Probabilistic approach for QoS-aware recommender system for trustworthy web service selection

We present a QoS-aware recommender approach based on probabilistic models to assist the selection of web services in open, distributed, and service-oriented environments. This approach allows consumers to maintain a trust model for each service provider they interact with, leading to the prediction of the most trustworthy service a consumer can interact with among a plethora of similar services. In this paper, we associate the trust in a service to its performance denoted by QoS ratings instigated by the amalgamation of various QoS metrics. Since the quality of a service is contingent, which renders its trustworthiness uncertain, we adopt a probabilistic approach for the prediction of the quality of a service based on the evaluation of past experiences (ratings) of each of its consumers. We represent the QoS ratings of services using different statistical distributions, namely multinomial Dirichlet, multinomial generalized Dirichlet, and multinomial Beta-Liouville. We leverage various machine learning techniques to compute the probabilities of each web service to belong to different quality classes. For instance, we use the Bayesian inference method to estimate the parameters of the aforementioned distributions, which presents a multidimensional probabilistic embodiment of the quality of the corresponding web services. We also employ a Bayesian network classifier with a Beta-Liouville prior to enable the classification of the QoS of composite services given the QoS of its constituents. We extend our approach to function in an online setting using the Voting EM algorithm that enables the estimation of the probabilities of the QoS after each interaction with a web service. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in modeling, classifying and incrementally learning the QoS ratings.     

Social context-aware trust paths finding for trustworthy service provider selection in social media

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Online Social Network (OSN) has been used to enhance service provision and service selection, where trust is one of the most important factors for the decision...     

面向QoS保障的虚拟可信服务*

针对服务计算模型中对应用的可信特性支持不足问题,提出面向QoS保障的虚拟可信服务VTS,并依据VTS设计了一种基于反馈控制的自适应QoS保障机制。首先将VTS的QoS保障转换为反馈控制问题,给出一种自适应QoS保障框架,再在此框架下对VTS的QoS维护过程和策略进行建模,设计和实现了相应的动态组建、调节算法和实时评估策略。最后通过仿真实验的结果分析表明,该保障机制能够有效地增强VTS对服务实体运行时的QoS保障能力。     

可信云服务评估的非加IVHF-GLRA方法

针对可信云服务评估问题,提出一种区间犹豫模糊灰色可能关联分析(IVHF-GLRA)决策方法。首先,提出了区间犹豫模糊灰色可能关联系数概念,进而基于Choquet积分介绍了一种非加区间犹豫模糊灰色可能关联测度;此外,提出了一种新的用于测度区间犹豫模糊元不确定性的熵测度公式,并将其用于确定决策准则间的权重系数。在此基础上,发展了一种用于可信云服务评估的区间犹豫模糊决策方法并进行了实例分析,分析结果表明所提方法科学且有效。     

Toward self-organizing service communities

This paper discusses a framework in which catalog service communities are built, linked for interaction, and constantly monitored and adapted over time. A catalog service community (represented as a peer node in a peer-to-peer network) in our system can be viewed as domain specific data integration mediators representing the domain knowledge and the registry information. The query routing among communities is performed to identify a set of data sources that are relevant to answering a given query. The system monitors the interactions between the communities to discover patterns that may lead to restructuring of the network (e.g., irrelevant peers removed, new relationships created, etc.).     

Biologically inspired self-organizing networks

Information networks are becoming more and more complex to accommodate a continuously increasing amount of traffic and networked devices, as well as having to cope with a growing diversity of operating environments and applications. Therefore, it is foreseeable that future information networks will frequently face unexpected problems, some of which could lead to the complete collapse of a network. To tackle this problem, recent attempts have been made to design novel network architectures which achieve a high level of scalability, adaptability, and robustness by taking inspiration from self organizing biological systems. The objective of this paper is to discuss biologically inspired networking technologies.     

A trustworthy QoS-based collaborative filtering approach for web service discovery

Many network services which process a large quantity of data and knowledge are available in the distributed network environment, and provide applications to users based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web services technology. Therefore, a useful web service discovery approach for data and knowledge discovery process in the complex network environment is a very significant issue. Using the traditional keyword-based search method, users find it difficult to choose the best web services from those with similar functionalities. In addition, in an untrustworthy real world environment, the QoS-based service discovery approach cannot verify the correctness of the web services’ Quality of Service (QoS) values, since such values guaranteed by a service provider are different from the real ones. This work proposes a trustworthy two-phase web service discovery mechanism based on QoS and collaborative filtering, which discovers and recommends the needed web services effectively for users in the distributed environment, and also solves the problem of services with incorrect QoS information. In the experiment, the theoretical analysis and simulation experiment results show that the proposed method can accurately recommend the needed services to users, and improve the recommendation quality.     

