Non-functional Characteristics Research Articles

An attempt to enhance the time of reply for web service composition with QoS

The web services are the commonly prevailing service clusters of the service-oriented framework (SOA) and service related assessments. The disputes are related to the quality of service (QoS) for choosing web services freely and creating a collection of web services for carrying out trades. The ultimate aim is to choose web services based on the non-functional features and quality of service (QoS) ranks. In order to choose a web service for every process a social aspect web (SAW) scheme is employed which does not comprehensively make use of all sorts of web services. It employs the requirements of the user for ranking web service set of the applications and finally provides SAW schemes over a set of web service applicants. The mechanism helps in selecting the web services in terms of quality of services (QoS) scores and user needs. The choice of web services over varied web services based on scheme can be utilised for aggregation and organising web services resulting in optimised time of reply to the web service actions.

JSON-LD Based Web API Semantic Annotation Considering Distributed Knowledge

Based on semantically annotated Web APIs, automatic Web API composition can be implemented easily. The operation can greatly improve efficiency of building a software system. However, in real world, semantic annotation for Web APIs will encounter various difficulties, because of their distribution and function diversity, such as disunited API description formats, response result with complex structure, shortage of business domain ontologies, semantic conflicts among distributed knowledge, and so on. To solve these difficulties, we propose a JSON-LD based Web API semantic annotation approach (JWASA). JWASA can assist professional developers to semi-automatically complete semantic annotation of Web APIs. A common Web API description ontology is firstly defined, including necessary vocabularies about invocation information, functional semantics, and non-functional features. Then, JWASA automatically converts a Web API description into a document in an united JSON format, and assist developers to semi-automatically embed semantic information of crucial elements of the API by means of a lightweight Linked Data format JSON-LD. Meanwhile, a semantic annotation specification is proposed to deal with various complex situations in Web API description, e.g: too many response parameters, no request parameters, etc. In addition, to improve efficiency of annotation, JWASA provides some extra operations, including automatic new ontology or vocabulary creation, automatic functional semantics extraction etc. Also, JWASA provides semi-automatically bridge rule generation algorithm, which can infer implied relationships among vocabularies (e.g: sub-class, super-class, equality). JWASA focuses on the semantic annotation of functionality of Web APIs, and can create effective semantic Web APIs for future API automatic composition. We implement a prototype system and carry out a series of experiments to evaluate JWASA on real Web APIs crawled from Internet. Experiments show that our approach is effective and efficient.

Selection of computerized maintenance management systems to meet organizations’ needs using AHP

Due to the complexity of modern industrial plants introduced by Industry 4.0, it has become increasingly difficult to manage physical assets maintenance without the support of a specialized information system, often referred to as Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). CMMS implementation brings several benefits such as cost reduction, increased productivity and better planning and scheduling. Nevertheless, selecting the most suitable one is not an easy task due to the large amount of CMMS available in the market. This paper presents a multicriteria decision-making method based on Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) applied for comparative evaluation of different CMMS alternatives. This method allows the evaluation of CMMS quality level based on a set of functional and non-functional features defined according to ISO/IEC 25010:2011 and distributed into a hierarchical structure of 5 criteria and 16 sub-criteria. This study shows the application of the proposed method in a synthetic foam production company, where it allowed a detailed comparison of three possible CMMS candidates and the selection of the most appropriate according to this organization’ specific needs and requirements. It was observed that the differences in the global quality levels of the three CMMS alternatives were practically unnoticeable, requiring a cost-benefit analysis to complete the decision process. The method proposed has shown to be easily applied in an industrial context, leading to a reduction of the probability of failure often faced by organizations at the time of CMMS implementation.

An intelligent cloud service discovery framework

Due to the heterogeneity nature and the huge number of published cloud services, as well as, the continuous increase of the users’ complexity demands, the discovery process of cloud services remains an open issue. According to our conducted comprehensive survey study, the existing cloud service discovery solutions suffer from a set of drawbacks; missing a standardized and comprehensive specification of cloud services, not considering the lack of knowledge about cloud concepts, and not considering the continuous increase of the complex cloud services published to meet the complexity of the users’ demands. In this paper, a comprehensive, standardized, flexible, and intelligent cloud service discovery framework is proposed to overcome these drawbacks. According to this framework, a comprehensive ontology has been developed to provide a standardized semantic specification of cloud services based on their functional features and non-functional features. For exploiting the high performance of the relational databases in managing the large amounts of data and improving the effectiveness of the proposed framework, instances of the non- functional features’ ontological concepts are separated from the developed ontology to be stored in a relational database, where Ontop OBDA platform is used to translate the complex queries over the ontology to SQL queries that are understood by the underlying relational database source. Also, our proposed framework provides a user-centric interface that enables users with low knowledge about cloud concepts to compose complex queries using their natural English language. The effectiveness evaluation shows that the proposed framework provides better results than other solutions. According to the implementation results, the average amount of error expected to identify a service by using the proposed framework is 11% compared to 31% by using the Cloudle service discovery solution. Also, the framework achieves entirely the cloud service discovery evaluation criteria compared to 66% of these criteria for the current cloud service discovery solutions. For efficiency, the proposed framework achieves 88% F-Score for mapping cloud services into suitable functional features and 80% for discovering services that match the users’ queries.

