On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2016 Workshops

With the continually reducing of research and development time and cost, large-scale complex products design and development depends on powerful and flexible tools to validate, verify and test its results. A flexible and scalable simulation framework is needed to support research, design, test, function extension and new technology implementation, especially for the product definition, system definition and equipment definition stages in complex product development projects. To address these requirements, the service oriented simulation framework is developed. Some enabling technologies including simulation unit service, simulation orchestration, simulation process monitoring and control are developed. The prototype implementation of the simulation system and the simulation results of an AFMS/Autoflight system are given. Both the effectiveness and flexibility of the technology developed in the paper are confirmed.

With the progress of world trade and globalization, and the development of information & communication technology (ICT) and industrial technology, manufacturing pattern and technology are now facing a turning point. In order to realize economic transformation, the Chinese government published China Manufacturing 2025 national strategy; German government published Industry 4.0; and American government proposed Re-industrialization and Industrial Internet. All of these mentioned strategies have a key topic: smart manufacturing. In order to present a systematic standard solution for smart manufacturing, standardization organizations of China, Germany and US published standards landscapes or roadmaps. This paper compares these smart manufacturing standardization architectures and methodology, develops a reference model for smart manufacturing standards development and implementation. At the end of the paper, a standards framework is presented.

Due to the current structural economic transformation towards smart production and logistics, a holistic and interactive connection between involved agents and departments becomes essential. Therefore, also in the field of operations research, an innovative approach of performance measurement is necessary to ensure increasing efficiency in smart enterprises. However, using traditional mathematical optimization methods, the isolated consideration of problem models can lead to high opportunity costs in other departments. In this paper, an integrated approach for measuring the performance of combined logistics optimization problems is presented. The connection of single problems is shown by proposing optimization networks (ON), where isolated problems are solved simultaneously to be able to use synergy effects. A methodology for measuring the results of an ON, called integrated performance measurement system (IPMS), is introduced. It monitors quantitative business goal achievement and ensures an overall increasing efficiency.

Achieving seamless interoperability among heterogeneous communication systems and technologies is critical in todays’ networked business world, ranging from joint collaborative military operations that need to exchange critical information in real-time, to complex e-business scenarios of organizations from different industry sectors using heterogeneous technologies and communication infrastructures to execute complex inter-organizational business processes. The aim of this article is to present a review of current domain-specific standardization initiatives towards seamless communication, discussing challenges and highlighting directions for further research and development work. This article has two main contributions. First, it provides an up-to-date review of the most relevant domain-specific standardization initiatives aiming at achieving seamless interoperability among communication systems. Second, by comparing these initiatives, a set of recommendations is advanced towards improving further interoperability developments, offering a unique niche for researchers, practitioners and developers to make significant contributions.

To handle challenges such as globalization, new technologies and fast-changing environments, enterprises are progressively collaborating with others and becoming part of a Networked. In this context, Enterprise Interoperability (EI) is a crucial requirement that needs to be respected by enterprises when starting a collaborative relationship. As soon as this requirement is not achieved, EI becomes a problem that must be solved. To avoid these problems and consequently, take corrective actions on time, enterprises need to predict and solve potential problems before they occur. The Maturity Model for Enterprise Interoperability (MMEI) was proposed to assess the interoperability potential of an enterprise as well as to help enterprises evaluating the suitability of partners in an interoperability context. However, this method has some inconveniences such as the lack of formal definitions specifying the boundaries between each maturity level. Hence the objective of this paper is to formalize the MMEI maturity levels boundaries by defining formal measures. Finally, a case study is proposed to validate the defined measures.

This paper presents an integrated collaborative approach for Micro Devices Assembly (MDA). The cyber and physical components of such an approach is described in this paper along with a discussion of their design and implementation. The cyber modules focus on assembly planning and 3D Virtual Reality (VR) based simulation activities. The physical components use the outcomes of the cyber modules to perform physical assembly for target MDA activities. A discussion of an Insertion Algorithm is also provided for generating near optimal assembly sequence of micro devices.

In this paper, we describe how we ensure interoperability of software agents that support planning and control decisions in semiconductor supply chains by means of a domain- and task-specific ontology. The sheer size of the facilities and the supply chains in the semiconductor domain, the permanent appearance of uncertainty, and the rapid technological changes lead to an industrial environment that gives rise to applying software agents for next-generation enterprise information systems. The S2CMAS prototype is a hierarchically organized agent-based system that allows for decisions ranging from long-term capacity planning for the entire network to detailed scheduling decisions for single wafer fabrication facilities (wafer fabs). The ontology for the S2CMAS system is designed based on a domain analysis. The usage of the proposed ontology is illustrated by an example.

