基于Agent的Web Services自适应工作流模型的研究

如何让企业可以灵敏反应外部环境的变动并快速改变企业内部的流程作业,是传统工作流管理系统面临的最大挑战.提出一种基于Agent的Web Services工作流模型(AW-WFM)来解决这个难题.在这个模型中,基于Agent的技术实现一种工作流协作机制,而Web Services技术为工作流管理系统提供了计算资源.最后,介绍了AW-WFM在上海大学协同办公系统中的应用.     

An ontology,intelligent agent-based framework for the provision of semantic web services

Intelligent agents and semantic web services are two technologies with great potential. Striking new applications can be developed by using the tools and techniques they provide. However, semantic web services need for an upper software entity able to deal with them and, on the other hand agent technology has historically suffered from a number of drawbacks that must be addressed. Integrating these two technologies in a joint environment can overcome their problems while strengthening their advantages. In this paper, the necessity for integrating these technologies and the potential benefits of their combination are analyzed. Based on this study, we present SEMMAS, an ontology-based framework for seamlessly integrating Intelligent Agents and Semantic Web Services. The basics of the framework are detailed and a proof-of-concept implementation described.     

Supply web co-ordination by an agent-based trading network with integrated logistics services

B2B interactions, like electronic negotiations and auctions between suppliers and customers, could be significantly improved by enabling the participants to adapt their bidding strategies to current logistics information (e.g., about transportation condition, cost or dates) while the negotiation goes on. We present an approach of an agent-based information and trading network (ITN) called CASA for dynamic production and sales of timber; the integrated services for logistics and e-commerce are efficiently coordinated by appropriate types of holonic structured intelligent agents of the network. We introduce the agent-based architecture and describe how the agents build their plans and optimize them afterwards. For optimizing their plans, the agents use various market-based negotiation mechanisms, i.e., several auction mechanisms and the simulated trading mechanism described in detail in this article. The effects of the different mechanisms on resulting cost and surplus have been evaluated by various simulation runs in different competitive and co-operative settings. It turned out that the simulated trading mechanism as well as matrix auction mechanisms for two or three items are especially suitable for supply web co-ordination and optimization tasks.     

关于Web服务组合的有效Web服务发现机制

随着Web Services的广泛流行,怎样发现适当Web Services来支持Web Services的组合已经成为一种挑战.由于传统的关键字搜索具有太低的记忆性和精确性,因此这种方法是很低效的.基于Web Services的描述信息,介绍了一种有效的Web Services发现机制.此服务发现方法是简单可用的,通过引入语义变得十分高效,因此该机制成功的在服务组合模型上得到了实现.     

Enacting agent-based services for automated procurement

Negotiation events in industrial procurement involving multiple, highly customisable goods pose serious challenges to buying agents when trying to determine the best set of providing agents’ offers. Typically, a buying agent's decision involves a large variety of constraints that may involve attributes of a very same item as well as attributes of different, multiple items. In this paper we present iBundler, an agent-aware service offered to buying agents to help them determine the optimal bundle of received offers based on their business rules. In this way, buying agents are relieved with the burden of solving too hard a problem and concentrate on strategic issues. iBundler is intended as a negotiation service for buying agents and as a winner determination service for reverse combinatorial auctions with side constraints. Furthermore, we assess the computational cost added by employing agent technology in the development of iBundler to characterise the type of negotiation scenarios that it can acceptably handle.     

An interactive agent-based system for concept-based web search

Search engines are useful tools in looking for information from the Internet. However, due to the difficulties of specifying appropriate queries and the problems of keyword-based similarity ranking presently encountered by search engines, general users are still not satisfied with the results retrieved. To remedy the above difficulties and problems, in this paper we present a multi-agent framework in which an interactive approach is proposed to iteratively collect a user's feedback from the pages he has identified. By analyzing the pages gathered, the system can then gradually formulate queries to efficiently describe the content a user is looking for. In our framework, the evolution strategies are employed to evolve critical feature words for concept modeling in query formulation. The experimental results show that the framework developed is efficient and useful to enhance the quality of web search, and the concept-based semantic search can thus be achieved.     

