A semantic interoperability framework for software as a service systems in cloud computing environments

In cloud computing environments in software as a service (SaaS) level, interoperability refers to the ability of SaaS systems on one cloud provider to communicate with SaaS systems on another cloud provider. One of the most important barriers to the adoption of SaaS systems in cloud computing environments is interoperability. A common tactic for enabling interoperability is the use of an interoperability framework or model. During the past few years, in cloud SaaS level, various interoperability frameworks and models have been developed to provide interoperability between systems. The syntactic interoperability of SaaS systems have already been intensively researched. However, not enough consideration has been given to semantic interoperability issues. Achieving semantic interoperability is a challenge within the world of SaaS in cloud computing environments. Therefore, a semantic interoperability framework for SaaS systems in cloud computing environments is needed. We develop a semantic interoperability framework for cloud SaaS systems. The capabilities and value of service oriented architecture for semantic interoperability within cloud SaaS systems have been studied and demonstrated. This paper is accomplished through a number of steps (research methodology). It begins with a study on related works in the literature. Then, problem statement and research objectives are explained. In the next step, semantic interoperability requirements for SaaS systems in cloud computing environments that are needed to support are analyzed. The details of the proposed semantic interoperability framework for SaaS systems in cloud computing environments are presented. It includes the design of the proposed semantic interoperability framework. Finally, the evaluation methods of the semantic interoperability framework are elaborated. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed semantic interoperability framework for SaaS systems in cloud computing environments, extensive experimentation and statistical analysis have been performed. The experiments and statistical analysis specify that the proposed semantic interoperability framework for cloud SaaS systems is able to establish semantic interoperability between cloud SaaS systems in a more efficient way. It is concluded that using the proposed framework, there is a significant improvement in the effectiveness of semantic interoperability of SaaS systems in cloud computing environments.     

Virtual machine cluster mobility in inter-cloud platforms

Modern cloud computing applications developed from different interoperable services that are interfacing with each other in a loose coupling approach. This work proposes the concept of the Virtual Machine (VM) cluster migration, meaning that services could be migrated to various clouds based on different constraints such as computational resources and better economical offerings. Since cloud services are instantiated as VMs, an application can be seen as a cluster of VMs that integrate its functionality. We focus on the VM cluster migration by exploring a more sophisticated method with regards to VM network configurations. In particular, networks are hard to managed because their internal setup is changed after a migration, and this is related with the configuration parameters during the re-instantiation to the new cloud platform. To address such issue, we introduce a Software Defined Networking (SDN) service that breaks the problem of network configuration into tractable pieces and involves virtual bridges instead of references to static endpoints. The architecture is modular, it is based on the SDN OpenFlow protocol and allows VMs to be paired in cluster groups that communicate with each other independently of the cloud platform that are deployed. The experimental analysis demonstrates migrations of VM clusters and provides a detailed discussion of service performance for different cases.     

CloudChem—基于云计算的化学计量学软件服务

化学计量学被广泛应用于光谱、色谱及质谱数据处理,现有化学计量学软件都为串行单机程序,这将导致程序开发成本高、部署升级困难、可控制性差等缺点,难以胜任分析数据的成倍增长对快速分析和有效管理带来巨大的挑战。为了解决这些缺点,本文提出了CloudChem——1种基于云计算的化学计量学软件服务,它采用软件即服务的模式,使用浏览器/服务器结构来提供专业的化学计量学软件服务。系统的服务器端分为工作流层、业务层、计算层、数据层和Web层。数据层综合利用关系型数据库和分布式文件系统2种方法的优势来存储和组织数据;计算层使用并行计算来提升数据处理速度和规模;Web层使用Open API实现平台的数据资源共享功能。实验表明,平台上的并行交叉验证框架在四核CPU上加速比可以达到3.763倍。所以,CloudChem可以较好克服传统化学计量学软件的缺点,基于该方法的软件服务平台可实现光谱、色谱、核磁、质谱等数据的有效、高速、一体化的存储、分析、挖掘,最大限度减小用户在使用化学计量软件的基础设施成本和软件成本。     

Sources of value in application ecosystems

Mobile application stores have revolutionised the dynamics of mobile ecosystems. Research on mobile application ecosystems has been significantly driven by data that is focused on the visualisation of an ecosystem's dynamics. This is a valuable step towards understanding the nature of the ecosystems, but it is limited in its explanatory power. Thus, a theory-driven approach is needed to understand the overall dynamics of such systems. This study applies a theoretical framework of value creation in e-business in the context of mobile application ecosystems, with a focus on application developers. A qualitative research strategy is employed in testing operationalisation in a sample of developers. The sample comprises 27 application developers from the three leading mobile application ecosystems. The results show that efficiency is the main source of value, products seldom create value through complementarities, and approaches towards lock-in and novelty seem to vary among application developers. The managerial and theoretical implications of such biased value creation in mobile ecosystems are considered.     