Dynamic service composition in enterprise cloud bus architecture

Purpose Service composition phenomenon based on non-scenario aspects are become the latest issues in enterprise software applications of the multi-cloud environment due to the phenomenal increase in a number of Web services. The traditional service composition patterns are hard to support the dynamic, flexible and autonomous service composition in the inter-cloud platform. To address this problem, this paper aims to describe a dynamic service composition framework (SCF) that is enriched with various structural and functional aspects of composition patterns in a cloud computing environment. The proposed methodology helps to integrate various heterogeneous cloud services dynamically to acquire an optimal and novel enterprise solution for delivering the service to the end-users automatically. Design/methodology/approach SCF and different composition patterns have been used to compose the services present in the inter-cloud architecture of the multi-agent-based system. Further, the proposed dynamic service composition algorithm is illustrated using a hybrid approach, where service are chosen according to various needs of quality of service parameters. Besides, a priority-based service scheduling algorithm is proposed that facilitates the automation of delivering cloud service optimally. Findings The proposed framework is capable of composing the heterogeneous service and facilitate the structural and functional aspects of service composition process in enterprise cloud-based applications in terms of flexibility, scalability, integrity and dynamicity of the cloud bus. The advantage of the proposed algorithm is that it helps to minimize the execution cost, processing time and get better success rate in delivering the service as per customer’s need. Originality/value The novelty of the proposed architecture coordinates cloud participants, automate service discovery pattern, reconfigure scheduled services and focus on aggregating a composite services in inter-cloud environments. Besides, the proposed framework supported several non-functional characteristics such as robustness, flexibility, dynamicity, scalability and reliability of the system.

Development of an intelligent agent for analysis of nonfunctional characteristics in specifications of software requirements

One of the urgent present-day tasks consists in ensuring an automated analysis of specifications of software requirements for sufficiency of information on nonfunctional component characteristics of software quality. Analysis of known intelligent agents based on the ontological approach has shown that these agents do not solve the problem of quantifying sufficiency of information in the specification of software requirements for determining nonfunctional characteristics of software. The objective of this study was to implement the intelligent agent based on the ontological approach for analyzing information on nonfunctional characteristics in specifications of software requirements. A model of intelligent agent activity has been developed based on the ontological approach for evaluating specifications of software requirements. It reflects features of assessing information sufficiency for determining nonfunctional component characteristics of software quality. The developed model is a theoretical basis for implementing the intelligent agent based on the ontological approach for evaluating specifications of software requirements. The intelligent agent based on the ontological approach has been implemented for evaluating information on nonfunctional characteristics in the specifications of software requirements. The implemented agent forms conclusions on sufficiency or insufficiency of information about nonfunctional component characteristics of software quality in the specification of requirements to actual software. In addition, it quantifies the level of information sufficiency in the specification of requirements to actual software for determining each of nonfunctional characteristics of software and determining all nonfunctional component characteristics of software quality in aggregate. The agent provides a list of attributes that should supplement the specification of requirements for increasing the level of sufficiency of its information as well as visualization of gaps in knowledge of all nonfunctional component characteristics of software quality. The results of functioning of the implemented agent have shown an increase in the level of information sufficiency in the specification of software requirements. The developed intelligent agent makes it possible to partially eliminate human participation in information processing, avoid loss of essential information and minimize occurrence of errors at the early stages of the software life cycle.

Requirement Specification and Modeling a Wearable Smart Blanket System for Monitoring Patients in Ambulance.

