Policy-based model-driven engineering of pervasive services and the associated OSS

Pervasive computing is a new and emerging technology. The concept of pervasiveness and its deployment into reality are still not well aligned. This is because the vision of pervasiveness is a highly complex area that encompasses a large number of issues. The real vision of pervasiveness will never become a reality if everyone involved needs to repeatedly address all the issues involved in the concept. This paper focuses on the DAIDALOS Pervasive Service Platform (PSP) as an enabler of pervasive services. DAIDALOS is an EU Framework Programme 6 Integrated Project with 46 multinational partners from both the industry and academia. The paper details the strategy employed in DAIDALOS to facilitate Service Providers to offer pervasive services on top of the PSP. It argues that pervasiveness should be provided to Service Providers as part of the platform, instead of requiring pervasiveness to be totally embedded in the services themselves. This approach consequently opens up the service provision market to more players, driving the idea of a truly pervasive world. The paper gives an overview of the DAIDALOS platform as a pervasive service enabler, detailing how it facilitates pervasiveness by removing most of the work from the Service Providers themselves.

Ubiquitous computing and pervasive technology represent enabling technologies which have conditioned the evolution of the current Information Society. These ICT are transforming society and particularly changing the interfacing methods between services and user as well as their expectations from services. Such changes are related to arising of new kind of pervasive and sensitive service such as new healthcare and well-being personalized services. In this article such kind of services are defined in a comprehensive manner. This sense, sensitive services refers to new IS services that manage data that is not only based on the physical disposition of the user in regards to the environment but also related to more personal aspects. On its part, pervasive services are those developed by using pervasive technology and therefore can be defined as a delocalized and persistent ICT service. These definitions will be supported by an analysis of the evolution of services of the Information Society both from a socio-economic and industrial focus.

Ubiquitous computing and pervasive technology represent enabling technologies which have conditioned the evolution of the current information society. These ICT are transforming society and particularly changing the interfacing methods between services and user as well as their expectations from services. Such changes are related to arising of new kind of pervasive and sensitive service such as new healthcare and wellbeing personalized services. In this chapter, these services are defined in a comprehensive manner. This sense, sensitive services refers to new IS services that manage data that is not only based on the physical disposition of the user in regards to the environment but also related to more personal aspects. On its part, pervasive services are those developed by using pervasive technology and therefore can be defined as a delocalized and persistent ICT service. These definitions will be supported by an analysis of the evolution of services of the information society both from a socio-economic and industrial focus.

This article advocates the shift of the adaptive service engineering attention from the external service execution environment to the internal service logic itself. This article presents a novel adaptive service creation solution called POETRY that takes advantages of two promising techniques: PBM (Policy-based Management) and MDA (Model-driven Architecture). In particular, the POETRY service creation framework has investigated the thought of utilizing a policy-based management method to describe and control the internal logic of adaptive services and the method of utilizing MDA models to describe the adaptive service information model. The design details and operations of POETRY are presented and showcased via a typical adaptive service scenario.

Competition and Contracting in Service Industries

Nowadays configuration parameters about network and service in intelligent terminals are getting more complex. Faults and security risks in the terminal are increasing. These have become key holdbacks for usage of services. So it is necessary to manage the terminals to keep them normal and promote satisfaction from customer. OMA and 3GPP have done researches about management of terminals. But there are some shortages, such as mainly focus on interface instead of functions in the management system, focus on maintenance about equipment instead of customer-aware service, varied information modeling that difficult to share, etc. According to the management requirements of terminals in pervasive communication network, an integrated terminal management model was proposed. A common information model for heterogeneous terminals was given and the reasoning mechanism based on the information model for pervasive communication service was analyzed. Finally, the management model, modeling method and reasoning mechanism were validated by designing and implementing a prototype system under a typical pervasive communication service scenario.

Past research on opportunistic communications has demonstrated the power of mobile phones as information mediators and content providers to co-located devices. As an extension of opportunistic communication paradigm, opportunistic computing and services research leverages the powerful capabilities and pervasive nature of modern smartphones to provision services to nearby nodes. When an opportunistic network is viewed as a provider of services rather than as a simple message routing system, node and service discovery come to play a critical role. This paper discusses several factors that affect the discover ability of pervasive services with current existing devices in light of their practical limitations. Moreover, the impact of these limitations to pervasive service discovery is studied in evaluation results.

Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is an initiative of the OMG in which the software development process is driven by various software-related models describing the software to be generated. Moreover, the new upcoming UML 2.0 standard promises to support the execution of models based on several types of actions as well as the inheritance of statecharts. We adapt this new technology in order to generate business controllers. By application of the popular Model View Controller (MVC) architecture, these controllers separate core business model functionality like database management from the presentation and control logic that uses this functionality (i.e., interactive user access). In particular, a controller translates user interactions realized by means of an interactive view into actions on the core business model.

