Enhancing compositional reachability analysis with context constraints
Compositional techniques have been proposed for traditional reachability analysis in order to introduce modularity and to control the state explosion problem. While modularity has been achived, state explosion is still a problem. Indeed, this problem may even be exacerbated as a locally minimised subsystem may contain many states and transitions forbidden by its context or environments. This paper presents a method to alleviate this problem effectively by including context constraints in local subsystem minimisation. The global behaviour generated using the method is observationally equivalent to that generated by compositional reachability analysis without the inclusion of context constraints.Context constraints, specified as interface processes, are restrictions imposed by the environment on subsystem behaviour. The minimisation produces a simplified machine that describes the behaviour of the subsystem constrained by its context. This machine can also be used as a substitute for the original subsystem in the subsequent steps of the compositional reachability analysis. Interface processes capturing context constraints can be specified by users or automatically constructd using a simple algorithm. The concepts in the paper are illustrated with a clients/server system.

title: Contextual local analysis in the design of distributed systems
abstract: Compositional Reachability Analysis is a popular technique for studying behaviour of finite-state distributed systems. The technique is applied by a repetition oflocal analyses, the basic steps of which are to construct and examine the behaviour of subsystems. In most cases, behaviour of the subsystem is constrained by its environment (calledcontext) formed by neighbouring components. These behaviour constraints are normally not considered when using local analysis in conventional techniques of compositional reachability analysis. As a result, many execution paths derived in the local analysis may not be actually traversed by the subsystem. These paths are made impossible to traverse by the constraints. The paths are unnecessary for understanding the subsystem behaviour and their removal greatly simplifies the local analysis. In this paper, we describe an elegant technique, calledcontextual local analysis, to include these behaviour constraints in conventional local analysis. The technique can alleviate dramatically the state explosion problem encountered in local analysis. It also facilitates early detection of anomalous behaviour of a distributed system at its design stage. The technique works by composing an interface process with the subsystem being examined. That interface process is so chosen that it captures behaviour constraints enforced by the environment while its composition with the subsystem does not affect the global system behaviour. This interface process can be automatically derived using a simple algorithm. The contextual local analysis technique results in a simplified labelled transition system which can be used as a substitute for the original subsystem in the construction of the global system behaviour. The contextual local analysis technique is illustrated with a clients/server example implementing a round-robin protocol.

title: A Multi-Agent Infrastructure for Mobile Workforce Management in a Service Oriented Enterprise
abstract: With recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures, there are increasing demands for the support of mobile workforce management (MWM) across multiple platforms. Mobile users can interact with the MWM system through SMS messages or Web browsers from personal computers, PDA devices, or WAP phones. MWM typically involves tight collaboration, negotiation, and sophisticated business domain knowledge. Therefore, the main challenge of MWM for a service oriented enterprise is the integration of disparate business function for its mobile professional workforce and the management with a unified infrastructure, together with the provision of personalized assistance and automation. These requirements can be facilitated with the use of intelligent software agents, but has not been adequately studied before. As mobile devices become more powerful, intelligent software agents can now be deployed on these devices and hence also subject to mobility. Thus, MWM systems have to accommodate these requirements as well as the support of heterogeneous platforms. In this paper, we formulate a scalable, flexible, and intelligent multi-agent information system (MAIS) infrastructure for MWM with agent clusters in the context of a large service oriented enterprise. Each agent cluster comprise several types of agents to achieve the goal of each phase of the workforce management process, namely, task formulation, matchmaking, brokering, commuting, and service. We evaluate our approach against different stakeholders' perspective.

title: A Three-Layer Framework for Cross-Organizational e-Contract Enactment
abstract: In an e-commerce environment, contracts are important for attaining business process interoperability and enforcing their proper enactment.  In the business layer, e-contracts are defined through analyzing the contract clauses to business rules and business entities. In the structural layer, requirements for the E-contract enactment workflow are elucidated through requirement analysis to cover both static and dynamic aspects. In the implementation layer, workflows and cross-organizational interoperating interfaces are implemented using contemporary Enterprise Java Bean and Web services. In this paper, we present the methodology and process for engineering the functional aspects of e-contracts from high-level business-view down to implementation layer based on this framework, illustrated with an investment example. The framework allows an e-contract to be seamlessly defined and enacted. The framework is modeled in UML.

title: Exploiting automatic analysis of e-commerce protocols
abstract: While e-commerce continuously grows prosperous, some advantages e-commerce applications claimed haven't really been gained. More seriously, the availability and reliability of these systems are particularly hard to obtain. The e-commerce protocols, as the core of e-commerce applications, ask for new development approach and techniques to be introduced for their highly reliable and safe design and implementation. This paper describes research on synthesis of extended UML formalism and formal verification techniques for automatic development of e-commerce protocols. In this paper, we refine AUML protocol diagrams for visual modeling, and develop algorithm and rules to translate visually modeled e-commerce protocols into formal models that are then validated using model checking. This approach is applied to the design of an e-commerce protocol, NetBill, as example. Our objective is to create tools that enable designers to automatically develop available and reliable e-commerce protocols.

