Showing papers by "Munindar P. Singh published in 2010"

Service-Oriented Computing: Semantics, Processes, Agents

Abstract: About the Authors.Preface.Note to the Reader.Acknowledgments.Figures.Tables.Listings.I Basics.1. Computing with Services.2. Basic Standards for Web Services.3. Programming Web Services.4. Enterprise Architectures.5. Principles of Service-Oriented Computing.II Description.6. Modeling and Representation.7. Resource Description Framework.8. Web Ontology Language.9. Ontology Management.III Engagement.10. Execution Models.11. Transaction Concepts.12. Coordination Frameworks for Web Services.13. Process Specifications.14. Formal Specification and Enactment.IV Collaboration.15. Agents.16. Multiagent Systems.17. Organizations.18. Communication.V Solutions.19. Semantic Service Solutions.20. Social Service Selection.21. Economic Service Selection.VI Engineering.22. Building SOC Applications.23. Service Management.24. Security.VII Directions.25. Challenge and Extensions.VIII Appendices.Appendix A: XML and XML Schema.Appendix B: URI, URN, URL and UUID.Appendix C: XML Namespace Abbreviations.Glossary.About the Authors.Bibliography.Index.

Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks - A Survey

Abstract: Advances in wireless sensor network (WSN) technology has provided the availability of small and low-cost sensor nodes with capability of sensing various types of physical and environmental conditions, data processing, and wireless communication. Variety of sensing capabilities results in profusion of application areas. However, the characteristics of wireless sensor networks require more effective methods for data forwarding and processing. In WSN, the sensor nodes have a limited transmission range, and their processing and storage capabilities as well as their energy resources are also limited. Routing protocols for wireless sensor networks are responsible for maintaining the routes in the network and have to ensure reliable multi-hop communication under these conditions. In this paper, we give a survey of routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Network and compare their strengths and limitations.

Evidence-based trust: A mathematical model geared for multiagent systems

Abstract: An evidence-based account of trust is essential for an appropriate treatment of application-level interactions among autonomous and adaptive parties. Key examples include social networks and service-oriented computing. Existing approaches either ignore evidence or only partially address the twin challenges of mapping evidence to trustworthiness and combining trust reports from imperfectly trusted sources. This article develops a mathematically well-formulated approach that naturally supports discounting and combining evidence-based trust reports.This article understands an agent Alice's trust in an agent Bob in terms of Alice's certainty in her belief that Bob is trustworthy. Unlike previous approaches, this article formulates certainty in terms of evidence based on a statistical measure defined over a probability distribution of the probability of positive outcomes. This definition supports important mathematical properties ensuring correct results despite conflicting evidence: (1) for a fixed amount of evidence, certainty increases as conflict in the evidence decreases and (2) for a fixed level of conflict, certainty increases as the amount of evidence increases. Moreover, despite a subtle definition of certainty, this work (3) establishes a bijection between evidence and trust spaces, enabling robust combination of trust reports and (4) provides an efficient algorithm for computing this bijection.

From Quality to Utility: Adaptive Service Selection Framework

Abstract: We consider an approach to service selection wherein service consumers choose services with desired nonfunctional properties to maximize their utility. A consumer’s utility from using a service clearly depends upon the qualities offered by the service. Many existing service selection approaches support agents estimating trustworthiness of services based on their quality of service. However, existing approaches do not emphasize the relationship between a consumer’s interests and the utility the consumer draws from a service. Further, they do not properly support consumers being able to compose services with desired quality (and utility) profiles.

Internet predictions [Guest editor's introduction]

Abstract: More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future.

Abstracting and Applying Business Modeling Patterns from RosettaNet

Abstract: RosettaNet is a leading industry effort that creates standards for business interactions among the participants in a supply chain. The RosettaNet standard defines over 100 Partner Interface Processes (PIPs) through which the participants can exchange business documents necessary to enact a supply chain. However, each PIP specifies the business interactions at a syntactic level, but fails to capture the business meaning of the interactions to which they apply.

Analyzing contract robustness through a model of commitments

Abstract: We address one of the challenges in developing solutions based on multiagent systems for the problems of cross-organizational business processes and commerce generally. Specifically, we study how to gather and analyze requirements embodied within business contracts using the abstractions from multiagent systems. Commerce is driven by business contracts. Each party to a business contract must be assured that the contract is robust, in the sense that it fulfills its goals and avoids undesirable outcomes. However, real-life business contracts tend to be complex and unamenable both to manual scrutiny and domain-independent scientific methods, making it difficult to provide automated support for determining or improving their robustness. As a result, establishing a contract is nontrivial and adds significantly to the transaction costs of conducting business. If the adoption of multiagent systems approaches in supporting business interactions is to be viable, we need to develop appropriate techniques to enable tools to reason about contracts in relation to their robustness. To this end, we propose a powerful approach to assessing the robustness of contracts, and make two main contributions. First, we demonstrate a novel conceptual model for contracts that is based on commitments. Second, we offer a methodology for (i) creating commitment-based models of contracts from textual descriptions, and (ii) evaluating the contract models for robustness. We validate these contributions via a study of real-world contracts.

Evaluation of open-pollinated varieties and hybrids of cucumber for off-season production under naturally ventilated polyhouse

Abstract: Genetic variability, heritability in broad sense and expected genetic advance of fruit yield and twelve other characters were studied in eleven open pollinated varieties/hybrids of cucumber. Significant differences among the genotypes were observed for all the characters except internodal length. Phenotypic coefficient of variation and genotypic coefficient of variation were found high for number of fruits per plant. Highest heritability in broad sense was recorded for number of fruits per plant and number of nodes on main shoot. High heritability coupled with high genetic advance as per cent of mean was observed for yield and number of primary branches per plant which indicated that these characters are more reliable for effective selection.