The need for interoperability in mobility data is more crucial than ever. Due to a panoply of data sources, from traffic sensors to GPS data, mobility data is increasingly more complex in terms of volume, heterogeneity, availability and quality. To turn such complex data into shareable, meaningful data, interoperability approaches must be implemented, namely through the use of standards. The presented work, aims at developing an approach for transforming and harmonize, traffic related data acquired from highway sensor network, supported by an ITS reference data model (DATEX-II). CRISP-DM methodology is addressed here, as a methodology for guiding the developments of the proposed approach. The main challenge is to cope with a scalable big data- platform for traffic-related data collection, supporting an innovative dynamic toll-charging model in a real-world scenario. This work is supported by a European Commission-funded project, named OPTIMUM, and presents some preliminary results from data harmonization processes developed.

Data centers consist of various users with multiple roles and differentiated levels of access. Tenant execution flows can be of different priorities based on the role of the tenant and the nature of the process. Traditionally enterprise network optimizations are made at each specific layer, from the physical layer to the application layer. However, a cross-layer optimization of cloud networks would utilize the data available to each of the layers in a more efficient manner.This paper proposes an approach and architecture for differentiated quality of service (QoS). By employing a selective redundancy in a controlled manner, end-to-end delivery is guaranteed for priority tenant application flows despite congestion. The architecture, in a higher level, focuses on exploiting the global knowledge of the underlying network readily available to the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controller to cater the requirements of the tenant applications. QoS is guaranteed to the critical tenant flows in multi-tenant clouds by cross-layer enhancements across the network and application layers.

We create a program synthesis for searching optimal configurations in collaborative decision-making models. At the specification level, existing approaches do not consider both individual and business constraints to configure products in a cooperative manner. Usually, the combination of independent specifications is manually implemented into low level platforms, which limits the management of constraint-intensive decision processes. Our proposed model-driven collaboration system analyses multiple domain and preference models to help selecting goal-driven technological solutions. First, we extend an existing domain-specific language to specify multi-objective and constraint-based business rules. Next, we created model transformations to generate a program that can be executed into two different constraint-based platforms, which combine heterogeneous and highly expressive models. We apply our approach to find a goal-driven enterprise information system solution. The program synthesis analyzed in average 697 constraints across multiple specifications to avoid inconsistencies in manual configurations.

With the ever-changing dynamic Information and Communications Technology environment and the new shared deployment options for computing, a paradigm shift is occurring that enables ubiquitous and convenient computing on a pay-as-you-go basis in Cloud Computing. Access on demand is becoming available to networks of scalable, elastic, self-serviceable, configurable physical and virtual resources. In a companion pre-cloud-era focused IT and business front, there exists a parallel universe in the implementation of Open Electronic Data Interchange (Open-edi) services and processes based on agreed upon business scenarios between parties for the realization of interoperability and location transparency in context-specific implementations. This paper analyzes the on-going ISO work on Cloud Computing Interoperability and Portability and the existing Open-edi ISO standards, and offers a concept comparison using Fact Based Modeling (FBM) methodology.

This paper abstracts the modelling approaches and techniques used in modelling Dimensional Models in a BI data warehousing environment using FBM grammar to enable analysis and harmonization and assist information architects to bridge FBM concepts in Dimensional Modelling. The resulting FBM model allows us to distill the concepts, relationships and business rules, and in particular, create a graphic supported grammar to enable analysis and recognize the strengths and weakness of dimensional modelling.

In this paper we will present the results of research into the semantics of association end multiplicities (AEMs) in the Unified Modeling Language (UML). In this paper we will give a precise definition of the AEM concept in UML based upon the various definition ‘fragments’ we have encountered in the UML literature and we will give explicit rules for the application of the AEM for the conceptual modeling of an application subject area.

In this paper we discuss the pitfalls in the OO-paradigm for its application in conceptual analysis and subsequently its application in IS design. It is argued that there should exist a modeling procedure or methodology that guides the business domain analyst and the application designer on how to apply the OO modeling constructs in the different stages of the IS development life cycle.

To implement a customer-oriented approach for financing products, a financial organization has developed a conceptual model for it. The model identifies the basic components of a financing products and the relationships between these components. Instantiation of this conceptual model leads to specific products.The conceptual model is defined as generic as possible. It describes the playfield within which the products can be offered to customers, but it does not describe all the rules that apply as that is something to discover and to manipulate over time. For the latter, a rule configurator is under development that will provide the means to define and tailor the rules that apply before implementing them in the conceptual model as well as the final application. This rule configurator thereby provides end users the means to play with the conceptual model without having to learn a specific representation and the means to update a conceptual model in a for them intuitive manner.