Federated integration of networked manufacturing service platforms

Networked manufacturing is an advanced manufacturing pattern that was born of information technologies and suits the networked economic environment. Networked manufacturing service platforms have been widely established to support this new pattern. Since the island problems are retarding further development of networked manufacturing, integration of existing networked manufacturing platforms is in demand. A federated integration mode is proposed to integrate the existing networked manufacturing platforms and provide a large-scale distributed resource sharing and cooperative environment. The nature of federated integration is discussed, and the architecture of federated integration system was put forward along with a set of rules and three types of integration services. Two key issues in federated integration are discussed in detail. One is the federation management, including the hierarchy of federations, the basic states of federations and the state-keeping mechanism using factory/instance pattern. The other issue is the authentication, authorization and access control in across-platform applications. Finally, an implementation is presented.     

Cloud computing — The business perspective

The evolution of cloud computing over the past few years is potentially one of the major advances in the history of computing. However, if cloud computing is to achieve its potential, there needs to be a clear understanding of the various issues involved, both from the perspectives of the providers and the consumers of the technology. While a lot of research is currently taking place in the technology itself, there is an equally urgent need for understanding the business-related issues surrounding cloud computing. In this article, we identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for the cloud computing industry. We then identify the various issues that will affect the different stakeholders of cloud computing. We also issue a set of recommendations for the practitioners who will provide and manage this technology. For IS researchers, we outline the different areas of research that need attention so that we are in a position to advice the industry in the years to come. Finally, we outline some of the key issues facing governmental agencies who, due to the unique nature of the technology, will have to become intimately involved in the regulation of cloud computing.     

支持多类终端与服务定制的SaaS软件服务架构

由软件即服务(SaaS)模式中软件服务的概念与特点分析,可知现有的面向服务架构(SOA)不能完全支持软件服务的实现。此外,为了拓展软件服务的应用范围,实现多样化的服务,SaaS模式的软件服务必然要满足用户定制服务的需求,以及对多类用户终端的支持。通过对SOA的扩展,在其中引入了软件服务终端、软件服务端口、软件服务注册等模块,提出了一种支持多类终端与服务定制的SaaS软件服务架构,给出了该架构的结构与工作流程,并通过实验证明了该架构可以实现SaaS模式的软件服务,而且能够实现对上述功能需求的支持。     

基于划分算法的SaaS寻址中断软件生成策略

针对软件即服务(SaaS)软件生成时所面临的Web服务和表述性状态转移(REST)接口难识别的问题,提出一种基于划分算法的SaaS软件生成方法。该方法采用划分算法将云计算系统中的各SaaS的功能进行划分,将各功能定义成一个节点,并定义各节点属性和计算各节点的相似度,以实现划分分类,从而提高功能搜索效率。在此基础上,根据需求变化实现功能寻址中断完成新的SaaS软件生成。最后通过在Amazon下的一个SaaS销售软件生成为例进行分析表明,该方法有效且可行。     

A systematic approach to new mobile service creation

In spit of the growing importance of new service creation (NSC), especially new mobile service creation, most of the previous studies on NSC have been conceptual and focused on the traditional services. In response, this study suggests a new systematic approach to new mobile service creation. At first, morphological analysis is applied to identify the structure of services. Specifically, the dimension parameters are defined by decomposing the service system into basic components and the shape parameters are defined by mapping keywords extracted from business method patents through text mining. Then, by applying conjoint analysis, the promising configurations of mobile services are derived. Finally, the Kano model is applied to evaluate the requirement type of alternatives. The proposed approach can generate and evaluate the service concepts systematically. The detailed procedure of the approach is illustrated based on the case of mobile entertainment services. The proposed approach is expected to help service designers in real service creation processes.     