Requirements as Goals and Commitments Too

Abstract: In traditional software engineering research and practice, requirements are classified either as functional or non-functional. Functional requirements consist of all functions the system-to-be ought to support, and have been modeled in terms of box-and-arrow diagrams in the spirit of SADT. Non-functional requirements include desired software qualities for the system-to-be and have been described either in natural language or in terms of metrics. This orthodoxy was challenged in the mid-90 s by a host of proposals that had a common theme: all requirements are initially stakeholder goals and ought to be elicited, modeled and analyzed as such. Through systematic processes, these goals can be refined into specifications of functions the system-to-be needs to deliver, while actions assigned to external actors need to be executed. This view is dominating Requirements Engineering (RE) research and is beginning to have an impact on RE practice. We propose a next step along this line of research, by adopting the concept of conditional commitment as companion concept to that of goal. Goals are intentional entities that capture the needs and wants of stakeholders. Commitments, on the other hand, are social concepts that define the willingness and capability of an actor A to fulfill a predicate ϕ for the benefit of actor B, provided B (in return) fulfills predicate ψ for the benefit of actor A. In our conceptualization, goals are mapped to collections of commitments rather than functions, qualities, or actor assignments. We motivate the importance of the concept of commitment for RE through examples and discussion. We also contrast our proposal with state-of-the-art requirements modeling and analysis frameworks, such as KAOS, MAP, i * and Tropos.

Incorporating Expectations as a Basis for Business Service Selection

Abstract: The collaborative creation of value is the central tenet of services science. In particular, then, the quality of a service encounter would depend on the mutual expectations of the participants. Specifically, the quality of experience that a consumer derives from a service encounter would depend on how the consumer’s expectations are refined and how well they are met by the provider during the encounter. We postulate that incorporating expectations ought therefore be a crucial element of business service selection.

Trust and reputation in multiagent systems: strategies and dynamics with reference to electronic commerce

Abstract: In multiagent interactions, such as e-commerce and peer-to-peer file sharing, being able to accurately assess the trustworthiness of other agents is important for agents to protect themselves from losing utility. We focus on an agent’s discount factor (time preference of utility) as a direct measure of the agent’s trustworthiness in a number of settings. We prove that an agent’s discount factor, when in context of the agent’s valuations and capabilities, is isomorphic to its trustworthiness for a set of reasonably general assumptions and definitions. Further, we propose a general list of desiderata for trust systems and show how discount factors as trustworthiness meet these desiderata. We also show how discount factors are a robust measure of trustworthiness when entering commitments with adverse selection and moral hazards. When agents can significantly increase each other’s utility at a moderate cost, the socially optimal outcome is for the agents to provide favors to each other. However, when agents cannot support or enforce a market system, the favor environment forms a situation similar to the repeated prisoner’s dilemma because each agent can unilaterally improve its utility by refusing to help others. We present an adaptive tit-for-tat strategy that provides a mutually beneficial equilibrium when agents may have differing private discount factors and when favor costs and benefits are stochastic and asymmetric. This strategy enables agents to treat previously unencountered agents with caution, communicate about the trustworthiness of other agents, and evaluate past communication for deception. We discuss the details of our simulation results and the impact of various parameterizations and communication. Building from the favor model, we examine more complex transactions with private discount factors as a model for trustworthiness. We closely examine the case of simultaneous favors, which comprise a single market transaction where two parties perform an exchange. Further, we investigate more complex market models, where agents directly compete on price and quality. We derive a number of methods that agents can use to obtain and aggregate information of other agents’ discount factors and valuations. Despite the large body of work in reputation and trust in dynamic multiagent environments, no metrics exist to directly and quantitatively evaluate and compare reputation systems. We present a common conceptual interface for reputation systems and a set of four measurable desiderata, inspired by dynamical systems theory, that are broadly applicable across multiple domains. We discuss the implications, strengths, and limitations of our desiderata. Our discount factor as trustworthiness model performs well across the desiderata when measured against other established reputation models from the literature. We apply our desiderata to empirically evaluate the Amazon reputation mechanism in terms of actual ratings data obtained by sellers on Amazon’s marketplace.

Multidisciplinary Views of Business Contracts

Abstract: Several major trends in the services industry drive toward an increasing importance of contracts. These include the formalization of business processes across the client and the provider organizations; resource administration in cloud computing environments; service-level agreements as they arise in infrastructure and networking services; and services viewed from the perspective of real-life engagements.

Governance of Services: A Natural Function for Agents (extended abstract)

Abstract: The objective of service-oriented computing (SOC) is to construct software applications out of appropriate services available and executing in place anywhere across the Web. To achieve this objective requires that techniques for discovering and engaging services be developed and used across the lifetime of the service-based applications. Doing this well requires that additional techniques be developed for ensuring desired quality of service metrics and servicelevel agreements. The crucial aspect of using services is thus their governance.

Governance of services: a natural function for agents

Abstract: The objective of service-oriented computing (SOC) is to construct software applications out of appropriate services available and executing in place anywhere across the Web. To achieve this objective requires that techniques for discovering and engaging services be developed and used across the lifetime of the service-based applications. Doing this well requires that additional techniques be developed for ensuring desired quality of service metrics and servicelevel agreements. The crucial aspect of using services is thus their governance.