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.     

A web services framework for distributed model management

Distributed model management aims to support the wide-spread sharing and usage of decision support models. Web services is a promising technology for supporting distributed model management activities such as model creation and delivery, model composition, model execution and model maintenance to fulfill dynamic decision-support and problem solving requests. We propose a web services based framework for model management (called MM-WS) to support various activities of the model management life cycle. The framework is based on the recently proposed Integrated Service Planning and Execution (ISP & E) approach for web services integration. We discuss encoding of domain knowledge (as individual models) and utilize the MM-WS framework to interleave synthesis of composite models with their execution. A prototypical implementation with an example is used to illustrate the utility of the framework to enable distributed model management and knowledge integration. Benefits and issues of using the framework to support model-based decision-making in organizational contexts are outlined.

一种策略驱动的Web服务质量保障框架

随着面向服务计算技术的发展和应用,提供非功能属性保障能力成为服务在企业应用中获得成功的关键因素.同传统的分布式计算技术不同的是,服务是动态发现和绑定的,这要求服务双方必须动态协商并保障各种非功能属性.使用WS-Policy语言来显式描述Web服务的非功能性的能力和需求,并提出了一种策略驱动的服务保障框架来完成非功能属性的动态保障,最后在SOAP引擎SOAPExpress中实现了这一框架,结果表明它可以有效满足企业应用对Web服务质量的需求.     

A dual-layered model for web services representation and composition

Nowadays more and more companies and organizations implement their business services in the Internet due to the tremendous progress made recently in the field of Web services. It becomes possible to publish, locate and invoke applications across the Web. Thus, the ability to select efficiently and integrate at runtime services located in different sites on the Web is an important issue. In some situations, if no single Web service can satisfy the request of the user, there should be a possibility to combine existing services together in order to meet the user’s request. This paper provides a dual-layered model for web services, where the first model layer captures the high-level functional specifications (namely goals, achievement contexts, and external behaviours), and the second model layer captures the low-level functional specifications (namely interfaces). This model allows the service composition process to be performed on both high-level and low-level specifications. We also introduce the composition operators (both high-level and low-level) to allow composition of virtual services.     

A framework for QoS-aware binding and re-binding of composite web services

QoS-aware dynamic binding of composite services provides the capability of binding each service invocation in a composition to a service chosen among a set of functionally equivalent ones to achieve a QoS goal, for example minimizing the response time while limiting the price under a maximum value.This paper proposes a QoS-aware binding approach based on Genetic Algorithms. The approach includes a feature for early run-time re-binding whenever the actual QoS deviates from initial estimates, or when a service is not available. The approach has been implemented in a framework and empirically assessed through two different service compositions.     

Reliability-aware automatic composition approach for web services

In this paper,we study the reliability-aware synthesis problem for composing available services automatically and guaranteeing that the composed result satisfies the specification,such as temporal constraints of functionality and reliability,centered on a synthesis model for mediator of web services composition (CSM).This approach focuses on handling attributes and state relations,and permitting users and services to operate over them,i.e.,read /write their data values and compare them according to a dense state order.We show that the reliability-aware synthesis problem for the specification is EXPTIME-complete and we give an exponential-time algorithm (CSM-NSA) which for a given formula ψ and a synthesis model,synthesizes available services in the library satisfying ψ over the synthesis model (if they exist) or responds with "not satisfiable" (otherwise).The specification ψ is a fragment of PCTL (probabilistic computation tree logic),obtained from "ordinary" CTL (computation tree logic) by replacing the EX,AX,EU and AU operation with their quantitative counterparts X >p,X =1,U >p,and U =1,respectively.As opposed to NSA,we provide a more effective algorithm to replace the NSA algorithm called CSM-HSA (heuristic synthesis algorithm).Though HSA is an incomplete algorithm,the answer is correct.The experiments show that the HSA algorithm solves the problem of reliability-aware service synthesis effectively and efficiently.     