On coordinating personalized composite web services

This paper presents a research project on the coordination of personalized composite web services. By coordination, it is meant the mechanisms that specify the orchestration of the component web services of a composite web service. The orchestration is about the execution chronology of the component web services, the data that the component web services exchange, the states that the component web services take, and the actions that the component web services perform. By personalization, it is meant the integration of user preferences into the specification that orchestrates the component web services. These preferences concern when the component web services are to be executed. In this research project, the operations of coordination and personalization are entrusted to software agents, which, for instance, monitor the context surrounding users and trigger as a result the appropriate component web services. In addition, software agents engage in conversations with their peers when it comes to tracking the personalized component web services.     

基于移动agent的语义Web服务发现模型

现有的语义Web服务发现机制还很难实现Web服务发布、发现的自动化、智能化,这严重影响了语义Web服务的质量(QoS)和满意度.因此提出了一种分布式UDDI网络环境下基于移动agent的语义Web服务发现模型,性能分析表明该模型具有较高的查全率和查准率,提高了Web服务发布,发现的自动化、智能化,缩短了查询时间,很大程度上满足了用户个性化服务需求.     

An analysis of web services support for dynamic business process outsourcing

Outsourcing of business processes is crucial for organizations to be effective, efficient and flexible. In fast changing markets, dynamic outsourcing is required, in which business relationships are established and enacted on-the-fly in an adaptive, fine-grained way. This requires automated means for the establishment of outsourcing relationships and for the enactment of services performed in these relationships. Due to wide industry support and their model of loose coupling, Web Services have become the mechanism of choice to interconnect organizations. This paper analyzes Web Services support for the dynamic process outsourcing paradigm. We discuss contract-based outsourcing to define requirements, introduce the Web Services framework and investigate the match between the two. We observe that the framework requires further support for cross-organizational business processes and mechanisms for contracting, QoS management and transaction management. We suggest an approach to fill these gaps based on a business process support application layer implemented on Web Service technology.     

Web服务信誉度评估模型的研究

对Web服务的信誉度、信誉关系属性和信任类型进行了形式化的定义,并据此来评估Web服务的信誉行为,考虑到Web服务信誉度的不确定性,在引入信誉量化概念的基础上,对现有的UDDI规范进行扩展,提出了Web服务信誉度评估模型,并深入研究了Web服务的信誉度评估方法及模型的实现方案,与其它的Web服务信誉度模型相比,该模型通过使用客户反馈、主动监视的机制以及采用第三方权威机构评价Web服务的信誉度,从而保证了信誉度的公平性和有效性.     

Agent-based game-theoretic model for collaborative web services: Decision making analysis

In agent and (web) service computing, collaboration takes place when distributed entities have limited knowledge and capabilities, so they cannot perform required tasks without interacting and helping each other. For instance, web services, which are loosely-coupled business applications, are called to cooperate in distributed settings for the sake of efficiency. In this context, agents that abstract and act on behalf of web services could act in cooperative groups that gather a number of agents sharing some common goals. Enabling those agent-based web services to decide about their strategies in terms of joining and acting within groups, inviting other agents to join, and leaving a group to act alone is an open issue that we address in this work. In this paper, we propose a framework where agent-based web services select strategies that maximize their outcomes. These strategies could be categorized into cooperative strategies involving other agents and strategies that highlight the single operative attitude. Although cooperation seems to bring better utility to cooperative agents, we highlight that web services in some environments obtain better outcome while they act individually (i.e., outside the group). This means that the cost of cooperation (in some particular cases) might negatively influence the outcome and obtained utility. As solution, we propose in this paper (1) an agent-based model that formalizes web services decision making where different parameters are considered; and (2) a game-theoretic framework that analyzes the web services strategies allowing them to maximize their acting performance where non-zero-sum games are being used. The paper presents theoretical results, which are also confirmed through extensive simulations.     

