Web Service Middleware Research Articles

Using Web Service Middleware to Smart Smart Multi-Test System in CMOS Image Sensing Devices

The current CMOS image sensor industry has lots of challenges including product life cycle shortening, manufacturing cycle shortening, strategically vertical integrated operation and precisely quality. There are lots of difficulties in customized test system including duplicated function develop, less flexible, and hard to integrate heterogeneous systems. Currently, collect the test data in the test system is easy to make mistakes and causes the poor quality control. In this research, I have designed a web service middleware of software component structure and XML data structure to collect, integrate, and manage device test data. It provides an extendable, flexible, standardized and reusable web service middleware component test software platform. To use this software platform build a CMOS image sensor Smart Multi-Test System, then to integrate MES system, provide functions of automatic collect test process data, automatic hold and release process lot which has abnormal quality. It provide database and file system handling service, XML data format translate handling service, basic data maintain service, test result translate service, quality of production control service and abnormal event handling service. The result of this research, it automatically collects process data to save data entering time and prevent the making mistake in operation, and improve efficiency of operator operation. It also provides a quality control mechanism to improve efficiency including the quality of product and the inspection quality up to 95percent. And it makes the more flexible producing and save 75 percent of the new equipment data format develop time.

Configuration and operation architecture for dynamic cellular manufacturing product–service system

The sustainability and re-configurability of a dynamic cellular manufacturing system (DCMS) play significant roles for enterprises in their rapid response to the ever changing market, while increasing their competitive power. Because of a lack of an efficient standard for implementing manufacturing and service integration, the configuration and operation architecture for Product–Service System (PSS) supporting DCMS remains a problem. In order to improve operation sustainability and re-configurability of DCMS, a configuration and operation architecture for Dynamic Cellular Manufacturing Product–Service System (DCM-PSS) based on function block is presented, and key techniques of configuration and operation of DCM-PSS are studied. The real-time dynamically reconfigurable and sustainable DCM-PSS can be implemented by means of the function block standard and Web Services middleware, which is verified through prototype system design and running instances. Because of the low cost of designing, developing and maintaining DCM-PSS due to its simple, open and scalable architecture, it can not only satisfy the requirement of developing dynamic cellular manufacturing system for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), but also provide high-value-added services for DCMS manufacturers.

Study on Web Services Middleware for Real-Time Monitoring in the IoT Environment

Recently, the need for real-time systems which are providing various types of information that occur in large quantities in IoT environment is increasing. In this paper, we propose a middleware system which can monitor in real time on a web environment. The proposed system is designed to be integrated by using communication functions provided by a network operating system and external sensors. The proposed system is compared with an existing system and analysed by the server performance testing tool.

Rule-based approaches for energy savings in an ambient intelligence environment

This paper presents a novel real-world application for energy savings in a Smart Building environment. The proposed system unifies heterogeneous wireless sensor networks under a Semantic Web Service middleware. Two complementary and mutually exclusive rule-based approaches for enforcing energy-saving policies are proposed: a reactive agent based on production rules and a deliberative agent based on defeasible logic. The system was deployed at a Greek University, showing promising experimental results (at least 4% daily savings). Although the percentage of energy savings may seem low, the greatest merit of the method is ensuring that no energy is wasted by constantly enforcing the policies.

PhishTackle—a web services architecture for anti-phishing

Phishing is web based criminal activity of making innocent online users to reveal sensitive information into fake web sites. Such fake web sites lead to fraudulent charges against individuals and corporations. Phishers have a lot of methods to design and host phished web pages, so in reality there cannot be a single solution that can help us combat phishing. As technology advances, the phishing techniques being used are also getting advanced and hence it demands the anti-phishing techniques also to be upgraded and the new techniques are to be included along with the existing methods. But most of the anti-phishing techniques today do not satisfy these criteria. In this paper, we propose service oriented three-layer architecture model for detecting and identifying phishing web sites as it overcomes the shortcomings of existing anti-phishing solutions. This model enables us to separate the user interface layer from the anti-phishing components layer. This is done through web service middleware layer, which provides us with the freedom of building our own anti-phishing components layer in an efficient and flexible way, independent of other layers. Anti-phishing components layer provides a set of reusable components to convert webpage into feature vectors using finest heuristic methods and external repositories of information. The feature vectors act as an input to trained support vector machine classifier to generate phishing label which determines whether a webpage is legitimate or a phishing page. This when experimented, displayed the significance and importance of three-layered architecture model along with combination of heuristics in detection of phishing webpage. This results in high accuracy of 99 % with less than 1 % of false positive rate.