大数据环境下基于公共服务平台的资源多级智能寻租与匹配策略和价值创造

资源的高效寻租与匹配是其价值创造的关键。文中研究大数据环境下基于公共服务平台的资源寻租与匹配问题,针对公共服务资源的非结构化特点,考虑本体树的路径距离、连接深度和广度,重新定义了语义距离,提出了基于语义距离的五元组形式化描述模型,消除了公共服务资源在底层结构和类型上的复杂性;针对公共服务平台上资源及其相关数据信息规模巨大的问题,提出了资源多级智能寻租与匹配策略,首先通过对参数相对较少且简单的S_category和S_status进行粗粒度过滤,大幅缩小资源寻租的范围,快速提高算法的匹配速度,再通过对Sability和SQoS的细粒度匹配,最终得到符合需求方匹配阈值要求的资源排序集合。实验算例表明,该方法的计算效率显著高于传统的多线程算法,且与目前常用的资源寻租与匹配算法相比,查准率和查全率更优。实验结果证明,该方法有效可行,不仅能够实现公共服务平台上资源的快速寻租和高效匹配,而且还能够在大数据的驱动下实现资源的价值创造。     

BodyCloud: A SaaS approach for community Body Sensor Networks

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) have been recently introduced for the remote monitoring of human activities in a broad range of application domains, such as health care, emergency management, fitness and behavior surveillance. BSNs can be deployed in a community of people and can generate large amounts of contextual data that require a scalable approach for storage, processing and analysis. Cloud computing can provide a flexible storage and processing infrastructure to perform both online and offline analysis of data streams generated in BSNs. This paper proposes BodyCloud, a SaaS approach for community BSNs that supports the development and deployment of Cloud-assisted BSN applications. BodyCloud is a multi-tier application-level architecture that integrates a Cloud computing platform and BSN data streams middleware. BodyCloud provides programming abstractions that allow the rapid development of community BSN applications. This work describes the general architecture of the proposed approach and presents a case study for the real-time monitoring and analysis of cardiac data streams of many individuals.     

企业远程安全运维服务系统可行性分析研究

而今,随着计算机通信网络技术的飞速发展,IT越来越深入到企业的核心业务,影响企业的策略制定和企业的发展。对于企业而言,如何把有限的IT资源有效的作用于企业核心业务,最快地获取专业的支持能力,实现对系统的完善管理,提高系统的可靠性和可用性,提高企业的工作效率,更好地管理IT运营成本,提高企业的竞争力,这是所有企业都必须面对的问题。     

企业云服务体系结构的参考模型与开发方法

服务与云计算范型的融合有助于大规模分布式软件的开发和应用,同时也为面向服务的软件工程带来了新的挑战。云计算的最大挑战是缺少事实上的标准或单一的体系结构方法,以满足企业将关键产品作为Internet上的云服务发布的应用需求。首先,针对企业云计算的业务特点,提出了一种企业云服务体系结构(Enterprise Cloud Service Architecture,ECSA)风格的通用和抽象参考模型,分析了该模型中的云服务、服务模式、服务消费者、管理、流程、质量属性、服务构件模型、服务匹配和交互模式匹配9个组件及其之间的关系,并讨论了它们中的角色。然后,提出了一个四阶段的ECSA迭代改进过程,该过程把云服务视为首要的类建模元素,通过解除云服务模型和来自目标构件配置之间的耦合,可实现相同云服务集的多种不同体系结构。最后,给出了一种基于该模型的期货程序化交易的私有云服务应用实例,用以展示该方法的可行性和有效性。     

Capacity planning for IaaS cloud providers offering multiple service classes

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud providers typically offer multiple service classes to satisfy users with different requirements and budgets. Cloud providers are faced with the challenge of estimating the minimum resource capacity required to meet Service Level Objectives (SLOs) defined for all service classes. This paper proposes a capacity planning method that is combined with an admission control mechanism to address this challenge. The capacity planning method uses analytical models to estimate the output of a quota-based admission control mechanism and find the minimum capacity required to meet availability SLOs and admission rate targets for all classes. An evaluation using trace-driven simulations shows that our method estimates the best cloud capacity with a mean relative error of 2.5% with respect to the simulation, compared to a 36% relative error achieved by a single-class baseline method that does not consider admission control mechanisms. Moreover, our method exhibited a high SLO fulfillment for both availability and admission rates, and obtained mean CPU utilization over 91%, while the single-class baseline method had values not greater than 78%.     

