Building ontology based knowledge maps to assist business process re-engineering

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is being used to improve the efficiency of the organizational processes, however, a number of obstacles have prevented its full potential from being realised. One of these obstacles is caused by an emphasis on the business process itself at the exclusion of considering other important knowledge of the organization. Another is due to the lack of tools for identifying the cause of the inefficiencies and inconsistencies in BPR. In this paper we propose a methodology for BPR that overcomes these two obstacles through the use of a formal organizational ontology and knowledge structure and source maps. These knowledge maps are represented formally to facilitate an inferencing mechanism which helps to automatically identify the causes of the inefficiencies and inconsistencies. We demonstrate the applicability of this methodology through the use of a case study of a university domain.     

udpSkeduler: A Web architecture based decision support system for course and classroom scheduling

A key process for post-secondary educational institutions is the definition of course timetables and classroom assignments. Manual scheduling methods require enormous amounts of time and resources to deliver results of questionable quality, and multiple course and classroom conflicts usually occur. This article presents a scheduling system implemented in a Web environment. This system generates optimal schedules via an integer-programming model. Among its functionalities, this system enables direct interaction with instructors in order to gather data on their time availability for teaching courses. The results demonstrate that significant improvements over the typical fully manual process were obtained.     

A consistency and consensus based decision support model for group decision making with multiplicative preference relations

In group decision making (GDM) with multiplicative preference relations (also known as pairwise comparison matrices in the Analytical Hierarchy Process), to come to a meaningful and reliable solution, it is preferable to consider individual consistency and group consensus in the decision process. This paper provides a decision support model to aid the group consensus process while keeping an acceptable individual consistency for each decision maker. The concept of an individual consistency index and a group consensus index is introduced based on the Hadamard product of two matrices. Two algorithms are presented in the designed support model. The first algorithm is utilized to convert an unacceptable preference relation to an acceptable one. The second algorithm is designed to assist the group in achieving a predefined consensus level. The main characteristics of our model are that: (1) it is independent of the prioritization method used in the consensus process; (2) it ensures that each individual multiplicative preference relation is of acceptable consistency when the predefined consensus level is achieved. Finally, some numerical examples are given to verify the effectiveness of our model.     

Cloud brokering mechanisms for optimized placement of virtual machines across multiple providers

In the past few years, we have witnessed the proliferation of a heterogeneous ecosystem of cloud providers, each one with a different infrastructure offer and pricing policy. We explore this heterogeneity in a novel cloud brokering approach that optimizes placement of virtual infrastructures across multiple clouds and also abstracts the deployment and management of infrastructure components in these clouds. The feasibility of our approach is evaluated in a high throughput computing cluster case study. Experimental results confirm that multi-cloud deployment provides better performance and lower costs compared to the usage of a single cloud only.     

Distributed computing for carbon footprint reduction by exploiting low-footprint energy availability

Low carbon footprint energy sources such as solar and wind power typically suffer from unpredictable or limited availability. By globally distributing a number of these renewable sources, these effects can largely be compensated for. We look at the feasibility of this approach for powering already distributed data centers in order to operate at a reduced total carbon footprint. From our study we show that carbon footprint reductions are possible, but that these are highly dependent on the approach and parameters involved. Especially the manufacturing footprint and the geographical region are critical parameters to consider. Deploying additional data centers can help in reducing the total carbon footprint, but substantial reductions can be achieved when data centers with nominal capacity well below maximum capacity redistribute processing to sites based on renewable energy availability.     

Link weight assignment and loop-free routing table update for link state routing protocols in energy-aware internet

In order to lessen the greenhouse effects and diminish environmental pollution, reducing energy usage is important in designing next generation networks. Shutting down the network devices that carry light load and redirecting their traffic flows to other routes is the most common way to reduce network energy consumption. Since traffic demands among node pairs vary in different time periods, an energy efficient network has to dynamically determine the optimal active links to adapt itself to network traffic changes. However, in current IP networks, shutting down and/or turning on links would trigger link state routing protocols to reconverge to a new topology. Since the convergence time would take tens of seconds, routing table inconsistencies among routers would result in network disconnection and even worse, generating traffic loops during the convergence interval. Removing routing images inconsistent among routers to prevent loops is a critical issue in energy efficient network and this issue is still not considered in the green network design yet. The contribution of the paper is presented in two parts. First, we propose a comprehensive approach to determine a network topology and a link metric for each time period. Traffic engineering is considered in our design such that flows going on the energy-aware network are within a predetermined percentage of the link capacity such that no congestion occurs in a statistical manner. Second, to avoid transient loops during time period changes, we propose a Distributed Loop-free Routing Update (DLRU) scheme to determine the correct sequence for updating the routing table. A scrupulous proof was also presented to ensure the loop-free property of the DLRU. In this paper, we formulate an integer linear programming to determine this multi-topology and link weight assignment problem. Due to its NP-hard property, we propose an efficient algorithm, termed Lagrangian Relaxation and Harmonic Series (LR&HS) heuristic. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed LRHS approach outperforms the other approaches on several benchmark networks and random networks by providing up to 35%-50% additional energy saving in our experimental cases.     

