Showing papers by "Munindar P. Singh published in 2012"

Specifying and Verifying Cross-Organizational Business Models: An Agent-Oriented Approach

Abstract: Cross-organizational business processes are routine in today's economy. Of necessity, enterprises conduct their business in cooperation to create products and services for the marketplace. Thus business processes inherently involve autonomous partners with heterogeneous software designs and implementations. Therefore, it would be natural to model such processes via high-level abstractions that reflect the contractual relationships among the business partners. Yet, in today's IT practice, cross-organizational processes are modeled at a low level of abstraction in terms of the control and data flow among the participants. This paper makes the following contributions. First, it proposes a simple, yet expressive, declarative way to specify business models at a high level based on the notion of commitments. Second, it shows how such a high-level model maps to a conventional operational model. Third, it provides a basis for verifying the correctness of the operational representations with respect to the declarative business model using existing temporal model checking tools. This paper validates the above claims using the well-known Quote To Cash business process, e.g., as supported by vendors such as SAP and applied in large enterprises. In this manner, this paper helps bridge the gap between high-level business models and their IT realizations.

Argument Schemes for Reasoning about Trust.

Abstract: Trust is a natural mechanism by which an autonomous party, an agent, can deal with the inherent uncertainty regarding the behaviors of other parties and the uncertainty in the information it shares with those parties. Trust is thus crucial in any decentralized system. This paper builds on recent efforts to use argumentation to reason about trust. Specifically, a set of schemes is provided, abstract patterns of reasoning that apply in multiple situations, geared toward trust. Schemes are described in which one agent, A, can establish arguments for trusting another agent, B, directly, as well as schemes that A can use to construct arguments for trusting C, where C is trusted by B. For both sets of schemes, a set of critical questions is offered that identify the situations in which these schemes can fail.

Mining Business Contracts for Service Exceptions

Abstract: A contract is a legally binding agreement between real-world business entities whom we treat as providing services to one another. We focus on business rather than technical services. We think of a business contract as specifying the functional and nonfunctional behaviors of and interactions among the services. In current practice, contracts are produced as text documents. Thus the relevant service capabilities, requirements, qualities, and risks are hidden and difficult to access and reason about. We describe a simple but effective unsupervised information extraction approach and tool, Contract Miner, for discovering service exceptions at the phrase level from a large contract repository. Our approach involves preprocessing followed by an application of linguistic patterns and parsing to extract the service exception phrases. Identifying such (noun) phrases can help build service exception vocabularies that support the development of a taxonomy of business terms, and also facilitate modeling and analyzing service engagements. A lightweight online tool that comes with Contract Miner highlights the relevant text in service contracts and thereby assists users in reviewing contracts. Contract Miner produces promising results in terms of precision and recall when evaluated over a corpus of manually annotated contracts.

A Review of Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract: Wireless sensor network (WSN) has emerged as a useful supplement to the modern wireless communication networks. Optimal selection of paths for data transfer results in saving of energy consumption resulting in increase of network lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks. Many routing, power management, and data dissemination protocols have been specifically designed for WSNs where energy awareness is an essential design issue. Routing protocols in WSNs might differ depending on the application and network architecture as there is still no consensus on a fixed communication stack for WSN. Newer Routing protocols are required to cater to the need of ubiquitous and pervasive computing. In this paper, WSN Routing Protocols has been classified in four ways i.e., routing paths establishment, network structure, protocol operation and initiator of communications. Further, routing protocols have been categorized on the basis of their homogeneity and heterogeneity of sensor nodes followed by the criteria of clustered and non clustered among both. Data aggregation, support for query and scalability of the network of these routing protocols have also been.

Comma: a commitment-based business modeling methodology and its empirical evaluation

Abstract: We introduce Comma, a methodology for developing cross-organizational business models. Comma gives prime position to patterns of business relationships understood in terms of commitments. In this manner, it contrasts with traditional operational approaches such as RosettaNet that are commonly used in industry.We report the results of a developer study comparing Comma with a methodology recommended by the RosettaNet Consortium. Ours is one of the only evaluations of an agent-oriented methodology that (1) involves developers other than the proposing researchers and (2) compares against a traditional nonagent approach.We found that Comma yields improved model quality, a greater focus in relative effort on the more important aspects of modeling, and a general reduction in total time despite yielding more comprehensive models. Certain anomalies in effort expended point toward the need for improved tooling.