In 2012 a co-creation has been established in The Netherlands involving government service providers, academia and innovative businesses to develop a durable architecture for services that are based on laws, decrees or regulations and the specification of a formal language to specify the formal requirements for regulation based services. The authors have been involved in the deliberations how to develop a durable architecture that can be used as a practical guideline in the various discussions how to improve the specification, the design, the production and delivery of regulation based services. It has been observed that the vast majority of these regulation based services are information-intensive and require a substantial IT effort. As regulations change fairly often, it is a requirement to reduce the traditional procedural complexity and introduce a more manageable declarative approach.

This paper describes the current state of the development of a formal Regulations Based Services Language that is understandable to various stakeholders, including legal experts, service experts and specification experts. This research and development work is the result of a co-creation that in 2012 has been established in The Netherlands involving government service providers, academia and innovative businesses to develop a durable architecture for services that are based on regulations. The authors have been involved in try outs of parts of the Regulations Based Services Language. The Regulations Based Services Language is primarily intended to be used as the language to express the durable specifications for the regulation based services. One of the requirements of the Regulations Based Services Language is use a declarative approach wherever possible. This Regulations Based Services Language is meant as a formal Controlled Natural Language (CNL).

There has been increasing complexity of cloud infrastructure to sustain the growth of enterprise applications and so as the need to constantly monitor loads and resource utilization. Numerous sophisticated techniques are applied to achieve a unified observation but disparate environments, sources and policies restrain the objective to be achieved using a standard methodology. The paper tries to present a model for standardizing the monitoring platform for applications which are highly environment aware and are restraint by governance using a novel algorithmic approach. The models tries to instrument APIs to monitor single to multitude of parameters to cover the transactions across geography. The model also covers a timeline for evolving big data analytic methods for application performance monitoring systems for environment based applications covering the high data rates and computation requirements. The concept of Data Lake brings a unique dimension to the model and resource utilization and performance metrics for varied workloads and also configuration complexities.

In this paper we are identifying enterprise interoperability as a possible framework for knowledge management in projects. In particular we are reflecting on research projects, involving small groups of companies and research institutions with heterogeneous backgrounds. The nature of research raises several issues due to the heterogeneous expertise of the project teams. This is in particular true when multiple (semi-formal) models are developed in parallel. In addition to the work evolving over time at the partner’s locations, the organisational contexts moved over time, often invisible to the rest of the teams. Interoperability barriers emerge between organisations and models. Enterprise Interoperability can be used to prepare the project teams, supporting the required work on interfaces between models.

With the introduction of Dev-ops, there has been lot of research on how to stabilize the cloud for better support and define the characteristics of the environments surrounding them. The hybrid cloud presents the challenge of creating a framework which can formalize build deployment activities with minimal errors. This paper will focus on delivering the concepts of a stable framework with ability to handle product landscapes for variable environments. We will also present the approach to realize the concept of standardization by defining rules for automated healing. Lifecycle of any deployment relies heavily on support and virtual environment performance along with developmental improvements. The framework would define the life cycle of the jobs and the parameters that affect the hardware level performance and intelligently provision resources for optimal usage.

Virtual Reality (VR) based simulation environments are becoming more widely used in the field of medical surgery. Typically, medical residents practice on cadavers or animals or observing a master surgeon perform surgery. The creation of VR based simulation environments holds the potential in improving the quality of training while decreasing the time needed for training. In this paper, the design and development of a Virtual Surgical Environment (VSE) is described which is used to train medical residents in an orthopedic surgery process known as LISS plating. A discussion of the overall system architecture along with an overview on the adoption of Next Generation Internet frameworks is provided. The results of the initial validation activities is discussed along with a brief outline of the process of designing and building the VSE.

E-health is a key factor in the E-society. E-health, in fact, enhances the efficiency and reduces the costs of the health services. In the diagnostic field, E-health can avail of several Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for instance, which often demonstrated a high classification accuracy. Although ANNs have already been applied for medical diagnosis, their influence on the Decision Making Process (DMP) has not been investigated in detail. Therefore, this paper focuses on the impact of ANNs on the DMP for a special kind of medical diagnosis called Spondylolisthesis and Disk Hernia. Through the Decision Model and Notation standard (DMN), the DMP is described, offering a model for possible health policies. In this way ANNs supported decision making for Spondylolisthesis and Disk Hernia diagnosis improve efficiency and quality of health service, especially in developing countries.