Towards a green cluster through dynamic remapping of virtual machines

Since power is one of the major limiting factors for a data center or for large cluster growth, the objective of this study is to minimize the power consumption of the cluster without violating the performance constraints of the applications. We propose a runtime virtual machine (VM) mapping framework in a cluster or data center to save energy. The new framework can make reconfiguration decisions on time with the consideration of a low influence on the performance. In the GreenMap framework, one probabilistic, heuristic algorithm is designed for the optimization problem: mapping VMs onto a set of physical machines (PMs) under the constraint of multi-dimensional resource consumptions. Experimental measurements show that the new method can reduce the power consumption by up to 69.2% over base, with few performance penalties. The effectiveness and performance insights are also analytically verified.     

CyberGuarder: A virtualization security assurance architecture for green cloud computing

As the sizes of IT infrastructure continue to grow, cloud computing is a natural extension of virtualisation technologies that enable scalable management of virtual machines over a plethora of physically connected systems. The so-called virtualisation-based cloud computing paradigm offers a practical approach to green IT/clouds, which emphasise the construction and deployment of scalable, energy-efficient network software applications (NetApp) by virtue of improved utilisation of the underlying resources. The latter is typically achieved through increased sharing of hardware and data in a multi-tenant cloud architecture/environment and, as such, accentuates the critical requirement for enhanced security services as an integrated component of the virtual infrastructure management strategy. This paper analyses the key security challenges faced by contemporary green cloud computing environments, and proposes a virtualisation security assurance architecture, CyberGuarder, which is designed to address several key security problems within the ‘green’ cloud computing context. In particular, CyberGuarder provides three different kinds of services; namely, a virtual machine security service, a virtual network security service and a policy based trust management service. Specifically, the proposed virtual machine security service incorporates a number of new techniques which include (1) a VMM-based integrity measurement approach for NetApp trusted loading, (2) a multi-granularity NetApp isolation mechanism to enable OS user isolation, and (3) a dynamic approach to virtual machine and network isolation for multiple NetApp’s based on energy-efficiency and security requirements. Secondly, a virtual network security service has been developed successfully to provide an adaptive virtual security appliance deployment in a NetApp execution environment, whereby traditional security services such as IDS and firewalls can be encapsulated as VM images and deployed over a virtual security network in accordance with the practical configuration of the virtualised infrastructure. Thirdly, a security service providing policy based trust management is proposed to facilitate access control to the resources pool and a trust federation mechanism to support/optimise task privacy and cost requirements across multiple resource pools. Preliminary studies of these services have been carried out on our iVIC platform, with promising results. As part of our ongoing research in large-scale, energy-efficient/green cloud computing, we are currently developing a virtual laboratory for our campus courses using the virtualisation infrastructure of iVIC, which incorporates the important results and experience of CyberGuarder in a practical context.     

Power-efficient video encoding on resource-limited systems: A game-theoretic approach

Most mobile video applications are often deployed on battery-operated devices. With limited power supply, it is a challenging issue to support video applications with high resolution due to the complex functionality and high resource requirements. Thus, power-efficient design is important in computation intensive applications especially for mobile video terminals. Previous works on power-efficient control in video encoding systems focus on the low complexity design while typically ignoring the impact of scalable design by considering various power consumption involved in the encoding process. This paper is dedicated to developing a power-scalable video encoding (PSVE) strategy for energy-limited mobile terminals. PSVE can help the video encoding terminal to adjust its power consumption budget efficiently so as to enhance the power-scalable capability in mobile video terminals. This paper first establishes game theoretical analysis to model the power consumption problem as a bargaining problem. Then, the tradeoff between encoding effect and power consumption achieved by the use of game theory. The scalable and low power video encoding system based on Nash equilibrium solution is derived through the analysis on the power consumption and encoding effect. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.     

Balancing energy consumption with mobile agents in wireless sensor networks

For Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), an unbalanced energy consumption will decrease the lifetime of network. In this paper, we leverage mobile agent technology to investigate the problem of how to balance the energy consumption during data collection in WSNs. We first demonstrate that for a sensor network with uniform node distribution and constant data reporting, balancing the energy of the whole network cannot be realized when the distribution of data among sensor nodes is unbalanced. We design a method to mitigate the uneven energy dissipation problem by controlling the mobility of agents, which is achieved by an energy prediction strategy to find their positions. Finally, we propose energy balancing cluster routing based on a mobile agent (EBMA) for WSNs. To obtain better performance, the cluster structure is formed based on cellular topology taking into consideration the energy balancing of inter-cluster and intra-cluster environments. Extensive simulation experiments are carried out to evaluate EBMA with several performance criteria. Our simulation results show that EBMA can effectively balance energy consumption and perform high efficiency in large-scale network deployment.