Towards ubiquitous tourist service coordination and process integration: A collaborative travel agent system architecture with semantic web services

With the recent advances in Internet and mobile technologies, there are increasing demands for ubiquitous access to tourist information systems for service coordination and process integration. However, due to disparate tourist information and service resources such as airlines, hotels, tour operators, it is still difficult for tourists to use them effectively during their trips or even in the planning stage. Neither can current tourist portals assist tourists proactively. To overcome this problem, we propose a Collaborative Travel Agent System (CTAS) based on a scalable, flexible, and intelligent Multi-Agent Information System (MAIS) architecture for proactive aids to Internet and mobile users. We also employ Semantic Web technologies for effective organization of information resources and service processes. We formulate our MAIS architecture for CTAS further with agent clusters based on a case study of a large service-oriented travel agency. Agent clusters may comprise several types of agents to achieve the goals involved in the major processes of a tourist’s trip. We show how agents can make use of ontology from the Semantic Web to help tourists better plan, understand, and specify their requirements collaboratively with the CTAS. We further illustrate how this can be successfully implemented with Web service technologies to integrate disparate Internet tourist resources. To conclude, we discuss and evaluate our approach from different stakeholders’ perspectives.

基于Web服务与Agent的软件架构

为了更好地适应软件智能化和分布化的发展需求,在概述了Web服务技术和Agent技术的核心概念的基础之上,提出了基于Web服务与Agent的软件架构,并设计了该架构中的核心概念服务代理的结构.该架构很好地融合了Web服务技术与Agent技术各自的优点,结合了Web服务体系结构与多代理系统各自的优势,能够更加高效地构建出应用于发布环境中开放的、动态的、分布式的IT系统.     

MobileTrust: a trust enhanced security architecture for mobile agent systems

While offering many practical benefits for distributed applications, mobile agent systems pose some fundamental security challenges. In this paper, we present a new approach to mobile agent security which helps to address some of these challenges. We present a new technique, which we refer to as trust enhanced security, and apply it to mobile agent-based systems; this new technique advocates a shift in security solutions from security-centric to trust-centric. This extends the traditional security mechanisms by enabling trust decisions through explicit specification and management of security-related trust relationships. The integration of the trust decisions into security decision-making process leads to our trust enhanced security performance. A formal trust model is proposed and is incorporated into the development of a novel trust management architecture—MobileTrust for mobile agent-based applications. We have conducted detailed practical investigations to evaluate and validate the emergent properties of the trust enhanced security technique. We present and discuss the key results in this paper.     

A proxy architecture for collaborative media streaming

Streaming media from the Internet is a successful application for end-users. With the upcoming success of mobile devices and home networking environments, cooperation among users will become more important in the future. To achieve such cooperation, explicit middleware standards have been defined. On the other hand, Internet conferencing applications do not handle collaborative streaming sessions with individual control for each user. We propose a new concept for cooperation exemplary for collaborative media streaming using IETF multimedia session control protocols together with a proxy architecture. This concept enables both synchronization among clients and flexible control to individual users.     

Evolutionary and collaborative software architecture recovery with Softwarenaut

Architecture recovery is an activity applied to a system whose initial architecture has eroded. When the system is large, the user must use dedicated tools to support the recovery process. We present Softwarenaut — a tool which supports architecture recovery through interactive exploration and visualization. Classical architecture recovery features, such as filtering and details on demand, are enhanced with evolutionary capabilities when multi-version information about a subject system is available. The tool allows sharing and discovering the results of previous analysis sessions through a global repository of architectural views indexed by systems.We present the features of the tool together with the architecture recovery process that it supports using as a case-study ArgoUML, a well-known open source Java system.     

CROWN:A service grid middleware with trust management mechanism

Based on a proposed Web service-based grid architecture, a service grid middleware system called CROWN is designed in this paper. As the two kernel points of the middleware, the overlay-based distributed grid resource management mechanism is proposed, and the policy-based distributed access control mechanism with the capability of automatic negotiation of the access control policy and trust management and negotia- tion is also discussed in this paper. Experience of CROWN testbed deployment and ap- plication development shows that the middleware can support the typical scenarios such as computing-intensive applications, data-intensive applications and mass information processing applications.     