To come up with a semantic web application, it requires skills from two major backgrounds: (a) domain experts to model and populate a semantic knowledge base; and (b) application developers to understand the domain ontology and then build an interface for end users. Learning and using such tools is an overhead and slows down the development process. To address these problems, our paper proposes KSD - Knowledge Serializer and De-serializer tool, that takes an ontology as an input and represents it in a structured form (like JSON, XML) while preserving the underlying semantic information. This format is adaptable to the changes in the underlying ontology and can be used to create user interface, web services and other application modules.

Knowledge extraction from scientific documents plays an important role in the development of academic databases and services. We focus on the processing of abstracts to academic papers for the purposes of research data structuring that includes various subtasks, such as key phrase extraction and clustering. The use of abstracts is beneficial, because authors keep up with formal and stylistic requirements imposed by the publishers, and, therefore, informational and language patterns can be revealed. From our viewpoint, the existence of these patterns makes it possible to perform the cross-task application of techniques used for abstracts processing. The aim of the paper is to show it.

Aviation is a high risk industry where safety management is mandatory for organizations. On a global scale, safety management is hierarchical, i.e. national authorities manage safety of the sector, controlling organizations which in turn manage safety of their operations, as well as the safety of their organizational units. It is apparent that safety information management is a key factor to the success of safety management. Improving safety information management in aviation can be achieved by the systematic documentation of safety information and its seamless sharing vertically as well as horizontally through the management hierarchy. Despite attempts to tackle this problem, the industry still suffers from information management issues, e.g. usage of terminologically incompatible safety management frameworks. As a result diverse information repositories, e.g. investigation reports, safety recommendations, or audit reports managed by these frameworks, cannot be efficiently explored and compared. We apply Linked Data principles, e.g. searchability and explorability based on dataset descriptors, to help solving the problem. In this work we propose an ontology-based safety information management for the aviation industry. To achieve this we develop the Aviation Safety Ontology that is modular and covers the contexts of the organization types aerodrome, airline, air traffic management, maintenance and the state civil aviation authority. We test the appropriateness of the proposed ontology by representing safety data in terms of the ontology.

We present the architecture for a framework for semantic web-based service discovery, suitable for integration with relational data-base systems. Existing discovery algorithms often lead to poor results due to limitations of the service description used and lack of domain data. Our framework incorporates context aware service discovery vis a vis dynamic (run-time) update using relational (domain) data from a legacy system. A template for service ontologies is provided, so the user may represent their services and the interrelationships between them. The domain data is represented as an OWL-ontology. The systems takes information in the service and domain ontologies and performs rule based reasoning using rules articulating inter-service dependencies as well as dependencies between services and domain data. An aggregation over service quality properties allows the aggregated selection of the best-suited services. The framework is implemented as a web application following the Service Oriented Architecture; extensive testing shows that the system is robust. Features of the framework are illustrated using a detailed case study for the health-care domain.

Óbuda University wanted to build a linked dataset describing their courses in the semester. The concepts to be covered included curricula, subjects, courses, semesters and educators. A particular use case needed the description of lecture rooms and events as well. Although there are several ontologies for the mentioned domains, selecting a set of ontologies fitting our use case was not an easy task. After realizing the problems, we created the Ontology for Linked Open University Data (OLOUD) to fill in the gaps between re-used ontologies. OLOUD acts as a glue for a selection of existing ontologies, and thus enables us to integrate data from several sources and to provide practical information services for students and lecturers.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is emerging as the Web of Data, providing information on various domains. A vast number of scientific documents such as books, articles and journals can be found through many publisher’s websites, portals and XML exports. The challenge here is that the data about these scientific documents can not be explored collectively, as they are published as a bounded group of sources organized by different publishers. To address these limitations, we have developed a generic framework termed as Linked Open Publications Data Framework (LOPDF) that facilitates crawling, processing, extracting and producing machine-processable data that is open and linked to other open datasets. We also demonstrate the RDF datasets produced by using LOPDF framework and describe statistics of different datasets entities.

