects in the coordination of distributed business networks.