Maintenance and after-sales service logistics are important disciplines that have received considerable attention both in practice and in the scientific literature. This attention is related to the often high investments and revenues associated with capital-intensive assets in technically advanced business environments. Different maintenance services such as inspections and preventive maintenance activities are executed with the goal to maximize the availability of these expensive assets. However, unavoidable failures may still happen, which means that, in addition to preventive maintenance and services, repair actions (corrective maintenance) are necessary. Spare parts, service engineers and tools are typically the main resources for executing the repair actions and their availability has a major impact on overall system downtime. In this dissertation, we analyze a multi-resource after-sales service supply chain consisting of a service provider and an emergency supplier. The service provider is contractually responsible for the timely repair of some randomly failing capital intensive assets. To execute a repair, the service provider needs both service engineers and spare parts to replace the malfunctioning parts. In case of spare parts stock out, the service provider can either wait for the regular replenishment of parts or decide to hand over the entire repair call to an emergency supplier. For the latter case, a contract between the service provider and the emergency supplier is necessary to specify the compensation. In the first part of this dissertation, we focus on the optimal integrated planning of spare parts and engineers, considering an asset availability constraint. We evaluate the system performance using Markov chain analysis and queueing models, and employ different optimization algorithms to jointly determine the optimal capacity of the resources. This integrated planning results in considerable cost savings compared to the separate planning of spare parts and engineers. In the second part, we investigate the best contract the supplier can offer to the service provider. Furthermore, we propose different coordinated contracts to achieve optimal revenues for both partners in this after-sales service supply chain, under both full and asymmetric information scenarios. Cooperative games, the dominance of one party over the other (Stackelberg game), and information sharing aspects are the tools included in the second part of this dissertation.

Following the Service-Oriented Architecture, Cloud services are exposed as Web APIs (Application Program Interface), which serve as the contracts between the service providers and service consumers. With increasing massive and broad applications of Cloud-based development, a large number of diversified APIs are emerging. Due to their wide impacts, any flaw in the cloud APIs may lead to serious consequences. API testing is thus necessary to ensure the availability, reliability, and stability of cloud services. The research proposed an approach to automating API testing following the model-driven architecture, so that services can be continuously fetched, analyzed and validated. A prototype system ATcloud was constructed to illustrate the process of API understanding, test scenario modeling using directed graph annotated with transfer probabilities between operations, cloud-based test resources management, distributed workload simulation, and performance monitoring.

The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach to develop information systems is a model-oriented approach since it focusses on the business logic (the “what”) rather than on the specific implementation technology (the “how”). Models are the authentic protagonist of information systems development. They represent the information system developed while the implementation in a certain technology is obtained through model transformation. The business process that will be automated in both frameworks is the user access management flow that employees follow in order to gain access into systems. The same business process will be modeled in two different formalisms, UML and BPMN, as per the capabilities supported from each framework. Starting from the model the automation steps in order to have an information system which can be executed and which automates the respective process will be clarified. A comparison study in each step of the process automation for both frameworks is presented. The advantages and disadvantages of each of the approaches will be considered and also evidence which approach is more suitable in specific cases. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n2p615

Chapter seven - Interactive objects/daimler case study: Automotive industry

The provision of computing resources such as com- puting power, storage, networking, and IT infrastructure dynamically and virtually by service providers over the Internet on a pay-per-use basis is known as cloud computing. Customers can send a lease to the cloud service provider via the internet to request cloud-based resources. Leases are resource provisioning abstractions that include all necessary resources, the provisioning time, and the customer’s budget, among other things, in termsof the quantity, capacity, and duration of nodes. The service provider then accepts all customer leases, generates virtual machines for them, and schedules them with the assistance of a lease manager. Lease managers utilize their algorithms to handle leases, which include scheduling leases. OpenNebula uses Haizea, an open-source VM-based leasing management framework, as a resource manager. It acknowledges the user’s lease request and subsequently arranges the lease according to the physical machines’ resource availability. It enables users to submit requests as leases. In haizea, preemptible best-effort leases can be supplanted by leases with a higher priority, such as those with an advanced reservation or an immediate lease. This article models each VM as a service provider and extracts its different performance metrics, including average number of request leasesin the system/ queue, the mean waiting time of the leases in the system/queue.

The 3G environment is promising a wide range of services with a variety of pricing structures and billing schemes for use over different network operator domains, i.e., a federated environment. A key success factor is to respond to customers' desires to choose the billing scheme that suits their needs, to subscribe to all services as a service package, and to pay for them via a single bill regardless of service type, service location, service providers and network operators. Furthermore, customers may want to choose their services and compose a package dynamically without paying attention to the billing scheme used. The main premise of this paper is that pre-paid and post-paid billing schemes will merge and customers will use services according to their account balance and credits, as opposed to their billing scheme. The requirement on service providers is to use OSS (operations support system) functions and the accompanying information model to support diverse pricing and billing schemes, which is a complex task. This paper presents key OSS functions and an information model that tackle this complexity. Challenges are described and requirements are defined. Related efforts are highlighted, and the context surrounding this work is laid out in detail. Finally, individual entities of information model and OSS functions are defined and an example using flow-chart to illustrate interaction of functions is presented.

Nowadays, providing Internet of Things (IoT) environments with service level guarantee is a challenging task. We describe in this paper a service level based IoT architecture that enables an IoT Service Level Agreement (iSLA) achievement between an IoT Service Provider and an IoT Client. This IoT SLA specifies the requirements of an IoT service in a specific application domain (e-health, smart cities, etc.). In order to guarantee these requirements, QoS mechanisms should be implemented within the IoT architecture. Thus, we propose an adaptation of the IEEE 802.15.4 slotted CSMA/CA mechanism to ensure the requirements of an IoT e-health service. Our approach called QBAIoT (QoS based Access for IoT) consists in creating different contention access periods corresponding to different specified traffic classes. Each of these periods within the QoS based adapted IEEE 802.15.4 superframe is specific for a traffic type. A QoS based contention access period called QoS CAP is configured with a number of slots during which only IoT objects belonging to the same QoS class can send data.