AWESoME: A web service middleware for ambient intelligence

This work presents a Web Service Middleware infrastructure for Ambient Intelligence environments, named aWESoME. aWESoME is a vital part of the Smart IHU project, a large-scale Smart University deployment. The purpose of the proposed middleware within the project is twofold: for one, to ensure universal, homogeneous access to the system’s functions and secondly, to fulfill functional and non-functional requirements of the system. Namely, the infrastructure itself should consume significantly low power (as it is meant for energy savings in addition to automations), without compromising reliability and fast response time. The infrastructure should enable fast and direct discovery, invocation and execution of services. Finally, on hardware level, the wireless sensor and actuator network should be optimally configured for speed and reliability as well. The proposed solution employs widely used web open standards for description and discovery to expose hardware and software functions and ensure interoperability, even outside the borders of this university deployment. It proposes a straightforward method to integrate low-cost and resource-constrained heterogeneous devices found in the market and a large-scale placement of servers and wireless sensor networks. Different server hardware installations have been evaluated to find the optimum trade-off between response time and power consumption. Finally, a range of client applications that exploit the middleware on different platforms are demonstrated, to prove its usability and effectiveness in enabling, in this scenario, energy monitoring and savings.

Web Portal Integration Architecture Approaches

Enterprise Modelling with Web portal integration architecturerequires investment of advanced architectural thinking into definition of services before any development of services or service consumers can begin. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)is gradually replacing monolithic architecture as the premier d sign principle for new business applications with its inherently systematic nature andcapability. Earlier efforts of notable styles of SOA such as CORBA and XATMI have failed to be adopted as main stream projects because of demanding design process requirement with sense -making activities and even have been residing with the modern SOA or Web services middleware. In this paper it is aimed to incorporate sensemaking design activities with the proposed semantic web service based architecture. This paper tries to tackle the above problem by proposing a service -oriented architecture for web data and service integr ation. A gen-Spec architectural pattern has been suggested and adopted in order to tackle theproblem. Firstly, it proposes a service-oriented platform independent architecture andSecondly, it presents a specific deployment of such architecture for data and service integratio n on the web using semantic webservices implemented with the WSMO (Web Services Modeling Ontology).

Building Web services middleware with predictable execution times

Predictability of execution has seldom been considered important in the design of Web services middleware. However, with the paradigm shift brought by cloud computing and with offerings of Platforms and Infrastructure as services, execution level predictability is mandating an increased importance. Existing Web services middleware are optimised for throughput with unconditional acceptance of requests and execution in a best-effort manner. While achieving perceived levels of throughput, they also result in highly unpredictable execution times. This paper presents a generic set of guidelines, algorithms and software engineering techniques that enable service execution to complete within a given deadline. The proposed algorithms accept requests for execution based on their laxity and executes them to meet requested deadlines. An introduced admission control mechanism results in a large range of laxities, enabling more requests to be scheduled together by phasing out their execution. Specialised development libraries and operating systems empower them with increased control over execution. Two widely used Web services middleware products were enhanced using these techniques. The two systems are compared with their unmodified versions to measure the predictability gain achieved. Empirical evidence confirms that the enhancements made enable these systems to achieve more than 90% of the deadlines under any type of traffic, while the unmodified versions achieve less than 10% of the deadlines in high traffic conditions. Predictability of execution achieved through these techniques, would open up new application areas such as industrial control systems, avionics, robotics and financial trading systems to the use of Web services as a middleware platform.

