A high performance backoff protocol for fast execution of composite web services

Using web services to expose applications over the Internet is now a widely accepted practice. Currently, there are several ongoing efforts that provide ways to effectively compose web services distributed across different organizations. One of the problems underlying the deployment of such composite services on the web, however, is service co-allocation that arises when a composite service needs to ensure all the required component services to be available for execution at the same time. Motivated by this, this paper presents a new decentralized protocol, named web service co-allocation protocol (WSCP), which can facilitate fast execution of composite web services. The proposed framework is an enhancement of the famous two phase commit protocol through the incorporation of tentative hold phase as well as the employment of a new high performance backoff protocol developed to better address the dynamics of the service co-allocation problem. The simulation results show that the proposed approach yields significant improvements over existing protocols.     

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.     

Context-aware agents for user-oriented web services discovery and execution

Service-oriented computing (SOC) suggests that the Internet will be an open repository of many modular capabilities realized as web services. Organizations may be able to leverage this SOC paradigm if their employees are able to ubiquitously incorporate such capabilities and their resulting information into their daily practices. It is impractical to assume that human users will be able to manually search vast distributed repositories at real-time. This paper presents an architecture, Software Agent-Based Groupware using E-services (SAGE), that incorporates the use of intelligent agents to integrate human users with web services. SAGE provides background search and discovery approaches, thus enabling human users to exploit service-based capabilities that were previously too time-consuming to locate and integrate. We present a multi-agent system where each agent learns the rule-based preferences of a human user with regards to their current operational “context” and manages the incorporation of relevant web services. Recommended by: Djamal Benslimane and Zakaria Maamar     

A tentative commit protocol for composite web services

Composite web services provide promising prospects for conducting cross-organizational business transactions. Such transactions: are generally complex, require longer processing time, and manipulate financially critical data. It is therefore crucial to ensure stronger reliability, higher throughput and enhanced performance of transactions. In order to meet these requirements, this paper proposes a new commit protocol for managing transactions in composite web services. Specifically, it aims to improve the performance by reducing network delays and the processing time of transactions. The proposed protocol is based on the concept of tentative commit that allows transactions to tentatively commit on the shared data of web services. The tentative commit protocol avoids resource blocking thus improving performance. The proposed protocol is tested through various simulation experiments. The outcomes of these experiments show that the proposed protocol outperforms existing protocols in terms of transaction performance.     

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.     

An adaptive QoS-aware fault tolerance strategy for web services

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is widely adopted for building mission-critical systems, ranging from on-line stores to complex airline management systems. How to build reliable SOA systems becomes a big challenge due to the compositional nature of Web services. This paper proposes an adaptive QoS-aware fault tolerance strategy for Web services. Based on a user-collaborated QoS-aware middleware, SOA systems can dynamically adjust their optimal fault tolerance configurations to achieve optimal service reliability as well as good overall performance. Both the subjective user requirements and the objective system performance of the Web services are considered in our adaptive fault tolerance strategy. Experiments are conducted to illustrate the advantages of the proposed adaptive fault tolerance strategy. Performance and effectiveness comparisons of the proposed adaptive fault tolerance strategy and various traditional fault tolerance strategies are also provided.     

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.     

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.     

Efficient execution of composite Web services exchanging intensional data

Web service technologies provide a standard means of integrating heterogeneous applications distributed over the Internet. Successive compositions of new Web services using pre-existing ones usually create a hierarchical structure of invocations among a large number of Web services. For the efficient execution of these composite Web services, we propose an approach which exploits intensional XML data, i.e. an XML document that contains special elements representing the calls to Web services, in order to delegate the invocations of the external Web services to some relevant nodes. We formalize an invocation plan for composite Web services in which intensional data is used as their parameters and results, and define a cost-based optimization problem to obtain an efficient invocation plan for them. We provide an A∗ heuristic search algorithm to find an optimal invocation plan for a given set of Web services and also present a greedy method of generating an efficient solution in a short time. The experimental results show that the proposed greedy method can find a close-to-optimal solution efficiently and has good scalability for a complex call hierarchy of Web services.     

