Research on Service-Oriented Workflow and Performance Evaluation
The advent of SOA and Grid technology has brought new challenges to workflow operation and performance evaluation. In this paper, the characteristics of service-oriented workflow are presented, based on which the service-oriented workflow performance evaluation model is described and the performance analysis methods are depicted. Finally the design and implementation of our prototype system are introduced briefly.

title: DE and NLP Based QPLS Algorithm
abstract: As a novel evolutionary computing technique, Differential Evolution (DE) has been considered to be an effective optimization method for complex optimization problems, and achieved many successful applications in engineering. In this paper, a new algorithm of Quadratic Partial Least Squares (QPLS) based on Nonlinear Programming (NLP) is presented. And DE is used to solve the NLP so as to calculate the optimal input weights and the parameters of inner relationship. The simulation results based on the soft measurement of diesel oil solidifying point on a real crude distillation unit demonstrate that the superiority of the proposed algorithm to linear PLS and QPLS which is based on Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) in terms of fitting accuracy and computational costs.

title: Manufacturing Grid: Needs, Concept, and Architecture
abstract: As a new approach, grid technology is rapidly used in scientific computing, large-scale data management, and collaborative work. But in the field of manufacturing, the application of grid is just at the beginning. The paper proposes the concept of manufacturing. The needs, definition and architecture of manufacturing gird are discussed, which explains why needs manufacturing grid, what is manufacturing grid and how to construct a manufacturing grid system.

title: A New Performance Evaluation Model and AHP-Based Analysis Method in Service-Oriented Workflow
abstract: In service-oriented architecture, services and workflows are closely related so that the research on service-oriented workflow attracts the attention of academia. Because of the loosely-coupled, autonomic and dynamic nature of service, the operation and performance evaluation of workflow meet some challenges, such as how to judge the quality of service (QoS) and what is the relation between QoS and workflow performance. In this paper we are going to address these challenges. First the definition of service is proposed, and the characteristics and operation mechanism of service-oriented workflow are presented. Then a service-oriented workflow performance evaluation model is described which combines the performance of the business system and IT system. The key performance indicators (KPI) are also depicted with their formal representation. Finally the improved Analytic Hierarchy Process is brought forward to analyze the correlation between different KPIs and select services.

title: An Effective PSO-Based Memetic Algorithm for Flow Shop Scheduling
abstract: This paper proposes an effective particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based memetic algorithm (MA) for the permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSSP) with the objective to minimize the maximum completion time, which is a typical non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP) hard combinatorial optimization problem. In the proposed PSO-based MA (PSOMA), both PSO-based searching operators and some special local searching operators are designed to balance the exploration and exploitation abilities. In particular, the PSOMA applies the evolutionary searching mechanism of PSO, which is characterized by individual improvement, population cooperation, and competition to effectively perform exploration. On the other hand, the PSOMA utilizes several adaptive local searches to perform exploitation. First, to make PSO suitable for solving PFSSP, a ranked-order value rule based on random key representation is presented to convert the continuous position values of particles to job permutations. Second, to generate an initial swarm with certain quality and diversity, the famous Nawaz-Enscore-Ham (NEH) heuristic is incorporated into the initialization of population. Third, to balance the exploration and exploitation abilities, after the standard PSO-based searching operation, a new local search technique named NEH_1 insertion is probabilistically applied to some good particles selected by using a roulette wheel mechanism with a specified probability. Fourth, to enrich the searching behaviors and to avoid premature convergence, a simulated annealing (SA)-based local search with multiple different neighborhoods is designed and incorporated into the PSOMA. Meanwhile, an effective adaptive meta-Lamarckian learning strategy is employed to decide which neighborhood to be used in SA-based local search. Finally, to further enhance the exploitation ability, a pairwise-based local search is applied after the SA-based search. Simulation results based on benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the PSOMA. Additionally, the effects of some parameters on optimization performances are also discussed

title: Constrained Nonlinear State Estimation - A Differential Evolution Based Moving Horizon Approach
abstract: A solution is proposed to estimate the states in the nonlinear discrete time system. Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE) is used to obtain the approximated states by minimizing a criterion that is the Euclidean form of the difference between the estimated outputs and the measured ones over a finite time horizon. The differential evolution (DE) algorithm is incorporated into the implementation of MHE in order to solve the optimization problem which is presented as a nonlinear programming problem due to the constraints. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated in simulated systems that have appeared in the moving horizon estimation literature.

title: Intrusion detection system for high-speed network
abstract: The increasing network throughput challenges the current Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) to have compatible high-performance data processing. In this paper, we describe an in-depth research on the related techniques of high-performance network intrusion detection and an implementation of a Rule-based High-performance Network Intrusion Detection System (RHPNIDS) for high-speed networks. By integrating several performance optimizing methods, the performance of RHPNIDS is very impressive compared with the popular open source NIDS Snort.

title: Using Constraints to Model Disjunctions in Rule-Based Reasoning
abstract: Rule-based systems have long been widely used for building expert systems to perform practical knowledge intensive tasks. One important issue that has not been addressed satisfactorily is the disjunction, and this significantly limits their problem solving power. In this paper, we show that some important types of disjunction can be modeled with Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) techniques, employing their simple representation schemes and efficient algorithms. A key idea is that disjunctions are represented as constraint variables, relations among disjunctions are represented as constraints, and rule chaining is integrated with constraint solving. In this integration, a constraint variable or a constraint is regarded as a special fact, and rules can be written with constraints and information about constraints. Chaining of rules may trigger constraint propagation, and constraint propagation may cause firing of rules. A prototype system (called CFR) based on this idea has been implemented.

title: Non-linear Correlation Techniques in Educational Data Mining
abstract: There is such an increasing interest in data mining and educational systems currently that has made educational data mining as a new growing research community. This paper explores how to develope new methods for discovering knowledge of data from educational context. The non-linear correlation technology was introduced and applied in the mining process in the whole knowledge achieved. Meanwhile, we have applied these methods in the real course management datasets and found correspondent results for the educators.

title: Analyzing the Subjective Interestingness of Association Rules
abstract: Association rules, a class of important regularities in databases, have proven very useful in practical applications, but association-rule-mining algorithms tend to produce huge numbers of rules, most of which are of no interest. Users have considerable difficulty manually analyzing so many rules to identify the truly interesting ones. To solve that problem, we have developed a new approach to help them find interesting rules (in particular, unexpected rules) from a set of discovered association rules. This interestingness analysis system (IAS) leverages the user's existing domain knowledge to analyze discovered associations and then rank discovered rules according to various interestingness criteria, such as conformity and various types of unexpectedness. This article describes how we have implemented this technique and used it successfully in a number of applications.

title: Automatic Wrapper Generation Using Tree Matching and Partial Tree Alignment
abstract: This paper is concerned with the problem of structured data extraction from Web pages. The objective of the research is to automatically segment data records in a page, extract data items/fields from these records and store the extracted data in a database. In this paper, we first introduce the extraction problem, and then discuss the main existing approaches and their limitations. After that, we introduce a novel technique (called DEPTA) to automatically perform Web data extraction. The method consists of three steps: (1) identifying data records with similar patterns in a page, (2) aligning and extracting data items from the identified data records and (3) generating tree-based regular expressions to facilitate later extraction from other similar pages. The key innovation is the proposal of a new multiple tree alignment algorithm called partial tree alignment, which was found to be particularly suitable for Web data extraction. This paper is based on our work published in KDD-03 and WWW-05.