Social network-based service recommendation with trust enhancement

Given the increasing applications of service computing and cloud computing, a large number of Web services are deployed on the Internet, triggering the research of Web service recommendation. Despite of service QoS, the use of user feedback is becoming the current trend in service recommendation. Likewise in traditional recommender systems, sparsity, cold-start and trustworthiness are major issues challenging service recommendation in adopting similarity-based approaches. Meanwhile, with the prevalence of social networks, nowadays people become active in interacting with various computers and users, resulting in a huge volume of data available, such as service information, user-service ratings, interaction logs, and user relationships. Therefore, how to incorporate the trust relationship in social networks with user feedback for service recommendation motivates this work. In this paper, we propose a social network-based service recommendation method with trust enhancement known as RelevantTrustWalker. First, a matrix factorization method is utilized to assess the degree of trust between users in social network. Next, an extended random walk algorithm is proposed to obtain recommendation results. To evaluate the accuracy of the algorithm, experiments on a real-world dataset are conducted and experimental results indicate that the quality of the recommendation and the speed of the method are improved compared with existing algorithms.     

A new architecture for a collaborative authoring system

Much research has occurred in recent years detailing computer systems which support collaborative writing. In this paper we describe a collaborative authoring system capable of handling both synchronous and asynchronous communication between authors, based upon a writing model of coordination, writing, annotation, consolidation and negotiation. This assumes that the negotiation aspects play a major role in the collaborative process. A model linking the logical structure of documents and author roles is also established, based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language.     

A virtual collaborative maintenance architecture for manufacturing enterprises

This paper presents a virtual collaborative maintenance architecture aimed at improving the performance of manufacturing systems. The proposed architecture incorporates maintenance elements such as operational reliability, maintenance economics, human factors in maintenance, maintenance program, and maintenance optimization in a virtual collaborative architecture. An analytical model is proposed to measure the relative performance of the proposed virtual collaborative architecture as well as that of the manufacturing enterprise. A numerical example is also presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed approach.     

基于认知模型的室内移动服务机器人人机耦合协同作业机制

针对老年人和残疾人这类特殊用户群体与服务机器人构成的人机智能系统,提出了基于ACT-R(理性思维的适应性控制)认知架构模型的室内移动服务机器人人机耦合协同作业机制.基于ACT-R认知架构对人机一体化室内移动服务机器人人机协同作业系统进行了总体设计,利用简单自然的人机效应通道,设计了基于ACT-R认知架构的人机耦合界面;通过人-机-环境空间感知耦合,提出并建立了室内移动服务机器人人机一体化协同决策作业机制.最后在室内环境下进行移动服务机器人人机协同作业实验,系统安全高效地完成了作业任务,验证了该机制的有效性.     

Malaca: A component and aspect-oriented agent architecture

The production of maintainable and reusable agents depends largely on how well the agent architecture is modularized. Most commercial agent toolkits provide an Object-Oriented (OO) framework, whose agent architecture does not facilitate separate (re)use of the domain-specific functionality of an agent from other concerns. This paper presents Malaca, an agent architecture that combines the use of Component-based Software Engineering and Aspect-Oriented Software Development, both of which promote better modularization of the agent architecture while increase at the architectural level. Malaca supports the separate (re)use of the domain-specific functionality of an agent from other communication concerns, providing explicit support for the design and configuration of agent architectures and allows the development of agent-based software so that it is easy to understand, maintain and reuse.     

A pessimistic approach to trust in mobile agent platforms

The problem of protecting an execution environment from possibly malicious mobile agents has been studied extensively, but the reverse problem, protecting the agent from malicious execution environments, has not. We propose an approach that relies on trusted and tamper-resistant hardware to prevent breaches of trust, rather than correcting them after the fact. We address the question of how to base trust on technical reasoning. We present a pessimistic approach to trust that tries to prevent malicious behavior from occurring in the first place, rather than correcting it after it has occurred     

A collaborative platform for complex product design with an extended HLA integration architecture

How to integrate the heterogeneous, autonomous models in a distributed environment, running on Internet, integration based on multilayer federation architecture and simulation resources dynamic reuse are the major difficulties for complex product collaborative design and simulation. An extended HLA-based collaborative simulation platform for multidisciplinary collaborative design is proposed. The architecture of platform is first given. The idea and realization of four key technologies, the dynamic creation of simulation federation based on resource management federation (RMF), HLA enabled template, collaborative simulation algorithm based on stage-data synchronization and TH_RTI, an extensible HLA runtime infrastructure (RTI), which is a web enabled RTI and can be used at Internet, are emphasized. Finally, an industry case is given. The demonstration of these prototype systems shows that extended HLA integration architecture is effective infrastructure for multidisciplinary collaborative modeling and simulation (M&S).     

