E-service Composition Research Articles

EServices Classification, Trends, and Analysis: A Systematic Mapping Study

The concept of eServices originated in the early 2000s in the field of business and commerce. However, in recent years, eServices are being applied in many domains. Therefore, a thorough study on eServices is required to identify the areas in which eServices have been applied till date and to what extent. The main objective of this research is to perform a mapping study to provide an extensive review, gather trends, and identify the state of the art in the research on eServices to answer the research questions designed to conduct this research. A mapping study has been conducted employing an automatic search in digital repositories by developing a mapping protocol. Mapping studies are useful for categorizing and classifying the existing information concerning a particular research question in an unbiased manner. The search procedure identified 806 studies of which 318 were selected for full analysis during the years 2000 and 2016 in the field of computer science. No study was published before this time period. Research on eServices were recorded and classified into tabulated spread sheets, and finally analyzed. According to the study, the range of eService service and application domains is quite wide. Most studies conducted have focused on eService composition and eService Adoption. However, the most common application domains identified were eGovernment, eBusiness, eHealth, and eLearning. The study findings show that the research on eService composition, design, provision, and adoption is increasing with the passage of time. The literature not only discusses various domains of eServices but also provides the in-depth classification, review and trend of eService studies over time.

E-Services quality assessment framework for collaborative networks

In a globalised networked economy, collaborative networks (CNs) are formed to take advantage of new business opportunities. Collaboration involves shared resources and capabilities, such as e-Services that can be dynamically composed to automate CN participants’ business processes. Quality is essential for the success of business process automation. Current approaches mostly focus on quality of service (QoS)-based service selection and ranking algorithms, overlooking the process of service composition which requires interoperable, adaptable and secure e-Services to ensure seamless collaboration, data confidentiality and integrity. Lack of assessment of these quality attributes can result in e-Service composition failure. The quality of e-Service composition relies on the quality of each e-Service and on the quality of the composition process. Therefore, there is the need for a framework that addresses quality from both views: product and process. We propose a quality of e-Service composition (QoESC) framework for quality assessment of e-Service composition for CNs which comprises of a quality model for e-Service evaluation and guidelines for quality of e-Service composition process. We implemented a prototype considering a simplified telemedicine use case which involves a CN in e-Healthcare domain. To validate the proposed quality-driven framework, we analysed service composition reliability with and without using the proposed framework.

A message negotiation approach to e-services by utility function and multi-criteria decision analysis

In modern society, information and internet techniques have changed human lifestyles. Service providers provide innovative e-services to attract and retain their customers. The popularity of e-services has made selecting a good e-service, which will also provide reasonable composite e-service solutions, an important issue. Therefore, this work proposes a message negotiation approach to e-services to assist consumers in acquiring a reasonable composite e-service solution. An e-service composition involves a complete e-service process including a series of steps. E-service formalization, an e-service utility model and a multi-criteria decision analysis are used to determine the optimal selection order of e-services for each specific e-service composition step. Then, the selected e-service for each step is composed through a message negotiation process. The result is presented to the consumer as a reasonable composite e-service solution. This work uses an ingredient procurement use case of property management in Taiwan to demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective.

The Safety and Liveness Properties of Composite E-Services Based on Activity Chain

E-service composition is most impressing method for development and deployment of e-business. Description and modeling the behavior requirements of composite E-services for users and verifying composite E-service compliance to specific requirements is an important step in design of services. But most work does not address the issue of how to model the requirements that the BPEL4WS processes are supposed to satisfy. The specifications in verification works are general temporal relation based on activity or scenario in essence. Distinguish with these work, we propose a novel concept of behavior specification based on activity chain in which granularity is between activity and scenario. Chain existence mode, chain absence mode are designed to express such behavioral requirements based on activity chain that is similar with safety or liveness property based on activity respectively. Encode them on Labeled Transition System LTS and then give them exact operation semantics. Finally, an example is illustrated.