Multi-sector multi-range control for self-organizing wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-sector multi-range (MSMR) control algorithm for supporting self-organizing wireless networks. The algorithm enables us to reduce the unnecessary coverage with fine-tuned range control and also to increase the network-wide capacity with enhanced spatial reusability. The proposed algorithm discovers neighboring nodes within the maximum transmission range at every node, divides its transmission area into multiple non-overlapping angular sectors of a given degree, chooses the home sector for each neighboring node according to its relative position, and constructs a spanning subgraph per sector by determining appropriate transmission range to maintain connectivity. Since the range control influences on network connectivity directly, we prove in the first place that the proposed algorithm preserves both network-wide and local connectivity as far as both connectivity exist in the network that uses the maximum transmission range. In order to investigate the performance of the proposed algorithm, we implemented it in the ns-2 simulator, and performed an extensive set of simulation study in comparison with other transmission range control schemes. The simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme is superior to other schemes with respect to the network-wide throughput and its normalized value per energy in various simulation configurations. In specific, the algorithm achieves minimally one order and maximally two orders of magnitude improvement in those performance evaluations. The improvement becomes more salient as the number of nodes increases and is immune to traffic type, network size, node distribution, or node density.     

Cooperative device discovery for multi-interface self-organizing networks

For device-to-device communications, a device must locate neighbor devices on a certain channel within a short period to establish a communication link. When the channel information is not provided, a rendezvous technique can be adapted to resolve the issue of device discovery. Unlike existing approaches that have considered the rendezvous problem for a flat network and a single interface, the proposed approach considers a hierarchical network where nodes have different ranks and multiple interfaces. We extend the jump-and-stay rendezvous algorithm for multiple interfaces and divide the interfaces into two types: standby and scan interfaces. Scan interfaces follow the extended pattern of the jump-and-stay algorithm. Standby interfaces remain on a selected channel for a round of slots until rendezvous with other nodes. To determine the interface type of each node, we consider the rank of a node such that a higher-ranked node is assigned more standby interfaces. Based on this framework, we propose a cooperative rendezvous algorithm where a node rebroadcasts the channel information of a higher-ranked node together with its rendezvous message. Our simulation results confirm that the proposed rendezvous algorithm achieves superior performance compared to conventional methods.     

A context-aware approach for trustworthy worker selection in social crowd

Crowdsourcing applications like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) make it possible to address many difficult tasks (e.g., image tagging and sentiment analysis) on the internet and make full use of the wisdom of crowd, where worker quality is one of the most crucial issues for the task owners. Thus, a challenging problem is how to effectively and efficiently select the high quality workers, so that the tasks online can be accomplished successfully under a certain budget. The existing methods on the crowd worker selection problem mainly based on the quality measurement of the crowd workers, those who have to register on the crowdsourcing platforms. With the connect of the OSNs and the crowdsourcing applications, the social contexts like social relationships and social trust between participants and social positions of participants can assist requestors to select one or a group of trustworthy crowdsourcing workers. In this paper, we first present a contextual social network structure and a concept of Strong Social Component (SSC), which emblems a group of workers who have high social contexts values. Then, we propose a novel index for SSC, and a new efficient and effective algorithm C-AWSA to find trustworthy workers, who can complete the tasks with high quality. The results of our experiments conducted on four real OSN datasets illustrate that the superiority of our method in trustworthy worker selection.     

Mapping and hierarchical self-organizing neural networks for VLSIplacement

We have developed mapping and hierarchical self-organizing neural networks for placement of very large scale integrated (VLST) circuits. In this paper, we introduce MHSO and MHSO2 as two versions of mapping and hierarchical self-organizing network (MHSO) algorithms. By using the MHSO, each module in the placement wins the competition with a probability density function that is defined according to different design styles, e.g., the gate arrays and standard cell circuits. The relation between a placement carrier and movable modules is met by the algorithm's ability to map an input space (somatosensory source) into an output space where the circuit modules are located, MHSO2 is designed for macro cell circuits. In this algorithm, the shape and dimension of each module is simultaneously considered together with the wire length by a hierarchical order. In comparison with other conventional placement approaches, the MHSO algorithms have shown their distinct advantages. The results for benchmark circuits so far obtained are quite comparable to simulated annealing (SA), but the computation time is about eight-ten times faster than with SA.     

On self-organizing algorithms and networks for class-separability features.

We describe self-organizing learning algorithms and associated neural networks to extract features that are effective for preserving class separability. As a first step, an adaptive algorithm for the computation of Q(-1/2) (where Q is the correlation or covariance matrix of a random vector sequence) is described. Convergence of this algorithm with probability one is proven by using stochastic approximation theory, and a single-layer linear network architecture for this algorithm is described, which we call the Q(-1/2) network. Using this network, we describe feature extraction architectures for: 1) unimodal and multicluster Gaussian data in the multiclass case; 2) multivariate linear discriminant analysis (LDA) in the multiclass case; and 3) Bhattacharyya distance measure for the two-class case. The LDA and Bhattacharyya distance features are extracted by concatenating the Q (-1/2) network with a principal component analysis network, and the two-layer network is proven to converge with probability one. Every network discussed in the study considers a flow or sequence of inputs for training. Numerical studies on the performance of the networks for multiclass random data are presented.     