title: A three-layer architecture for e-contract enforcement in an e-service environment
abstract: In an e-service environment, contracts are important for attaining business process interoperability and enforcing their proper enactment.  In the document layer, contracts are composed of different types of clauses. In the business layer, e-contract enforcement activities are defined through the realization of contract clauses as business rules in event-condition-action (ECA) form. In the implementation layer, cross-organizational e-contract enforcement interfaces are implemented with contemporary Enterprise Java Bean and Web services. We present a methodology for the engineering of e-contracts enforcement from a high-level document-view down to the implementation layer based on this architecture, using a supply-chain example. As a result, e-contracts can be seamlessly defined and enforced. Conceptual models of various layers are given in the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

title: The chaos router chip: design and implementation of an adaptive router

title: Decomposing the queue length distribution of processor-sharing models into queue lengths of permanent customer queues
abstract: We obtain a decomposition result for the steady state queue length distribution in egalitarian processor-sharing (PS) models. In particular, for multi-class egalitarian PS queues, we show that the marginal queue length distribution for each class equals the queue length distribution of an equivalent single class PS model with a random number of permanent customers. Similarly, the mean sojourn time (conditioned on the initial service requirement) for each class can be obtained by conditioning on the number of permanent customers. The decomposition result implies linear relations between the marginal queue length probabilities, which also hold for other PS models such as the egalitarian PS models with state-dependent system capacity that only depends on the total number of customers in the system. Based on the exact decomposition result for egalitarian PS queues, we propose a similar decomposition for discriminatory processor-sharing (DPS) models, and numerically show that the approximation is accurate for moderate differences in service weights.

title: Automatic analysis of firewall and network intrusion detection system configurations
abstract: Given a network that deploys multiple firewalls and network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs), ensuring that these security components are correctly configured is a challenging problem. Although models have been developed to reason independently about the effectiveness of firewalls and NIDSs, there is no common framework to analyze their interaction. This paper presents an integrated, constraint-based approach for modeling and reasoning about these configurations. Our approach considers the dependencies among the two types of components, and can reason automatically about their combined behavior. We have developed a tool for the specification and verification of networks that include multiple firewalls and NIDSs, based on this approach. This tool can also be used to automatically generate NIDS configurations that are optimal relative to a given cost function.

title: Fast similarity search and clustering of video sequences on the world-wide-web
abstract: We define similar video content as video sequences with almost identical content but possibly compressed at different qualities, reformatted to different sizes and frame-rates, undergone minor editing in either spatial or temporal domain, or summarized into keyframe sequences. Building a search engine to identify such similar content in the World-Wide Web requires: 1) robust video similarity measurements; 2) fast similarity search techniques on large databases; and 3) intuitive organization of search results. In a previous paper, we proposed a randomized technique called the video signature (ViSig) method for video similarity measurement. In this paper, we focus on the remaining two issues by proposing a feature extraction scheme for fast similarity search, and a clustering algorithm for identification of similar clusters. Similar to many other content-based methods, the ViSig method uses high-dimensional feature vectors to represent video. To warrant a fast response time for similarity searches on high dimensional vectors, we propose a novel nonlinear feature extraction scheme on arbitrary metric spaces that combines the triangle inequality with the classical Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We show experimentally that the proposed technique outperforms PCA, Fastmap, Triangle-Inequality Pruning, and Haar wavelet on signature data. To further improve retrieval performance, and provide better organization of similarity search results, we introduce a new graph-theoretical clustering algorithm on large databases of signatures. This algorithm treats all signatures as an abstract threshold graph, where the distance threshold is determined based on local data statistics. Similar clusters are then identified as highly connected regions in the graph. By measuring the retrieval performance against a ground-truth set, we show that our proposed algorithm outperforms simple thresholding, single-link and complete-link hierarchical clustering techniques.

title: Modeling multistep cyber attacks for scenario recognition
abstract: Efforts toward automated detection and identification of multistep cyber attack scenarios would benefit significantly from a methodology and language for modeling such scenarios. The Correlated Attack Modeling Language (CAML) uses a modular approach, where a module represents an inference step and modules can be linked together to detect multistep scenarios. CAML is accompanied by a library of predicates, which functions as a vocabulary to describe the properties of system states and events. The concept of attack patterns is introduced to facilitate reuse of generic modules in the attack modeling process. CAML is used in a prototype implementation of a scenario recognition engine that consumes first-level security alerts in real time and produces reports that identify multistep attack scenarios discovered in the alert stream.