A pattern-based approach to protocol mediation for web services composition

ContextWith the increasing popularity of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), service composition is gaining momentum as the potential silver bullet for application integration. However, services are not always perfectly compatible and therefore cannot be directly composed. Service mediation, roughly classified into signature and protocol ones, thus becomes one key working area in SOA.ObjectiveAs a challenging problem, protocol mediation is still open and existing approaches only provide partial solutions. Further investigation on a systematic approach is needed.MethodsIn this paper, an approach based on mediator patterns is proposed to generate executable mediators and glue partially compatible services together. The mediation process and its main steps are introduced. By utilizing message mapping, a heuristic technique for identifying protocol mismatches and selecting appropriate mediator patterns is presented. The corresponding BPEL templates of these patterns are also developed.ResultsA prototype system, namely Service Mediation Toolkit (SMT), has been implemented to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.ConclusionThe approach along with the prototype system facilitate the existing practice of protocol mediation for Web services composition.     

面向服务Web用户界面的动态组合框架

针对当前Web服务的应用和研究只关注于对业务功能的封装和重用以及相应服务的组合,而对用户界面缺乏相应的支持,提出了一种动态的、面向服务的Web用户界面(web user interface,WebUI)组合框架.在此框架中,WebUI构件被封装为可重用的Web服务,因此可以被发现、选择和绑定,并根据WebUI建模时所生成的WebUI组合描述被动态地组合为相应的WebUI,显著地简化了WebUI的开发和维护工作.     

An open framework supporting multimedia web services

With the rapid emergence of Web services, more and more Web services are published on the Internet as resources for Web application development. There may exist some relationships among different Web services, such as exact match, plug-in match, and irrelevant. In this paper, we discuss a set of requirements related to multimedia Web services, and propose a three-tier framework to establish an open environment supporting multimedia Web services, while partially implementing the requirements. This paper focuses on the design of the service broker tier that is essential for future Web services-oriented system design and integration and enabling Web services more transparent, interoperable, and fault-tolerate.     

An ECA-based framework for decentralized coordination of ubiquitous web services

Emerging ubiquitous computing network is expected to consist of a variety of heterogeneous and distributed devices. While web services technology is increasingly being considered as a promising solution to support the inter-operability between such heterogeneous devices via well-defined protocol, currently there is no effective framework reported in the literature that can address the problem of coordinating the web services-enabled devices. This paper considers a ubiquitous computing environment that is comprised of active, autonomous devices interacting with each other through web services, and presents an ECA (Event-Condition-Action)-based framework for effective coordination of those devices. Specifically, we first present an XML-based language for describing ECA rules that are embedded in web service-enabled devices. An ECA rule, when triggered by an internal or external event to the device, can result in the invocation of appropriate web services in the system. Subsequently, we consider the situation in which the rules are introduced and managed by multiple, independent users, and propose effective mechanisms that can detect and resolve potential inconsistencies among the rules. The presented ECA-based coordination approach is expected to facilitate seamless inter-operation among the web service-enabled devices in the emerging ubiquitous computing environments.     

Synthy: A system for end to end composition of web services

The demand for quickly delivering new applications is increasingly becoming a business imperative today. However, application development is often done in an ad hoc manner resulting in poor reuse of software assets and longer time-to-delivery. Web services have received much interest due to their potential in facilitating seamless business-to-business or enterprise application integration. A web service composition system can help automate the process, from specifying business process functionalities, to developing executable workflows that capture non-functional (e.g. Quality of Service (QoS)) requirements, to deploying them on a runtime infrastructure. Intuitively, web services can be viewed as software components and the process of web service composition similar to software synthesis. In addition, service composition needs to address the build-time and runtime issues of the integrated application, thereby making it a more challenging and practical problem than software synthesis. However, current solutions based on business web services (using WSDL, BPEL, SOAP, etc.) or semantic web services (using ontologies, goal-directed reasoning, etc.) are both piecemeal and insufficient. We formulate the web service composition problem and describe the first integrated system for composing web services end to end, i.e., from specification to deployment. The proposed solution is based on a novel two-staged composition approach that addresses the information modeling aspects of web services, provides support for contextual information while composing services, employs efficient decoupling of functional and non-functional requirements, and leads to improved scalability and failure handling. We also present Synthy, a prototype of the service composition system, and demonstrate its effectiveness with the help of an application scenario from the telecom domain.     