Developing Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for mobile applications is a difficult task. Modern applications frequently need to interact with humans that use several devices with different characteristics (such as screen size or operating system). Any application that creates a specific GUI (surely designed for a certain device family) is likely to be rendered and/or behave incorrectly on many other user devices. Moreover, user interactions also need to be adapted to the preferences of each specific user and be learned from user context. The above challenges delegate every single application to have multiple versions of its GUI to be correctly executed on every possible device and operating system combination, in addition to consider user preferences and context.In this paper, we propose an architecture based on mobile agents for developing adaptive user interfaces for multiple devices and applications. This architecture makes it possible to further separate GUIs from their underlying logic, allowing GUIs to be specified once and automatically be adapted to different platforms and user preferences without further development. Moreover, our architecture enables GUIs to be composed in a collaborative way by multiple agents and across different devices by automatically adapting them to each device capabilities and user preferences. Thus every application developer is relieved of considering these issues.

Teaching distributed systems means to force the understanding of complexity and heterogeneity from different perspectives. The wide spectrum of legacy techniques and standards as well as up-to-date technology and future ideas is quite challenging. Learning science promises that personal experiences result in a deeper knowledge of problems and solutions in the field of distributed systems. For that we design a show case, managing a relay run (marathon) using android smartphones as relay batons and a web based infrastructure for data management. Whereas the system represents a quite small example it shows different problems, e.g., sensor data, energy management or evolution of smartphone operating systems or software development tools. Being part of the project, e.g. producing the tracking data as runner with an smartphone, students see the impact of own development steps made before. Also they can analyze their own sensor data after a run. Thus they are able to transfer this knowledge to integration or development projects in real enterprise scenarios.

The increasing amount and interconnection of smart devices holds a high potential for complex collaborations. Smart computing environments will heavily rely on the collaboration of multiple of such systems but they also become more decentralized and volatile. Such collaborations cannot be managed centrally anymore as they emerge and disappear dynamically. The key challenges of such systems are specification of complex collaborations as well as decentralized discovery, composition and subsequent adaptation. We introduce the term Pervasive Collaboration which captures complex collaborations at run time as a dynamic set of distributed, loosely coupled, on-demand collaborating systems in decentralized environments. The concept of roles, which aims for loose coupling of abstract functionality and its actual performance, is utilized to ease both composition and reconfiguration of Pervasive Collaborations. We propose a middleware architecture for distributed adaptive role-based software systems which provides a decentralized discovery mechanism, on-demand composition and subsequent adaptation. We will evaluate our concept based on several case studies and failure scenarios as well as in terms of limitations, scalability and trade-off.

SemNOTAM is a knowledge and rule-based semantic filter system for safety and time critical announcements of temporary changes to flight conditions (NOTAMs). The relevance and importance of NOTAMs to a specific situation is determined by business rules (BRs). In SemNOTAM, many BRs apply across several situations and thus can be collected into super-situations. To support an incremental BR elicitation process, required by their number, and later maintenance of BRs, an adequate BR management system is vital. However, current systems provide mostly simple organisation techniques insufficient for SemNOTAM.Many research fields, e.g., library information science, manage large information bases by utilising problem-specific contexts. These contexts may be hierarchically structured. Similarly, we propose aviation-specific contexts to manage BRs and their associated business vocabularies in SemNOTAM. To implement the proposed management system we employ design science. In this paper we present the method, preliminary results, and the evaluation planned to this end.

Nowadays, our daily live concerns the usage of Information Technology, increasingly. As a result, a huge amount of data has to be processed which is outsourced from local devices to data centers. Due to fluctuating demands these are not fully utilized all the time and consume a significant amount of energy while idling. A common approach to avoid unnecessary idle times is to consolidate running services on a subset of machines and switch off the remaining ones. Unfortunately, the services on a single machine interfere with each other due to the competition for shared resources such as caches after the consolidation, which leads to a degradation of performance. Hence, data centers have to trade off between reducing the energy consumption and certain performance criteria defined in the Service Level Agreement. In order to make the trade off in advance, it is necessary to characterize services and quantify the impact to each other after a potential consolidation. Our approach is to use random variables for characterization, which includes the fluctuations of the resource consumptions. Furthermore, we would like to model the interference of services to provide a probability of exceeding a certain performance criterion.

An increasing attention to Business Process Orientation (BPO) brings new challenges in terms of how to motivate employees to become more process-minded and to perform better in order to enjoy full benefit of business processes. Appraisals and rewards have been proven to be powerful techniques in influencing employee behavior and performance in the human resource management (HRM) literature. Hence, new opportunities arise for researching what can make appraisals and rewards more process-oriented. This paper will address such opportunities by conducting an explorative and interdisciplinary study on how to motivate employee performance and behavior in process-oriented organizations. With the help of case studies and a Delphi study, we intend to develop and evaluate a process-oriented appraisals and rewards framework with guidelines.