Network-aware service placement and selection algorithms on large-scale overlay networks

Currently many service providers offer their services on a private and proprietary hard- and software infrastructure. These infrastructures often share many similarities. Hence we believe a generic service management architecture, that allows service providers to offer a large array of different services on a single infrastructure or multiple providers to offer their services cooperatively, would provide many advantages over current silo-based approaches. Additionally, by allowing the distributed service management components to cooperate in a peer-to-peer overlay network, scalability and resilience of the system could be greatly improved.In this paper we propose an optimal algorithm, based on an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation, and several heuristics to support such a generic overlay-based service management architecture. More specifically, we propose algorithms for dynamically allocating server and network resources to a set of services and selecting a suitable service instance for each client. Service instances are placed on a set of servers, taking into account server resource constraints (e.g. CPU and memory). Unlike existing algorithms for this problem, those proposed in this paper also support service level agreements (SLAs), which take the form of Quality of Service demands such as transmission latency constraints and bandwidth requirements. The optimisation goal is to maximise the percentage of satisfied demand (answered requests) and minimise the total number of required overlay servers, while satisfying the SLAs and resource constraints. Additionally, we propose an extension that allows the algorithms to find overlay routing paths to improve the transmission latency for latency-sensitive services.Extensive simulations were performed to evaluate the performance and scalability of the heuristics. They showed that in many cases the heuristics perform close to optimal and they scale well in terms of network size.     

Optimization of self-organizing polynomial neural networks

The main disadvantage of self-organizing polynomial neural networks (SOPNN) automatically structured and trained by the group method of data handling (GMDH) algorithm is a partial optimization of model weights as the GMDH algorithm optimizes only the weights of the topmost (output) node. In order to estimate to what extent the approximation accuracy of the obtained model can be improved the particle swarm optimization (PSO) has been used for the optimization of weights of all node-polynomials. Since the PSO is generally computationally expensive and time consuming a more efficient Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) algorithm is adapted for the optimization of the SOPNN. After it has been optimized by the LM algorithm the SOPNN outperformed the corresponding models based on artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector method (SVM). The research is based on the meta-modeling of the thermodynamic effects in fluid flow measurements with time-constraints. The outstanding characteristics of the optimized SOPNN models are also demonstrated in learning the recurrence relations of multiple superimposed oscillations (MSO).     

Indeterminacy-aware service selection for reliable service composition

With the development of Internet and Web service technology, Web service composition has been an effective way to construct software applications; service selection is the crucial element in the composition process. However, the existing selection methods mostly generate static plans since they neglect the inherent stochastic and dynamic nature of Web services. As a result, Web service composition often inevitably terminates with failure. An indeterminacy-aware service selection algorithmbased on an improved Markov decision process (IMDP) has been designed for reliable service composition, but it suffers from higher computation complexity. Therefore, an efficient method is proposed, which can reduce the computation cost by converting the service selection problem based on IMDP into solving a nonhomogeneous linear equation set. Experimental results demonstrate the success rate of service composition has been improved greatly, whilst also reducing computation cost.     

SLACER: a self-organizing protocol for coordination in peer-to-peer networks

Coordination between nodes in open distributed computer systems is a general problem that's becoming increasingly relevant as massive peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are being deployed on the Internet. A major subproblem is establishing and maintaining cooperation between nodes. To solve this problem, we created a simple algorithm, SLACER (a selfish link-based adaptation for cooperation excluding rewiring). When executed in a P2P network's nodes, SLACER self-organizes the network into a robust artificial social network (ASN) with small-world characteristics and high cooperation.     

模糊神经网络的结构自组织算法及应用

提出了一种新的模糊神经网络自组织算法,该算法能够基于输入输出数据自动进行结构辨识和参数辨识.首先采用一种自组织聚类方法建立起网络的结构和各参数的初值,然后采用监督学习来优化网络参数.通过对非线性函数逼近的分析,明了该自组织算法的有效性,并与其他算法作了比较.最后,以某污水处理厂的实际运行数据为对象,应用该模糊神经网络建立了活性污泥系统出水水质预测模型,仿真结果表明.该模型能够对污水处理系统出水水质进行较好的预测.     

Parallel, self-organizing, hierarchical neural networks

A new neural-network architecture called the parallel, self-organizing, hierarchical neural network (PSHNN) is presented. The new architecture involves a number of stages in which each stage can be a particular neural network (SNN). At the end of each stage, error detection is carried out, and a number of input vectors are rejected. Between two stages there is a nonlinear transformation of input vectors rejected by the previous stage. The new architecture has many desirable properties, such as optimized system complexity (in the sense of minimized self-organizing number of stages), high classification accuracy, minimized learning and recall times, and truly parallel architectures in which all stages operate simultaneously without waiting for data from other stages during testing. The experiments performed indicated the superiority of the new architecture over multilayered networks with back-propagation training.