Web Services动态合成技术的研究

为了提高Web Services合成的效率,减少用户查询时过多的人工干预,提出了一个Web Services最佳路径动态合成框架.在该框架下以产生式的形式建模,构建一个适合于最佳路径算法的DAG图,以参数级本体解决合成过程中的语义冲突问题,并通过最佳路径算法进行合成.通过分析比较,该框架特别适合于对同样的用户输入和Web Services进行多次合成以生成相同的或者不同的输出,同时也避免了回溯和对合成方案的优化.     

Evolutionary composition of QoS-aware web services: A many-objective perspective

Web service based applications often invoke services provided by third-parties in their workflow. The Quality of Service (QoS) provided by the invoked supplier can be expressed in terms of the Service Level Agreement specifying the values contracted for particular aspects like cost or throughput, among others. In this scenario, intelligent systems can support the engineer to scrutinise the service market in order to select those candidates that best fit with the expected composition focusing on different QoS aspects. This search problem, also known as QoS-aware web service composition, is characterised by the presence of many diverse QoS properties to be simultaneously optimised from a multi-objective perspective. Nevertheless, as the number of QoS properties considered during the design phase increases and a larger number of decision factors come into play, it becomes more difficult to find the most suitable candidate solutions, so more sophisticated techniques are required to explore and return diverse, competitive alternatives. With this aim, this paper explores the suitability of many-objective evolutionary algorithms for addressing the binding problem of web services on the basis of a real-world benchmark with 9 QoS properties. A complete comparative study demonstrates that these techniques, never before applied to this problem, can achieve a better trade-off between all the QoS properties, or even promote specific QoS properties while keeping high values for the rest. In addition, this search process can be performed within a reasonable computational cost, enabling its adoption by intelligent and decision-support systems in the field of service oriented computation.     

Time-constrained services: a framework for using real-time web services in industrial automation

The use of web services in industrial automation, e.g. in fully automated production processes like car manufacturing, promises simplified interaction among the manufacturing devices due to standardized protocols and increased flexibility with respect to process implementation and reengineering. Moreover, the adoption of web services as a seamless communication backbone within the overall industrial enterprise has additional benefits, such as simplified interaction with suppliers and customers (i.e. horizontal integration) and avoidance of a break in the communication paradigm within the enterprise (i.e. vertical integration). The Time-Constrained Services (TiCS) framework is a development and execution environment that empowers automation engineers to develop, deploy, publish, compose, and invoke time-constrained web services. TiCS consists of four functional layers—tool support layer, real-time infrastructural layer, real-time service layer, and hardware layer—which contain several components to meet the demands of a web service based automation infrastructure. This article gives an overview of the TiCS framework. More precisely, the general design considerations and an architectural blueprint of the TiCS framework are presented. Subsequently, selected key components of the TiCS framework are discussed in detail: the SOAP4PLC engine for equipping programmable logic controllers with a web service interface, the SOAP4IPC engine for processing web services in real-time on industrial PCs, the WS-TemporalPolicy language for describing time constraints, and the TiCS Modeler for composing time-constrained web services into a time-constrained BPEL4WS workflow.     

comFlow:一个支持Web服务动态组合的原型系统

随着电子商务的迅速发展及用户对企业服务质量和及时信息反馈的要求越来越高,企业内及企业间各个系统之间的交互对企业的发展越来越重要.结合Web服务技术和流程建模技术,设计并初步实现了支持Web服务动态组合和执行的原型系统,给出了comFlow的系统架构,并描述它的组成部分.     

A Logical Framework for Knowledge Base Maintenance

The maintenance sequences of a knowledge base and their limits are introduced.Some concepts used in knowledge base maintenance,such as new laws,user‘s rejections,and reconstructions of a knowledge base are defined;the related theorems are proved.A procedure is defined using transition systems;it generates maintenance sequences for a given user‘s model and a knowledge base.It is proved that all sequences produced by the procedure are convergent,and their limit is the set of true sentences of the model.Some computational aspects of reconstructions are studied.An R-calculus is given to deduce a reconstruction when a knowledge base meets a user‘s rejection.The work is compared with AGM‘s theory of belief revision.