Network mapping services for dynamic selection of web services: promises and challenges

Web services provide the possibility of dynamically integrating distributed service components scattered over the Internet to fulfill sophisticated business demands. The effectiveness of service integration depends critically on the selection of best-fit service components. In this paper, we first review several research streams related to server selection. We then propose a framework of dynamic service discovery, termed Network Mapping Services (NMS), which combines prior efforts on network-aware applications and server selection into a coherent structure. As successful implementation of NMS requires the collaboration among all participating service providers, we also discuss several incentive schemes and compare their effectiveness in supporting collaboration.This research was sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation under contract number IIS-0219825.     

动态Web服务合成中的服务选择算法研究

为了提高服务合成效率并更好的适应动态变化的应用环境,提出了基于流程修改的服务合成方案,使得复合服务的执行与服务发现过程并行化。提出了基于QoS属性的服务选择算法,该算法能够实现服务执行时选择服务,在考虑综合QoS信息及时间因素的基础上,通过不断更新用户需求来进行服务选择,提高了服务合成效率。实验结果表明,该选择算法可以获得满足用户需求且最优的服务,很好的保证了服务的可靠执行。     

Constructing composite web services from natural language requests

As a demand on composite Web services increases, there is a growing interest in a convenient access to them. This paper proposes a natural language interface to Web services, which can be used even by a novice user who does not know Web service technologies. Given a user's natural language request to a composite service, the proposed method generates an abstract workflow, which describes the constituent tasks and their transitions in a composite service. Specifically, the proposed method constructs a sophisticated abstract workflow from complex sentences with phrases and control constructs. Experimental results with a variety of natural language requests show that the proposed method successfully extracts abstract workflows, resulting in an accuracy of 95.2%.     

QoS驱动的Web services动态计价机制研究

结合Web services的服务质量(QoS)因素和用户经验,对Web services的计价机制进行研究,提出一种QoS驱动的Web services动态计价模型,描述其计价过程,并给出相应的实现算法。通过对模型的简单实现,经测试这一计价模型在准确性和合理性上具有一定优势。     

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.     

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.     

基于扩展语义接口的Web服务动态组合方法

自动地根据用户请求进行服务的动态组合是目前Web服务领域的关键问题.针对该问题,提出了一种基于本体的服 务动态组合方法,设计并实现了一个服务动态组合原型.首先Web服务按照一定规则被抽象为本体模型,然后通过分析所 构造服务的模型来实现服务的匹配,最后利用BPEL4ws对匹配生成的服务组合序列来进行自动的组合.实验结果表明,该 方法细化了服务接口的语义,并且在发现结果上有更高的准确性.     

基于MDA的Web服务动态组合的研究

针对目前Web服务动态组合方面出现的技术问题,给出了基于MDA的Web服务组合的方法,MDA具有将功能需求与具体实现技术分离的优势,因此可以有效地解决Web服务动态合成的可靠性、灵活性、复用性问题.在给出了结合MDA思想的服务合成体系框架的基础上,分析了UML类图与WSDL语言元模型、UML活动图与WS-BPEL语言元模型的对应关系以确定模型到代码的转换规则.最后以某制造企业的案例验证该技术的可行性.     

Web服务动态组合方法研究与设计

目前基于工作流的Web服务组合方法大多要求预先定义流程结构,不能适应现代企业业务流程复杂多变的需求.提出了一种Web服务动态组合方法,将流程中动态部分用黑盒子流程进行封装,在执行时根据预定义规则和用户需求将黑盒子流程自动组合展开为实际运行流程.对具体服务、抽象服务、黑盒子流程等概念和服务选取规则、服务组合规则进行了定义,详细描述黑盒子流程展开算法,并设计了一个实现动态服务流程组合的框架结构.     

在Web Services动态合成中的最佳路径算法

为实现Web Services动态、自动的合成,以减少合成过程中过多的人工干预,提出了一个基于A*算法的最佳路径算法.该算法通过对核心的估值函数的设计,启发式地对Web Services进行选择合成,从而能够将最适当的服务配置到合成的结果当中去.分析比较结果表明,该算法能够合成出最适当的服务并且服务合成的时耗较少.