Business Process Composition with QoS Optimization
One of the challenges in SOA is to provide an efficient and effective way to identify compatible Web service(s) and compose them into a service process that satisfies a user’s functional and non-functional needs. Quality of Service (QoS), like response time or throughput, might need to be optimized for the selected service process. This paper describes a system architecture and strategies Web services composition with QoS optimization. The strategies include a uniform cost backward search for optimizing response time and an improved greedy search for optimizing throughput.

title: Backup reprovisioning to remedy the effect of multiple link failures in WDM mesh networks
abstract: As networks grow in size and complexity, both the probability and the impact of failures increase. The pre-allocated backup bandwidth, which has been widely investigated in the literature, may not be able to provide full protection guarantee when multiple failures occur in a network. In this study, we consider multiple concurrent failures where concurrent means that a new failure occurs before a previous failure is repaired. To combat the effect of multiple concurrent failures, new backups can be reprovisioned after one failure such that the next potential failure can be handled effectively and efficiently. We consider dynamic traffic where a pair of link-disjoint primary and backup paths is provisioned when a new connection request arrives. After a failure occurs, the affected connections switch traffic from their primary paths to backup paths. To protect against next potential failure, we reprovision new backups for connections that become unprotected or vulnerable because of losing their primary or their backup due to the previous failure or due to backup resource sharing. This approach is called Minimal Backup Reprovisioning (MBR). An alternative approach is to globally rearrange backups for all connections after one failure occurs, which is called Global Backup Reprovisioning (GBR). Backup reprovisioning can be performed whenever the network's state changes, e.g., (1) when a new request arrives, (2) when an existing connection terminates, (3) when a network failure occurs, (4) when a failed link/node is repaired, etc., to utilize the available resources more efficiently or to recover quickly from the next failure. In this study, we perform MBR or GBR after one network failure occurs to protect against the next potential failure in a wavelength-convertible WDM mesh network. The link-vector network model which can maximally explore the backup-sharing potential is assumed in this study. We then analyze the complexity of MBR and GBR under such a network model. A reprovisioning algorithm is proposed for MBR which can significantly reduce the connection vulnerability without the knowledge of the location of the next failure. In GBR, both integer linear program (ILP) and heuristic-based approaches are proposed. We compare capacity requirement and computational complexity of MBR to that of GBR through numerical examples. MBR demonstrates a good tradeoff between complexity and capacity efficiency to handle multiple concurrent failures

title: An Efficient Approach for Service Process Reconfiguration in SOA with End-to-End QoS Constraints
abstract: Using SOA, service processes can be composed statically or dynamically using services provided by different service providers. Some services may become faulty at runtime and cause the service process to violate the end-to-end quality of service (QoS) constraint. We propose an efficient approach for replacing faulty services to ensure that the reconfigured service process still meets the original end-to-end QoS constraint. We use an iterative algorithm to identify reconfiguration regions that have a small number of services, some faulty and some healthy, in order to have more service selection options. By reconfiguring services in these selected regions rather than the whole service process, the computational complexity is significantly reduced. Simulation study has shown that our approach is efficient as most service processes can be repaired by replacing only a small number of services.

title: Explicit Routing for Traffic Engineering in Labeled Optical Burst-Switched WDM Networks
abstract: Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising technique for supporting high-capacity bursty data traffic over optical wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) networks. A label-switched path can be established to forward a burst control packet (BCP) if each OBS node is augmented with an IP/MPLS controller. Such a network is called a labeled OBS (LOBS) network, and it can exploit the explicit routing and constraint-based routing properties supported in the MPLS framework to perform traffic and resource engineering. In this paper, we consider the traffic-engineering problem in a LOBS network, using explicit routing to balance network load and to reduce the burst-loss probability. We model the traffic-engineering problem in a LOBS network as an optimization problem and propose two new objective functions to minimize network congestion. Our illustrative numerical examples show that the burst-loss probability can be significantly reduced using optimization technique, when compared with shortest-path routing.