A pluggable service platform architecture for e-commerce

In the beginning of the e-commerce era, retailers mostly adopted vertically integrated solutions to control the entire e-commerce value chain. However, they began to realize that to achieve agility, a better approach would be to focus on certain core capabilities and then create a partner ecosystem around them. From a technical point of view, this means it is advised to have a lightweight platform architecture with small core e-commerce functionality which can be extended by additional services from third party providers. In a typical e-commerce ecosystem with diverse information systems of network partners, integration and interoperability become critical factors to enable seamless coordination among the partners. Furthermore an increasing adoption of cloud computing technology could be observed resulting in more challenging integration scenarios involving cloud services. Thus, an e-commerce platform is required that suites the advanced needs for flexible and agile service integration. Therefore, this paper aims to present a reference architecture of a novel pluggable service platform for e-commerce. We investigate on currently available online shop platform solutions and integration platforms in the market. Based on the findings and motivated by literature on service-oriented design, we develop an architecture of a service-based pluggable platform for online retailers. This design is then instantiated by means of a prototype for an e-commerce returns handling scenario to demonstrate the feasibility of our architecture design.     

A software architecture for open service gateways

Two industrial trends are changing our day-to-day lives. One is the introduction of broadband service to the home, where it promises to deliver complex new services. The other is the increasing resourcefulness, connectedness, and intelligence of home appliances. A residential gateway is a networking device that creates a bridge between the broadband network and the in-home network, and between different networking technologies within the home. The article gives an overview of this emerging marketplace, and introduces the work ongoing at the Open Service Gateway initiative. OSG1 is defining a set of open-standard software application interfaces (APIs) for building open-service gateways, including residential gateways     

A measurement approach of trust relation in web service

With the advent and proliferation of web services, quality of service serves as a benchmark to differentiate and select the services. Because trust has been regarded as an essential security relationship within a distributed network environment, quality evaluation of services from the viewpoint of trust presents a significant trend in decision support for selecting service over Internet. Unfortunately, the current research in the context of web services does not accurately reflect the randomness and fuzziness of trust, the basic issue in related research about trust. In this paper, we designed two kinds of trust cloud based on cloud model theory to describe the randomness and fuzziness of trust factors. Furthermore, a formalized calculation was provided to obtain the trust degree. To our knowledge, this is the first investigation into trust of web Service considering the integration of randomness and fuzziness, and applying the cloud model to quantitative evaluation of trust in the field of web services.     

Complex service design: A virtual enterprise architecture for logistics service

This paper presents an interdisciplinary systems approach to service modeling, design and deployment. The study is based on a longitudinal case study of the development process of a complex logistic service system based on an advanced logistics model. The case examines the development of a Virtual Enterprise Architecture (VEA) for an automatic high-speed transport and sorting system applied in airports for baggage handling. The study traces the evolution of the system from the early conceptual phases to a successful commercial service deployed at Changi, Singapore Airport. The study is conducted using a retrospective analysis of the case using a design science research approach. The paper evaluates and discusses the issues of creating and designing a new complex logistics service, distinct from the physical product, based on an advanced discrete event-based simulation model. The paper concludes by presenting a generalized and validated conceptual framework for a VEA based on an advanced simulation model. The paper thus contributes to the field of service systems and service management by identifying a novel approach to effective design of a new service.     

A multiple agent architecture for handwritten text recognition

This paper investigates the automatic reading of unconstrained omni-writer handwritten texts. It shows how to endow the reading system with learning faculties necessary to adapt the recognition to each writer's handwriting. In the first part of this paper, we explain how the recognition system can be adapted to a current handwriting by exploiting the graphical context defined by the writer's invariants. This adaptation is guaranteed by activating interaction links over the whole text between the recognition procedures of word entities and those of letter entities. In the second part, we justify the need of an open multiple-agent architecture to support the implementation of such a principle of adaptation. The proposed platform allows to plug expert treatments dedicated to handwriting analysis. We show that this platform helps to implement specific collaboration or cooperation schemes between agents which bring out new trends in the automatic reading of handwritten texts.