30040964
Agent-Mediated Genetic Super-Scheduling in Grid Environments
Super-scheduling in a dynamic grid environment is a very challenging issue that remains to be solved before a grid can be deployed and effectively utilized. In this paper we investigate a paradigm based on genetic algorithms (GA) to efficiently solve the scheduling problem. This GA paradigm is architecturally combined with the multiagent system (MAS) paradigm to form a flexible super-scheduling system. A three-layered scheduling architecture is presented and the corresponding realization of a multiagent-based system is described. The experiment shows that the better scheduling results are obtained for the adopted metrics of flow time and job stretch.
8577812
Dynamic Self-Healing for Service Flows with Semantic Web Services
With an increasing complexity of business processes, self-healing capability is becoming an important issue in order to support robust service flow execution. In this paper, a dynamic self-healing mechanism is proposed, which can dynamically identify suitable alternatives and replace faulty services such that a service flow can be performed successfully despite of unexpected exceptions. This mechanism explicitly utilizes semantic Web services for service matching and selection of a composite service in business service flow, and Semantic Web services are equipped with rich business rules in a domain-dependent manner. We explore the self-healing mechanism for supporting self-healable service flow execution which is modeled in BPEL4WS. A demo system of self-healing capable service flow execution is built to validate its effectiveness by a concrete scenario, PC manufacturing application.
8202363
Coordinated Services Provision in Peer-to-Peer Environments
In recent years, inspired by the emerging Web services standard and peer-to-peer technology, a new federated service providing (FSP) system paradigm has attracted increasing research interests. Many existing systems have either explicitly or implicitly followed this paradigm. Instead of exchanging files, peers in FSP systems share their computation resources in order to offer domain-specific services. In this paper, we focused on the coordination problem of how to self-organize the service group structures in response to the varying service demand. We presented our solution in the form of a coordination mechanism, which includes a labor-market model, a recruiting protocol, and a policy-driven decision architecture. Peers make their service providing decisions based on their local policies, which can be added, removed, or modified by users. A general methodology is introduced in this paper to facilitate policy design. Specifically, a heuristic inspired by the extremal optimization technique is utilized to handle potential inconsistencies among policies. A stimulus-response mechanism was further applied to make the decision process adjustable. Experiments under five application scenarios verified our ideas and demonstrated the effectiveness of our coordination mechanism.
537363
Change propagation algorithm in a unified feature modeling scheme
Product lifecycle stages are inter-related and mutually constraining. Due to the sequential nature of the product development processes, some constraints or conflicts may emerge in a later stage and require modifications to the decisions made in earlier stages. The iterations between stages are hence unavoidable and must be managed carefully to maintain the consistency, integrity and validity of product information models. Due to the inter- or intra-stage relations, a chain of changes is very likely to occur as the consequence of an initial change. Modeling and maintaining these relations are important in collaborative engineering to evolve the state of the whole product model in a consistent manner. This paper introduces a new method of modeling associative engineering relations in a unified feature modeling scheme and elaborates a change propagation algorithm for the information consistency control among multiple applications of product lifecycle stages. The algorithm is established on a JTMS-based dependency network. Two case studies are used to illustrate the proposed dependency network and change propagation algorithm.
15177546
Semantic enhanced rule driven workflow execution in Collaborative Virtual Enterprise
Globalization leads to an efficient new business paradigm generally known as collaborative virtual enterprise (CVE) which demands flexible service orchestration and robust workflow execution. As two major service orchestration strategies, OWL-S and BPEL have their own strength and deficiencies. To meet the challenge in CVE, in this paper, we propose a workflow execution system (WES) that takes advantage of the complementary strengths of these two technologies. On the one hand, having semantic support, OWL-S is used in dynamic service discovery and composition at high level. On the other hand, at the concrete level, industry-based BPEL is exploited in service execution. The description of each semantic Web service is enhanced with rule-based modeling of the essential business logic behind the service interface. In order to realize interoperability in OWL-S and BPEL without loss of semantic information, we further proposed an OWLS2BPEL Mapper to facilitate the workflow robustness and support rule evaluation to increase responsiveness to customers. A concrete scenario in PC manufacturing collaborative virtual enterprise is analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our workflow execution system.