On composition and lookahead delegation of [formula omitted]-services modeled by automata

Let M be a class of (possibly nondeterministic) language acceptors with a one-way input tape. A system ( A ; A 1 , … , A r ) of automata in M is composable if for every string w = a 1 ⋯ a n of symbols accepted by A , there is an assignment of each symbol a j in w to one of the A i 's such that for each 1 ⩽ i ⩽ r , the subsequence of w assigned to A i is accepted by A i . For a nonnegative integer k , a k - lookahead delegator for ( A ; A 1 , … , A r ) is a deterministic machine D in M which, knowing (a) the current states of A , A 1 , … , A r and the accessible “local” information of each machine (e.g., the top of the stack if each machine is a pushdown automaton, whether a counter is zero or nonzero if each machine is a multicounter automaton, etc.), and (b) the k lookahead symbols to the right of the current input symbol being processed, can uniquely determine the A i to assign the current symbol. Moreover, every string w accepted by A is also accepted by D ; i.e., the subsequence of string w delegated by D to each A i is accepted by A i . Thus, k -lookahead delegation is a stronger requirement than composability, since the delegator D must be deterministic. A system that is composable may not have a k -delegator for any k . We study the decidability of composability and existence of k -delegators for various classes of machines M . Our results generalize earlier ones (and resolve some open questions) concerning composability of deterministic finite automata as e-services to finite automata that are augmented with unbounded storage (e.g., counters and pushdown stacks) and finite automata with discrete clocks (i.e., discrete timed automata). The results have applications to automated composition of e-services.

Process-Based E-Service Composition for Modeling and Automating Zero Latency Supply Chains

E-services are teams of applications and humans (participating electronically) that work together to provide a service or a product. Virtual Enterprises (VEs) are business or organizations that provide products or services that are created and managed by combining and wrapping e-services provided by multiple independent enterprises. To operate efficiently VEs must form supply chains that utilize and manage e-services. In this paper, we propose a Service Oriented Process model (SOP) and describe the architecture and the basic design principles of the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI), a system that supports SOP. SOP permits modeling of e-services and provides for e-service integration to construct efficient multi-enterprise supply chains. This is accomplished by modeling composite e-services as Multi-Enterprise Processes (MEPs). In particular, SOP supports service activities for modeling the services themselves, primitives for composing supply chains from services, and primitives for automating service coordination as required by a supply chain. The CMI system implements SOP and uses a semantic broker that has knowledge about the service capabilities an quality. Therefore, a MEP (and hence its supply chain) is capable of on-the-fly choice of the service providers that are best suited to its objectives (e.g., cheapest or fastest).

Dynamic and adaptive composition of e-services

The Web is rapidly becoming the platform through which many companies deliver services to businesses and individual customers. The number and type of on-line services increase day by day, and this trend is likely to continue at an even faster pace in the immediate future. Examples of e-services currently available include bill payment, delivery of customized news, or archiving and sharing of digital documents. E-Services are typically delivered individually. However, the e-service market creates the opportunity for providing value-added, integrated services, which are delivered by composing existing e-services. To support organizations in pursuing this business opportunity we have developed eFlow, a system that supports the specification, enactment, and management of composite e-services, modeled as processes that are enacted by a service process engine. Composite e-services have to cope with a highly dynamic business environment in terms of services and of service providers. In addition, the increased competition forces companies to provide customized services to better satisfy the needs of every individual customer. Ideally, service process should be able to transparently adapt to changes in the environment and to the need of different customers with minimal or no user intervention. In addition, it should be possible to dynamically modify service process definitions in a simple and effective way to manage cases where user intervention is indeed required. In this paper we show how eFlow achieves these goals.

Report on the VLDB workshop on technologies for e-services (TES)

1 Aims and scope The Web is changing every aspect of our lives, but no area is undergoing as rapid and significant changes as the way businesses operate. Today, large and small companies are using the Web to communicate with their partners, to connect with their back-end systems, and to perform electronic commerce transactions. The next chapter of the Internet story is the evolution of today's e-business and e-commerce systems into e-services, such as order procurement, on-line trading, customer relationship management, product promotion, or real-time car navigation and traffic information services. In order to make e-services available to customers, service providers need to address several issues, such as: • e-service description: which are the attributes of an e-service that should be made visible to customers or applications, and how they should be described. • e-service advertisement: how service providers can publish service description so that they can be discovered and accessed by customers and applications. • e-service discovery and selection: how customers and applications can discover and select the e-service (or the combination of e-services) that best fulfill their requirements. • e-service composition: how basic e-services (possibly offered by different companies) can be combined to form value-added, reliable services. Which architectures, models, and languages can achieve zero latency service integration and cross-organizational business process automation. • e-service delivery: how e-services are delivered to businesses and to customers • e-service monitoring and analysis: how service executions can be monitored and how service execution data can be analyzed in order to improve the service quality or efficiency • e-service contracts: how to agree on and perform legal contracts between service providers and clients electronically. • e-service ratings: how to validate service claims and evaluate the quality of the different service providers.