title: The LLAMA Middleware Support for Accountable Service-Oriented Architecture
abstract: Enterprises are turning to SOA for the flexible deployment of business processes. While current monitoring tools can detect service execution problems in an enterprise's servers and report such problems to human decision makers, they may not closely monitor the external services they use, diagnose the root cause of process problems, and automatically reconfigure the process to replace faulty services. This paper presents the LLAMA middleware support for service process monitoring, run-time management, and configuration. Instances of accountability agents are deployed to selectively monitor some services' performance. These agents in turn allow LLAMA's Accountability Authority (AA) to diagnose process problems and apply any necessary reconfiguration. The project also builds tools to simplify the setup and deployment of LLAMA components. Our experimental results indicate that using LLAMA contributes only a modest amount of system overhead, and that the diagnosis process is swift and sufficiently accurate.

title: Optimized routing for fault management in optical burst-switched WDM networks
abstract: Optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising technique for supporting high-capacity, bursty data traffic over optical wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) networks. An optical link failure may result in a huge amount of data (and revenue) loss, and it has been an important survivability concern in optical networks. In this paper, we study the fault- management issues related with a link failure in an OBS network. We propose to use pre-planned global rerouting to balance network load and to reroute bursts after a link fails. We apply optimization techniques to pre-plan explicit backup routes for failure scenarios. Our objective is to achieve optimal load balancing both before and after a failure such that the network state can still remain stable with minimum burst-loss probability when a failure occurs. We apply the pre-planned normal and backup routing tables to an OBS network, and study the network performance after a failure occur using illustrative numerical examples. The results show that the average burst-loss probability can be significantly reduced by 60% - from an average of 0.10 to 0.04 (when the normalized link load is less than 0.5) using globally-rerouted backup routes, when compared with the scheme without global rerouting. We also observe that the burst-loss probability is reduced by 43% - from an average of 0.07 to 0.04 (when the link load is less than 0.5) if the rerouting is done using optimization techniques, when compared with shortest-path routing.for Fault Management

title: A Web Service Adapter with Contract-Oriented Methodology
abstract: Loose coupling is a cornerstone for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Service contracts enable loose coupling, because they conceal internal details of services from the outside world behind the facade. However, current works on service oriented analysis and design (SOAD) largely focus on defining processes for developing business processes and services without considering variability in details. In this paper, a Web Service adapter of service-contract oriented is presented in order to enhance the applicability and reusability of such services. We also introduce some critical issues about service contract analysis engine, skeleton code generate engine and web-based WSDL editor in the Web Service adapter. Additionally, the Web Service adapter designed in this paper is compared with related tools, and the results indicate that our methods demonstrate a more desirable interactivity and stability.

title: Bath-induced Control of two-qubit entanglement under Markovian noises
abstract: An entanglement control strategy is presented for two-qubit quantum systems against Markovian noises. This proposal is realized by a tunable coupling between qubits which is induced by varying the parameters of an intermediate squeezed field. Its applications to the independent and collective amplitude damping decoherence channels and their mixture show that entanglement can be efficiently enhanced.

title: HOS-Miner: A System for Detecting Outlying Subspaces of High-dimensional Data
abstract: We identify a new and interesting high-dimensional outlier detection problem in this paper, that is, detecting the subspaces in which given data points are outliers. We call the subspaces in which a data point is an outlier as its Outlying Subspaces. In this paper, we will propose the prototype of a dynamic subspace search system, called HOS-Miner (HOS stands for High-dimensional Outlying Subspaces), that utilizes a sample-based learning process to effectively identify the outlying subspaces of a given point.

title: Business Process-Oriented Software Architecture for Supporting Business Process Change
abstract: As a business process is essential in running an enterprise, this paper aims toward improving software architecture by extracting business-relevant semantics from business logic and transforming them as important elements that need to be molded and represented in software architecture. This allows for the development of a business process-oriented software architecture (BPOSA) that can support smoother business process change. The paper introduces the structure of BPOSA and its work mode. Then it describes the steps involved in designing a process-oriented software system, and provides analysis and design methods of extending process-relevant attributes for application in business operations.

title: Monotone iterative technique for initial-value problems of nonlinear singular discrete systems
abstract: This paper studies a class of initial-value problems of nonlinear singular discrete systems and obtains the existence theorem of extremal solutions by employing a monotone iterative technique combined with the method of upper and lower solutions.