Background:Nowadays, the role of smart systems and developed tools such as wearable systems for monitoring the patients and controlling their conditions consistently has increased significantly. The present research sought to identify the factors which are essential for designing a wearable smart blanket system and modeling the proposed systems.Methods:To this aim, the requirements for creating the proposed system in ambulance were described after determining the features related to wearable systems by conducting on a comparative study. First, some studies were performed to identify the wearable system development. Then, the elicited questionnaire was given to the physicians and medical informatics specialists. Finally, the extracted requirements were implemented for modeling a smart blanket system.Results:Based on the results, the wearable smart blanket system includes some specific characteristics such as monitoring the important signs, communicating with the surroundings, processing the signals instantly, and storing all important signs. In addition, they should involve some nonfunctional characteristics such as easy installment and function, interactivity, error fault tolerance, low energy consumption, and the accuracy of sign stability. Then, based on the requirements and data elements extracted from the questionnaire, the system was modeled as a detailed design of the proposed technical blanket system. Based on the results, the architecture of the designed system could provide expected scenarios by using the Active Review for Intermediate Design-oriented scenario-based evaluation method.Conclusion:Today, smart systems and tools have considerably developed in terms of monitoring the patients and controlling their conditions. Therefore, wearable systems can be implemented for monitoring the health status of patients in ambulance.

A graph-based automatic services composition based on cost estimation heuristic

Currently, both software and hardware are being virtualised and offered as services on the internet. Companies have an opportunity to improve their workflows by composing services that best suit their quality and cost requirements. However, as more services become available, computer-aided services discovery and composition become essential. Traditional service representation and planning algorithms do not adequately address non-functional characteristics, large numbers of similar operators (i.e., services), and limited numbers of objects (i.e., inputs and outputs per service). This paper analyses existing work in automatic services composition, service representation and planning algorithms and proposes a new framework to address those needs. It proves that the proposed framework provides an admissible heuristic based on cost estimations that guarantee a minimum cost solution, if one exists.

Towards evaluation of cloud ontologies

Many enterprises consider that cloud computing will continue to play a key role due to its ability to deliver various types of on-demand IT services, and according to customer needs. Although cloud technology has characteristics that distinguish it from other technologies, unfortunately, services in this technology suffer from the heterogeneity issue. As a result, cloud services have many challenges, such as service description, interoperability, and service discovery. Many studies have contributed dealing with such challenges using ontology, as it can participate as a mapping layer to present such services in a unified description. Cloud ontologies included in these studies can be classified into three types of ontologies; ontologies that focus on representing functional features of cloud services, ontologies that focus on non-functional features, and ontologies that focus on both function and non-function features. These ontologies are not unified in representing such features, where they agree in some features and differ in others. By using techniques developed to evaluate ontologies related to the other technologies, it is difficult to decide which cloud ontology captures cloud services in the right way. We have noticed that there is not a framework or a benchmark to evaluate the cloud ontologies. In this survey, the current cloud ontologies are analyzed to identify a set of observations that represent their strengths and weaknesses. According to these observations, a set of suggested rules are introduced and verified to be considered during the construction or the evaluation of cloud ontologies. The work in this paper can be considered as the fundamental step for developing a formal framework to automatically evaluate cloud ontologies.

“Today I Tell” A Comics and Story Creation App for People with Autism Spectrum Condition

ABSTRACTThis article describes the design, development, and evaluation of an application to help people with autism spectrum condition (ASC) express themselves through the creation of stories and comics. The intended platform of the application is touchscreen devices. The design process follows a human-centered design approach involving caregivers, teachers, usability experts, primary school students, and people with ASC. The characteristics considered are explained to design and implement the application, as well as the different evaluation steps. The prototype design was evaluated with 36 experts (teachers, caregivers, and usability experts). Next, 14 primary school students and 10 participants from a special education institution tested the application. Among all the participants, five students of the primary school institution have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and five students of the special education institution had ASC. The feedback gathered shows the importance of multidisciplinary teams in developing an application aimed at people with special needs. Non-functional features such as usability and accessibility can be bypassed by developers and this is the point at which teachers, caregivers, usability experts, and even the end users of the application can provide their insights in order to improve the product during its development phase. This also reduces the costs that would be incurred if the final product had to be changed after its development.

ASSESSING PERFORMANCE OF AGENTS IN A MAS: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

A Multi-Agent System (MAS) is understood as a system consisting of interacting autonomous agents. Research on MAS is mainly concerned with functional properties such as coordination, rationality, and knowledge modeling. A very less attention is paid for the research activity on the nonfunctional properties performance, scalability and reliability of the MAS. However, as the MAS technologies have gradually matured to be exploited in building practical distributed applications, the non-functional properties have become increasingly important, and it is now vital to pay attention to the issues of nonfunctional characteristics of agents. We propose to access the performance of agents in MAS and the system is implemented using JADE. The experimental study provides the opportunity for cause and effect relationships. We considered a tiered architecture for the MAS. A tiered design can lessen the overall impact of changes to the application and allows modifying a component without disturbing the next Tier. So with the help of a good deployment plan, we can distribute the layers over multiple physical tiers in distributed computing to implement a better architecture of the system. The case study considered for illustration is Supply-Chain Management and the results obtained are validated with the tool SMTQA.