WEB PORTAL INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE APPROACHES

Enterprise Modelling with Web portal integration architecture requires investment of advanced architectural thinking into definition of services before any development of services or service consumers can begin. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is gradually replacing monolithic architecture as the premier design principle for new business applications with its inherently systematic nature and capability. Earlier efforts of notable styles of SOA such as CORBA and XATMI have failed to be adopted as main stream projects because of demanding design process requirement with sense-making activities and even have been residing with the modern SOA or Web services middleware. In this paper it is aimed to incorporate sense-making design activities with the proposed semantic web service based architecture. This paper tries to tackle the above problem by proposing a service-oriented architecture for web data and service integration. A gen-Spec architectural pattern has been suggested and adopted in order to tackle the problem. Firstly, it proposes a service-oriented platform independent architecture and Secondly, it presents a specific deployment of such architecture for data and service integration on the web using semantic web services implemented with the WSMO (Web Services Modeling Ontology).

Development Approaches of Smart Space Service Components for Service Robots

Aiming at the application requirement of service robots,a smart space service component system supporting and enhancing the functions of robots is designed by introducing component-based development(CBD) methods.Basic structures and interaction modes are proposed for service components,based on which cross-platform service invocation is realized for robots.As a result,the problems of the assistant resource's diversity and heterogeneity can be resolved effectively. Service component encapsulates the assistant functions of resources into shared service and provides open service access and invocation on smart space's communication network through contractually specified service interface and description.It supports independent deployment,and is subject to third-party composition.Starting from assistant resources and clients for service robots,the principles of developing service components and service invocation programs by applying web service (WS) middleware technique,are presented in detail,and finally,they are proved by typical experiments.

Guest Editorial: Special Section on Query Models and Efficient Selection of Web Services

SERVICE-ORIENTED computing is gaining momentum as the next technological vehicle to leverage the huge investments in web application development. Web services are poised to take center stage as part of this adoption [4]. The ever-increasing number of web services will have the effect of transforming the web from a data-oriented repository to a service-oriented repository, also known as the Service Web [1]. In this new paradigm, existing business logic would be wrapped as web services to be accessible on the web via a web services middleware [2]. As the number of web services is expected to substantially increase, this would have the effect of introducing competition among web services that offer similar functionalities. Service users are enabled to select the “best” web services and/or their combinations with respect to their expected quality, such as price, response time, and reputation. There is a need to provide a sound framework to organize web services. This would form as a platform to query web services. Building this framework is especially important due to the ever-increasing large and heterogeneous web service deployment. A key ingredient of such a service framework is a formal service query model that can capture the key features of services to filter interactions and accelerate service searches. The query models must be congruent with the dynamic, active, autonomous, and highly heterogeneous nature of web services and their environment. Query languages and efficient selection techniques can then be developed once such a service model is in place. Existing service discovery technologies, such as service registries and service search engines, mainly support the simple keyword-based search on web services. However, keyword search cannot always precisely locate web services, partially because of the rich semantics embodied in these services. Due to the ambiguity of the keywords, which are typically described using natural language, either too many irrelevant services may be returned or some highly relevant services may be missed. As a key facilitator for application outsourcing, a common usage pattern of web services is to be programatically integrated into other applications (e.g., a travel package, navigation system, etc.). This further requires a service query mechanism that is more precise and reliable than keyword-based search. Query processing on web services is a novel concept that goes beyond the traditional data-centric view of query processing, which is mainly performance centered. It focuses on user quality parameters to select multiple services that are equivalent in functionality but exhibit a different quality of web service [3]. This special issue provides insights into the latest research on web service querying and efficient selection. Five articles were selected through a rigorous review process. They cover a set of key research topics including modeling techniques for web services, service query languages, algorithms for efficient service selection, as well as quality of web service modeling and quality-based service selection. The article by Skoutas et al., “Ranking and Clustering Web Services Using Multicriteria Dominance Relationships,” proposes a service selection framework that integrates the similarity matching scores of multiple parameters obtained from various matchmaking algorithms. The framework relies on the service dominance relationships to determine the relevance between services and users’ requests. Instead of using a weighting mechanism, the dominance relationship adopts a multi-objective strategy that simultaneously considers the matching scores of all the parameters for ranking the relevant services. A clustering algorithm is also proposed that captures the trade-offs among different parameters with respect to the considered matching criteria. The article by Grigori et al., “Ranking BPEL Processes for Service Discovery,” proposes a service discovery approach based on behavioral descriptions expressed in BPEL. Behavioral matchmaking goes beyond interface matchmaking as it considers the constraints on the invocation order of operations in service interfaces. Graph matching algorithms are applied, which enable the delivery of approximate behavioral matches. The article by Michlmayr et al., “End-to-End Support for QoSAware Service Selection, Binding, and Mediation in VRESCo,” describes a runtime environment for serviceoriented computing, called VRESCo. The proposed VRESCo framework provides a service metadata model. Service discovery and selection approaches are developed using this model. In addition, other important issues, such as QoS monitoring, dynamic binding, and service mediation, are addressed. The article by Barhamgi et al., “A Query Rewriting Approach for Web Service Composition,” proposes a service querying approach to compose dataproviding services. The data-providing services are modeled as RDF views over a mediated ontology specified in RDF to capture the consensual and shared knowledge in a IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SERVICES COMPUTING, VOL. 3, NO. 3, JULY-SEPTEMBER 2010 161