针对Web服务的动态负载平衡模型

Web服务是一项非常重要的网络技术,如何提高其的性能是一个热点问题。为了增强Web服务系统的容错性和扩展性,将负载平衡技术应用到Web服务领域。报告了负载平衡算法的现状,分析了Web服务对负载平衡的要求,给出了一个针对Web服务的动态负载平衡模型,介绍了动态调整模型中的服务耗费值、负载阀值和服务器权重的方法,及过载保护的方法。     

Modeling the web as a hypergraph to compute page reputation

In this work we propose a model to represent the web as a directed hypergraph (instead of a graph), where links connect pairs of disjointed sets of pages. The web hypergraph is derived from the web graph by dividing the set of pages into non-overlapping blocks and using the links between pages of distinct blocks to create hyperarcs. A hyperarc connects a block of pages to a single page, in order to provide more reliable information for link analysis. We use the hypergraph model to create the hypergraph versions of the Pagerank and Indegree algorithms, referred to as HyperPagerank and HyperIndegree, respectively. The hypergraph is derived from the web graph by grouping pages by two different partition criteria: grouping together the pages that belong to the same web host or to the same web domain. We compared the original page-based algorithms with the host-based and domain-based versions of the algorithms, considering a combination of the page reputation, the textual content of the pages and the anchor text. Experimental results using three distinct web collections show that the HyperPagerank and HyperIndegree algorithms may yield better results than the original graph versions of the Pagerank and Indegree algorithms. We also show that the hypergraph versions of the algorithms were slightly less affected by noise links and spamming.     

Multi-group QoS consensus for web services

QoS has been considered as a significant factor for web service marketing and selection. The interpretation of QoS value from web service consumers and providers would be very different. However, a large group of web service participants with different backgrounds may have difficulties in reaching consensus on the values of multi-dimensional web service QoS, so they may have to be clustered in multi-groups in order to improve effectiveness and efficiency. The similarity of clustered fuzzy QoS dispositions as well as their preference order over these attributes should be analyzed to form a multi-groups consensus framework. A soft multi-groups clustering approach could be adopted to prevent opinions from being excluded unintentionally. The group boundaries and similarity thresholds which are used for clustering and analyzing fuzzy QoS opinions can be moderated dynamically according to the feedback from the internal learning mechanism and the web service consumers. As a result, a model for marketing web services based on multi-group consumers' QoS consensus, the FMG-QCMA (Fuzzy Multi-Groups based QoS Consensus Moderation Approach), is proposed to meet the above requirements. The proposed FMG-QCMA is also evaluated through a case study to demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency in relation to an existing framework, QCMA (QoS Consensus Moderation Approach).     

基于Cookie的Web服务安全认证系统

Web服务是一种崭新的分布式计算模式,是下一代电子商务的框架。但Web服务能否顺利发展的关键是其安全问题,对Web服务请求者的身份进行认证是解决安全问题的重要途径。为克服HTTP协议的无状态性,在对基于cookie的认证机制的实现原理和过程进行分析和研究的基础上,提出了一种基于Cookie的认证系统,详细介绍了其工作流程。谊认证系统具备单点登录和适应所有浏览器等特点,比较适合于Web服务在单域内的安全认证。     

A semantics for web services authentication

We consider the problem of specifying and verifying cryptographic security protocols for XML web services. The security specification WS-Security describes a range of XML security elements, such as username tokens, public-key certificates, and digital signatures, amounting to a flexible vocabulary for expressing protocols. To describe the syntax of these elements, we extend the usual XML data model with symbolic representations of cryptographic values. We use predicates on this data model to describe the semantics of security elements and of sample protocols distributed with the Microsoft WSE implementation of WS-Security. By embedding our data model within Abadi and Fournet's applied pi calculus, we formulate and prove security properties with respect to the standard Dolev–Yao threat model. Moreover, we informally discuss issues not addressed by the formal model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to the specification and verification of security protocols based on a faithful account of the XML wire format.