Cost model based service placement in federated hybrid clouds

As cloud federation allows companies in need of computational resources to use computational resources hosted by different cloud providers, it reduces the cost of IT infrastructure by lowering capital and operational expenses. This is the result of economies of scale and the possibility for organizations to purchase just as much computing and storage resources as needed whenever needed. However, a clear specification of cost savings requires a detailed specification of the costs incurred. Although there are some efforts to define cost models for clouds, the need for a comprehensive cost model, which covers all cost factors and types of clouds, is undeniable. In this paper, we cover this gap by suggesting a cost model for the most general form of a cloud, namely federated hybrid clouds. This type of cloud is composed of a private cloud and a number of interoperable public clouds. The proposed cost model is applied within a cost minimization algorithm for making service placement decisions in clouds. We demonstrate the workings of our cost model and service placement algorithm within a specific cloud scenario. Our results show that the service placement algorithm with the cost model minimizes the spending for computational services.     

Assessing cloud computing value in firms through socio-technical determinants

While cloud computing is touted as a promising information technology advancement, predictions of its value are inconclusive. This research investigates the impact of cloud computing within-firm and across-firm. Drawing on the resource-based view and sociotechnical theory, technical attributes and social attributes of cloud computing are identified to impact firm performance via primary and support use. Results from data collected from 513 firms show varying effects of technical and social attributes in primary use and support use, which help create value and better performance. Such effects also are found to differ between firms in service and manufacturing sectors.     

Embedded software verification in hardware–software codesign

Concurrent Embedded Real-Time Software (CERTS) is intrinsically different from traditional, sequential, independent, and temporally unconstrained software. The verification of software is more complex than hardware due to inherent flexibilities (dynamic behavior) that incur a multitude of possible system states. The verification of CERTS is all the more difficult due to its concurrency and embeddedness. The work presented here shows how the complexity of CERTS verification can be reduced significantly through answering common engineering questions such as when, where, and how one must verify embedded software. First, a new Schedule-Verify-Map strategy is proposed to answer the when question. Second, verification under system concurrency is proposed to answer the where question. Finally, a complete symbolic model checking procedure is proposed for CERTS verification. Several application examples illustrate the usefulness of our technique in increasing verification scalability.     

Development of a novel cloud-based multi-tenant model creation service for automatic virtual metrology

AVM (Automatic Virtual Metrology) is the highest-level technology for VM (Virtual Metrology) applications from the perspective of automation. Its various automatic capabilities could facilitate fast factory-wide deployment and operations of VM systems. AVM systems have been successfully applied to the semiconductor, TFT-LCD, solar-cell, and machining industries for on-line monitoring the production quality of workpieces. However, in its past industrial applications, the model creation (MC) functionality of the existing AVM system encountered several limitations, such as being a standalone application and confined to be used in situ in a factory, no support for multiuser model creation, wasting computing resources, etc., which could diminish the applicability of the existing AVM system in current global and distributed manufacturing environments. Thus, this paper is dedicated to tackling the problem of how to systematically and effectively overcome MC-related limitations of the existing AVM system so that it can robustly support multiple users across factories to create their VM models simultaneously in distributed manufacturing settings. By leveraging the advantages of cloud computing and several IT technologies (including virtualization software, XML, Web Service, Multi-tenancy technique, and HTML5), this paper proposes a novel cloud-based multi-tenant model creation service (i.e., CMMCS) for AVM. The proposed CMMCS contains a cloud-based system architecture, functional frameworks of its key components, several functional mechanisms, and HTML5-based Web GUIs. Testing results in an industrial case study that creates VM models using the CMMCS for CNC machine tools in machining wheel rims of automobiles in a factory in Taiwan demonstrate that the CMMCS can allow multiple users from different tenants to simultaneously create their VM models, while enabling the MC cloud services to be more robust for processing MC requests, having higher CPU-usage rates in the underlying virtual machines, and achieving better cross-platform usage, compared to the original MC functionality. This paper has provided a feasible solution to systematically and effectively remedying the MC-related limitations of the existing AVM system. The existing VM-related literature mainly focused on the development of VM models. To our knowledge, no papers have coped with issues addressed in this paper by leveraging cloud computing. The results of this paper can be a useful reference for industrial practitioners to construct AVM systems which support multi-tenant or multiuser model creation.     

云计算在基于NGB的智慧家庭业务平台上的应用

基于NGB的智慧家庭以其广泛的受众,必将承载海量数据。在智慧家庭业务平台建设中引入云计算技术,不仅可以提供云存储来保存大量数据,更使平台具备对大数据的快速分析和处理能力,这对用户和运营商都大有裨益,为此,文章详细阐述了云计算引入业务平台所带来的好处。