Flexible delivery of visualization software and services

An important issue in the design of visualization systems is to allow flexibility in providing a range of interfaces to a single body of algorithmic software. In this paper we describe how the ADVISE architecture provides exactly this flexibility. The architecture is cleanly separated into three layers: user interface, web service middleware and visualization components. This gives us the flexibility to provide a range of different delivery options, but all making use of the same basic set of visualization components. These delivery options comprise a range of user interfaces (visual pipeline editor, tailored application, web page), coupled with installation choice between a stand-alone desktop application, or a distributed client-server application.

The impact of research on the development of middleware technology

The middleware market represents a sizable segment of the overall Information and Communication Technology market. In 2005, the annual middleware license revenue was reported by Gartner to be in the region of $8.5 billion. In this article we address the question whether research had any involvement in the creation of the technology that is being sold in this market? We attempt a scholarly discourse. We present the research method that we have applied to answer this question. We then present a brief introduction into the key middleware concepts that provide the foundation for this market. It would not be feasible to investigate any possible impact that research might have had. Instead we select a few very successful technologies that are representative for the middleware market as a whole and show the existence of impact of research results in the creation of these technologies. We investigate the origins of Web services middleware, distributed transaction processing middleware, message-oriented middleware, distributed object middleware and remote procedure call systems. For each of these technologies we are able to show ample influence of research and conclude that without the research conducted by PhD students and researchers in university computer science labs at Brown, CMU, Cambridge, Newcastle, MIT, Vrije, and University of Washington as well as research in industrial labs at APM, AT&T Bell Labs, DEC Systems Research, HP Labs, IBM Research, and Xerox PARC we would not have middleware technology in its current form. We summarise the article by distilling lessons that can be learnt from this evidenced impact for future technology transfer undertakings.

Service-oriented communication architecture for automated manufacturing system integration

The heterogeneity of industrial environments is one of the most important challenges in the context of automated manufacturing system integration. To realize common industrial messaging services, this study employs service-oriented philosophy to realize manufacturing message specification (MMS) services and proposes a new concept of MMS Web Services, which rediscovers the semantics of MMS. Then, this study presents manufacturing communication model based on MMS and Web Services and provides service-oriented communication architecture (SOCA). On the basis of describing MMS, a protocol data unit (PDU) design based on Web Services and VMD server message transmission interfaces, manufacturing communication subsystem using unified modeling language model is discussed in detail. In particular, to verify the validity of the proposed design method, a prototype system has been achieved. The resulting prototype proves the effectiveness of MMS standard, Web Services middleware and service-oriented concepts in the design of manufacturing communication architecture. The combination of MMS and Web Services can bring truly platform-independent and language-independent communication capability for automated manufacturing system and improve its flexibility, reconfigurability and interoperability. Furthermore, the proposed communication architecture can be seamlessly integrated into manufacturing control systems or management systems in plug-and-play fashion.

Supporting collaborative engineering using an intelligent web service middleware

Collaborative Engineering tasks are difficult to manage and involve a high amount of risk – as such, these tasks generally involve only well-known pre-established relationships. Such collaborations are generally quite static and do not allow for dynamic reactions to changes in the environment. Furthermore, not all optimal resource providers can be utilised for the respective tasks as they are potentially unknown. The TrustCoM project elaborated the means to create and manage Virtual Organisations in a trusted and secure manner integrating different providers on-demand. However, TrustCoM focused more on the VO than on the participant, whereas the BREIN project is now enhancing the intelligence of such VO systems to support even providers with little business expertise and provide them with capabilities to optimise their performance. This paper analyses the capabilities of current VO frameworks on the example of TrustCoM and identifies the gaps from the participant’s perspective. It then shows how BREIN addresses these gaps.