14272859
Ant Colony Inspired Self-Healing for Resource Allocation in Service-Oriented Environment Considering Resource Breakdown
The ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is a metaheuristic inspired from the behavior of foraging ants. Instead of exploring its ability in finding optimal solutions, the current study investigates another unique property - self-healing mechanism for resource allocation in a service-oriented environment where unexpected resource breakdown can occur. A system architecture is first proposed to detect, diagnose and react to disturbances. Then the performance of the ACO self-healing mechanism is tested and compared based on a modified benchmark problem. The experimental results show that the self-healing mechanism can promptly recover an obsolete schedule with high quality solutions.
44499807
A State-Transfer-Based Dynamic Policy Approach for Constraints in RBAC
RBAC is widely used in access control field, and this paper proposes an approach to implement dynamic policy transfer on this model. Our approach monitors state-transfers of subjects and transfers policies correspondingly. It holds a finite number of states and a policy transfer set containing the predefined policies. When a state-transfer occurs, an appropriate policy chosen from the policy transfer set will be applied to change the user-role mapping or the role-permission mapping from one to another. This policy transfer not only focuses on the current state, but also takes the previous state into consideration since changing from different state will lead to a different current policy.
15133148
Modeling Image Data for Effective Indexing and Retrieval in Large General Image Databases
In this paper, we propose an image semantic model based on the knowledge and criteria in the field of linguistics and taxonomy. Our work bridges the "semantic gap" by seamlessly exploiting the synergy of both visual feature processing and semantic relevance computation in a new way, and provides improved query efficiency and effectiveness for large general image databases. Our main contributions are as follows: we design novel data structures, namely, a lexical hierarchy, an image-semantic hierarchy, and a number of atomic semantic domains, to capture the semantics and the features of the database, and to provide the indexing scheme. We present a novel image query algorithm based on the proposed structures. In addition, we propose a novel term expansion mechanism to improve the lexical processing. Our extensive experiments indicate that our proposed techniques are effective in achieving high runtime performance with improved retrieval accuracy. The experiments also show that the proposed method has good scalability.
120992950
A mathematical model for bifurcations in a Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction
Abstract In our investigation we find that there are three stages during the whole lifespan of a Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) system with 1,4-cyclohexanedione (CHD) and ferroin: transitional period (TP), induction period (IP), and main period (MP). When the system goes from the TP to the IP, there is a bifurcation from monostability (orange steady-state) to bistability (both orange and blue steady-states). When the system shifts from the IP to the MP, a different bifurcation occurs from the bistability back to the monostability (orange steady-state). A reduction step before the second bifurcation propagates slower than oxidation steps and pulses during the whole lifespan of the medium. This sharp difference of propagation speed has not been observed in other BZ systems, and cannot be interpreted by the prototype Oregonator model. We construct here an Oregonator-type model that simulates the two bifurcations and the propagation speed difference of the two kinds of step before the second bifurcation. Furthermore, our model demonstrates other bifurcations that are not observable in experiment. Our discovery not only unfolds a new aspect of the well-studied BZ reaction, but also leads to a new demand for further understanding of a reaction–diffusion equation system as the corresponding ordinary differential equation system bifurcates.
12333144
Query Triggered Crawling Strategy: Build a Time Sensitive Vertical Search Engine
In today's information society, it is important to retrieve fresh information. Many of the vertical search results are valid to users in only a short period of time. But due to resource constraints, it is not possible to keep the entire local storage synchronized with the Web. We implemented a TSVS (time sensitive vertical search engine) prototype named Velocisaurus focused on time-critical airfare discount information search to investigate the time critical requirements of vertical search and proposed a QTC (query triggered crawling) strategy to coordinate the crawling systems by real-time user queries and solve this problem. Experiment shows that QTC driven crawlers significantly improves the freshness of the search results and utilizes the resources more efficiently compared to regular search engine crawlers..
14562695
An Architecture for Automated Driving in Urban Environments
This paper presents a novel navigation architecture for automated car-like vehicles in urban environments. Motion safety is a critical issue in such environments given that they are partially known and highly dynamic with moving objects (other vehicles, pedestrians...). The main feature of the navigation architecture proposed is its ability to make safe motion decisions in real-time, thus taking into account the harsh constraints imposed by the type of environments considered. The architecture is based upon an efficient publish/subscribe middleware system that allows modularity in design and the easy integration of the key functional components required for autonomous navigation, namely perception, localisation, mapping, real-time motion planning and motion tracking. After an overall presentation of the architecture and its main modules, the paper focuses on the “motion” components of the architecture. Experimental results carried out on a simulated Cycab vehicle are presented.