Special issue on intelligent e‐services

The ubiquitous nature of the World Wide Web (WWW) coupled with the flexibility and agility associated with Software Services is one of the primary contributing factors in the development and deployment of intelligent (Software) e-services. The applications of these intelligent e-services span a number of domains such as manufacturing, transportation, and health. The aim of this special issue (SI) is to present some of the cutting-edge research done in this area. In response to the call-forpapers for this SI, more than 40 submissions were received. After thorough peer-review process, which spanned multiple rounds, six papers were selected. The first paper of this special issue, authored by Casado et al. [1], proposes an abstract web-services transaction model. The advantage of this abstract transaction model is that various specific transaction models can be derived from it. The authors validate the proposed abstract transaction model and conclude that their approach can be used to define different test cases in order to test the reliability and failures of different Web Services (WS) Transaction standards. The second paper of this special issue, authored by Flahive et al. [2], proposes a dynamic methodology for reusing, extracting, and updating ontology in a semantic grid environment. Mathematical formulations covering various aspects of ontology extraction and updating have been proposed. A case study based on the Unified Medical Language System ontology is used for validation of the proposed methodology. The third paper of this special issue, authored by Kołodziej et al. [3], proposes three different genetic algorithms (GA)-based energy-aware scheduling methods in computational grids. The proposed approach makes use of two parameters, namely, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling model for modeling the overall grid energy usage. For validation purposes, the performance of the three GA-based approaches was tested under various parameters. The results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed GA-based schedulers in optimizing the energy usage of the grid clusters. The fourth paper of this special issue addresses an interesting decision-making problem in distributed environments—bilevel decision making. This paper, authored by Lu et al. [4], outlines a set of rules for bilevel decision making. The authors use a case study to demonstrate the validity and applicability of the proposed rule-based approach. They additionally carry out experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in finding a solution to a bilevel decision problem. The fifth paper of this special issue proposes an intelligent profiling-based task scheduling approach for multicore network processors. A key objective of the proposed approach by Tang et al. [5] is to optimize the system throughput under a given set of system parameters. In the past few years, various web-based applications that leverage multicore processors have emerged. The proposed approach has been validated by implementing it on the Intel IXP network processor. Simulation results demonstrate both the feasibility and the applicability of the proposed task-scheduling approach. The final paper of this special issue, authored by Xhafa et al. [6], presents an intelligent e-service for content management in a peer-to-peer environment. The design of the e-service is grounded on a superpeer architecture. The proposed e-service dynamically and efficiently replicates documents (as XML files) and data to support group-based processes in large and distributed environments. Extensive experimentation is carried out under various scenarios (using JXTA). In concluding this editorial, I would like to thank everyone involved in bringing this special issue to this fruition. I would like to thank all the authors who submitted their manuscripts for consideration in this special issue. Additionally, I would like to thank all the reviewers in providing high-quality reviews to the authors. In particular, I would like to thank Professor