Intelligently reconfigurable manufacturing control system based on knowledge function block

To increase the intelligent reconfiguration capability of manufacturing control system, a novel concept of knowledge function block is proposed and an integrated framework for Intelligently Reconfigurable Manufacturing Control System (IRMCS) based on knowledge function block is constructed. After the concurrent execution process of intelligently reconfiguring and controlling being narrated, service-oriented control software architecture based on Web Services is presented. Besides, the system is designed by means of Unified Modelling Language (UML). In particular, a prototype system verifies the validity of knowledge function block standard, Web Services middleware and service-oriented philosophy in the design of IRMCS.

.NET Framework and Web Services: A Profit Combination to Implement and Enhance the IEEE 1451.1 Standard

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> In 1999, the 1451.1 Standard, which defines a common object model and interface specification to develop open multivendor distributed measurement and control systems, was published. However, despite the well-known advantages of the model, there have been a few initiatives to implement a commercial version of the standard. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a Network Capable Application Processor (NCAP) in a well-known and well-proven infrastructure, i.e., the Microsoft .NET Framework. The use of a commercial framework increases productivity because it handles low-level programming details and provides good development tools, which allows us to produce a reusable and robust code. In addition, a solution to enhance the 1451.1 Standard is presented by proposing a new format for interNCAP communication based on eXtended Markup Language (XML) Web Services. This approach promotes interoperability because any device with a compatible Web Service middleware can locate and communicate with our prototype. </para>

The impact of research on middleware technology

The middleware market represents a sizable segment of the overall Information and Communication Technology market. In 2005, the annual middleware license revenue was reported by Gartner to be in the region of 8.5 billion US Dollars. In this article we address the question whether research had any involvement in the creation of the technology that is being sold in this market? We attempt a scholarly discourse. We present the research method that we have applied to answer this question. We then present a brief introduction into the key middleware concepts that provide the foundation for this market. It would not be feasible to investigate any possible impact that research might have had. Instead we select a few very successful technologies that are representative for the middleware market as a whole and show the existence of impact of research results in the creation of these technologies. We investigate the origins of web services middleware, distributed transaction processing middleware, message oriented middleware, distributed object middleware and remote procedure call systems. For each of these technologies we are able to show ample influence of research and conclude that without the research conducted by PhD students and researchers in university computer science labs at Brown, CMU, Cambridge, Newcastle, MIT, Vrije, and University of Washington as well as research in industrial labs at APM, AT&amp;T Bell Labs, DEC Systems Research, HP Labs, IBM Research and Xerox PARC we would not have middleware technology in its current form. We summarise the article by distilling lessons that can be learnt from this evidenced impact for future technology transfer undertakings.

The impact of research on middleware technology

The middleware market represents a sizable segment of the overall Information and Communication Technology market. In 2005, the annual middleware license revenue was reported by Gartner to be in the region of 8.5 billion US Dollars. In this article we address the question whether research had any involvement in the creation of the technology that is being sold in this market? We attempt a scholarly discourse. We present the research method that we have applied to answer this question. We then present a brief introduction into the key middleware concepts that provide the foundation for this market. It would not be feasible to investigate any possible impact that research might have had. Instead we select a few very successful technologies that are representative for the middleware market as a whole and show the existence of impact of research results in the creation of these technologies. We investigate the origins of web services middleware, distributed transaction processing middleware, message oriented middleware, distributed object middleware and remote procedure call systems. For each of these technologies we are able to show ample influence of research and conclude that without the research conducted by PhD students and researchers in university computer science labs at Brown, CMU, Cambridge, Newcastle, MIT, Vrije, and University of Washington as well as research in industrial labs at APM, AT&amp;T Bell Labs, DEC Systems Research, HP Labs, IBM Research and Xerox PARC we would not have middleware technology in its current form. We summarise the article by distilling lessons that can be learnt from this evidenced impact for future technology transfer undertakings.