Automated Quantitative Verification for Service-Based System Design: A Visualization Transform Tool Perspective

Service-based systems are a new software mode for distributed business processes integration. It is difficult for traditional testing methods to verify the functional and nonfunctional requirements of software. To address this problem, this paper proposes a visual verification platform to quantitatively compute the reliability and cost for evaluating the performance of service-based systems in the design phase. First, an extended automata model namely Probabilistic Reward Labeled Transition System (PRLTS) is proposed to formalize both the functional behaviors and nonfunctional features. Then, the formal language of probabilistic model checker PRISM is introduced to show the grammar of the target verification codes that we want to transform. Second, XML description tags of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is parsed to generate the functional behaviors using different kinds of transformation rules, based on which the probability matrix and reward concept are employed to denote the service’s reliability and cost, respectively. Third, the PRLTS model is turned into the input language of PRISM, where the graphic description language DOT of Graphviz is used as an intermediary to display system behaviors in a visual way. The model layout allows the designer to manually adjust the behaviors of the PRLTS model, where verification codes can be dynamically updated according to the changes in modified information. Fourth, to perform quantitative verification, the verification property in the form of the Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) formula can be automatically generated when the requirement model of the service-based system is inputted, during which the threshold value of qualitative property will be initially computed and returned as a recommended value. This allows the user to modify the qualitative property in an interactive way. Furthermore, experimental analysis of the real-world case study demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed method. Thus, our platform provides guidance for quantitative verification and graphical visualization for effectively generating formal models and checking the quantitative properties for service-based systems.

License choice in open 3D printing content community: Are current license options sufficient?

3D printing content, which has been increasingly shared through the open communities over the last decade, has both aesthetic and functional features. There has been growing concern over whether current licensing policies provide sufficient options for contributors to the open communities. To suggest a direction for alternative license options, it is necessary to understand contributors’ license preferences for sharing diverse 3D printing content. Using a logit model based on information collected from Thingiverse, this study investigates the relationship between the various features of 3D printing content and contributors’ choices among the Creative Commons licenses currently available. The result indicates that preferences are clearly distinguished by the features of the content, whether the content is functional or non-functional in nature. However, there is no significant difference, in terms of license choice, for the numerous 3D printing content items that contain both functional and non-functional features. This result implies that there is a deficiency in the current licenses that cover 3D printing content. Implications for future license policies are discussed.

A novel QoS-aware prediction approach for dynamic web services.

Web service has become irreplaceable for service-oriented application in both academia and industry in recent years. Quality of Service (QoS) is used to describe the nonfunctional characteristics of Web service. Identifying Web service QoS is crucial for service-oriented application designers because service users may obtain very different QoS performance of the same service in the client-side due to dynamic changes of Internet environment as well as user context. However, evaluating QoS performance of a large scale of Web services requires considerable time and resources in real-world. Existing methods can make a personalized prediction for average QoS values by employing historical data but fail to take into consideration the fluctuation feature of Web service QoS values. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel method for personalized QoS prediction of dynamic Web Services. First, a novel approach is used to extract feature points of QoS sequences and dynamic time warping distance is used to compute the similarity instead of Euclidean distance. By finding the most similar QoS sequences of the target QoS sequence, the missing QoS values can be predicted without extra Web services invoking. To validate our method, we conduct a large number of experiments based on real-world Web service QoS data set. The experimental studies show that our method has higher accuracy rate compared with the existing methods.

Survey on QoS metrics and ranking in cloud services

The Cloud Computing uses high speed broadband for good Quality of Service (QoS) so that Cloud based application can be used with high speed which entails the minimum response time, less latency rate and reduced amount of loss of packets. Because of the ample range within the delivered Cloud solutions, from the customer’s aspect, it's emerged as irksome to decide whose providers they need to utilize and then what's the thought of his or her option. Bestowing suitable metrics is vital in assessing practices. QoS metrics are playing an important role in selecting Cloud providers and also revamping resource utilization efficiency. To guarantee a specialized product is published, describing metrics for assessing the QoS might be an essential requirement. To obtain high quality Cloud applications, Optimal Service Selection is needed. With the increasing number of Cloud services, QoS is usually selected for describing non-functional characteristics of Cloud services. In this paper, a widespread survey on QoS metrics for service vendors and QoS Ranking in Cloud Computing is presented.

The Current Practice of Data Management of Schools and District Education Offices: Is There a Need for a New Approach?

Currently, many government agencies, such as schools and district education offices, are using manual methods to manage data, which are not only unreliable but also insecure. Even more alarming is that many schools do not have data backups, which surely will have serious repercussions if important data were lost or damaged in unfortunate events. Hence, this study was carried out to examine the current practice of data management in selected schools and a District Education Office (DEO), to determine the problems associated with the current practice, and to propose a new method to help improve data management of such organizations. The study used a qualitative approach using a semi-structured interview, in which eight school principals and one DEO officer were recruited for the interview. The findings showed that the current practice was both ineffective and inefficient, with many schools having no duplicated copies, as backups, of important data. Furthermore, duplicated copies of data made by some of the schools were largely in printed form. More revealingly, the interviewees indicated that they were concerned with the security and safety of their school data and information. Overall, the research findings reinforce the need to develop an information system that is not only reliable but also highly accessible. Hence, a framework was proposed to guide the development of a web-based information system with appropriate functional and non-functional features, with which practitioners, notably school administrators and education officers, could use to improve the current practice of data management in their schools and DEOs.

Educator Perceptions of Virtual Learning System Quality Characteristics

In higher education institutions, digital learning environments, referred to as virtual learning systems in this article, have been adopted and are becoming increasingly popular among academics. A virtual learning system (VLS) has a suite of tools with associated functions and non-functional system characteristics. Higher education institutions (HEIs) implement a VLS with the intent to assimilate e-Learning with face-to-face instruction and thereby derive associated benefits from its usage. Currently there is limited information on educators’ perceptions on the usefulness of VLS tool functionality, and the importance assigned to non-functional characteristics. This article adapted the generic framework of the ISO 9126 external software quality model to ascertain the perceptions of educators with regards to VLS functionality and non-functional quality characteristics. A case study research strategy was adopted, using two South African higher education institutions. The main contribution of this article is a proposed model representing VLS quality in use characteristics, measured by the constructs of perceived usefulness and perceived importance. In addition to the theoretical contribution, this article makes a practical contribution by providing educators’ recommendations on the improvement of VLS quality characteristics. This article has potentially useful implications for the use of a VLS by educators and future VLS design iterations.

Qos prediction for web services based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines

Recently, reliability prediction of Web services has become very important in related research communities. Especially, predicting the Quality of Service (QoS) for active users has been a hot issue of research and application. On the other hand, with the rapidly growing in number of service providers and users, resulting in a large number of data sets. It has a big impact to the QoS such as managing and monitoring for describing functional and nonfunctional characteristics of Web services. Therefore, we will certainly struggle at processing large data sets in the future, unless the issues are resolved quickly before it happens. In that context, QoS prediction on big data set is an urgent problem to be solved. In this paper, we present a new model for handling this problem based on a Restricted Boltzmann Machines, it is called Two Layers Model (TLM) and also proposed to add a new method for evaluating prediction of the field of web service quality. We use this model to cope with large data sets and the model has been used by the efficient learning and inference procedures for predicting QoS values of Web services. Our experiments were performed on two data sets in the WSDREAM data set and the experimental results have proved the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Granularity-based Uncertain QoS Partitioning for Web Service Reliability

The performance of Web services may fluctuate due to their invocations in dynamic environment. Thus, quality of service (QoS) is inherently uncertain when reflecting non-functional features of Web services. QoS has been considered as a significant criterion for selecting those functionally similar services. In this paper, we proposed a novel granularity-based partitioning model (GPM) that is applied to evaluate the reliability of Web services with the consideration of uncertain QoS via cloud model and coefficient of variance. Extensive experiments with 1,558,224 service invocation records have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The results demonstrate that it outperforms the state-of-the-art traditional ones.

Fatal injection: a survey of modern code injection attack countermeasures

With a code injection attack (CIA) an attacker can introduce malicious code into a computer program or system that fails to properly encode data that comes from an untrusted source. A CIA can have different forms depending on the execution context of the application and the location of the programming flaw that leads to the attack. Currently, CIAs are considered one of the most damaging classes of application attacks since they can severely affect an organisation’s infrastructure and cause financial and reputational damage to it. In this paper we examine and categorize the countermeasures developed to detect the various attack forms. In particular, we identify two distinct categories. The first incorporates static program analysis tools used to eliminate flaws that can lead to such attacks during the development of the system. The second involves the use of dynamic detection safeguards that prevent code injection attacks while the system is in production mode. Our analysis is based on nonfunctional characteristics that are considered critical when creating security mechanisms. Such characteristics involve usability, overhead, implementation dependencies, false positives and false negatives. Our categorization and analysis can help both researchers and practitioners either to develop novel approaches, or use the appropriate mechanisms according to their needs.