Semantics and verification of information-based protocols

Abstract: Information-Based Interaction-Oriented Programming, specifically as epitomized by the Blindingly Simple Protocol Language (BSPL), is a promising new approach for declaratively expressing multiagent protocols. BSPL eschews traditional control flow operators and instead emphasizes causality and integrity based solely on the information models of the messages exchanged. BSPL has been shown to support a rich variety of practical protocols and can be realized in a distributed asynchronous architecture wherein the agents participating in a protocol act based on local knowledge alone. The flexibility and generality of BSPL mean that it needs a strong formal semantics to ensure correctness as well as automated tools to help develop protocol specifications.We provide a formal semantics for BSPL and formulate important technical properties, namely, enactability, safety, and liveness. We further describe our declarative implementation of the BSPL semantics as well as of verifiers for the above properties using a temporal reasoner. We have validated our implementation by verifying the correctness of several protocols of practical interest.

Behind the Curtain: Service Selection via Trust in Composite Services

Abstract: Service selection, where some of the services are accessed indirectly as constituents of composite services, is difficult for the following reasons: (1) the interpretation of service qualities is subjective; (2) evidence must be combined from multiple sources; (3) service profiles change dynamically; and (4) constituent services may be only partially observable behind composite services. We propose an approach where we map service qualities to a common probabilistic trust metric. Whereas current trust approaches estimate the trustworthiness of a composite service based on a fully observable and static setting, we propose a statistical approach built on expectation maximized over a finite mixture model. Our experiments show that our approach can dynamically punish or reward the constituents of composite services while making only partial observations.

Platys Social: Relating Shared Places and Private Social Circles

Abstract: Social circles can be valuable in online applications, but existing approaches don't readily support such grouping: they either require a user to manually tag connections or offer no more than broad-brush acquaintanceship between connections. Platys Social is a novel approach that learns users' social circles and prioritizes their connections by bringing together contextual information and user interactions. Platys Social runs incrementally, can execute on a resource-limited mobile device, and can potentially avoid storing users' private information on a remote site.

Towards argumentation with symbolic dempster-shafer evidence

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the combination of argumentation with the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. In particular, we show how logical elements of evidence, associated with numerical degrees of belief, can be combined into arguments.

Koko: an architecture for affect-aware games

Abstract: The importance of affect in delivering engaging experiences in entertainment and educational games is well recognized. Yet, current techniques for building affect-aware games are limited, with the maintenance and use of affect in essence being handcrafted for each game. The Koko architecture describes a service-oriented middleware that reduces the burden of incorporating affect recognition into games, thereby enabling developers to concentrate on the functional and creative aspects of their applications. The Koko architecture makes three key contributions: (1) improving developer productivity by creating a reusable and extensible environment; (2) yielding an enhanced user experience by enabling independently developed games and other applications to collaborate and provide a more coherent user experience than currently possible; (3) enabling affective communication in multiplayer and social games. Further, Koko is intended to be used as an extension of existing game architectures. We recognize that complex games require additional third party libraries, such as game engines. To enable the required flexibility we define the interfaces of the Koko architecture in a formal manner, thereby enabling the implementation of those interfaces to readily adapt to the unique requirements of game's other architectural components and requirements.

Generalized framework for personalized recommendations in agent networks

Abstract: An agent network can be modeled as a directed weighted graph whose vertices represent agents and edges represent a trust relationship between the agents. This article proposes a new recommendation approach, dubbed LocPat, which can recommend trustworthy agents to a requester in an agent network. We relate the recommendation problem to the graph similarity problem, and define the similarity measurement as a mutually reinforcing relation. We understand an agent as querying an agent network to which it belongs to generate personalized recommendations. We formulate a query into an agent network as a structure graph applied in a personalized manner that reflects the pattern of relationships centered on the requesting agent. We use this pattern as a basis for recommending an agent or object (a vertex in the graph). By calculating the vertex similarity between the agent network and a structure graph, we can produce a recommendation based on similarity scores that reflect both the link structure and the trust values on the edges. Our resulting approach is generic in that it can capture existing network-based approaches merely through the introduction of appropriate structure graphs. We evaluate different structure graphs with respect to two main kinds of settings, namely, social networks and ratings networks. Our experimental results show that our approach provides personalized and flexible recommendations effectively and efficiently based on local information.

Agent-based organisational governance of services

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. Succeeding with SOC in this broader sense presupposes that additional techniques be developed for ensuring desired quality of service metrics and service-level agreements. The crucial aspect of using services is thus their governance. In this paper, we describe a conceptual modelling approach that integrates organisational and coordination theories to achieve contextualised service governance. The approach allows for the development and analysis of dynamic, flexible, and robust service-oriented business applications.

IP based services

Abstract: Internet protocol (IP) is emerging as a ubiquitous protocol for communications and applications. IP-based services aims to provide consumers anytime-anywhere access to content over range of electronic devices and to integrate services & content, to tie them together. This paper presents an overview of various network architectures and their evolution to include an all IP based infrastructure fuelled by the introduction of the IMS which is capable of providing IP based multimedia services and backward integration with earlier networks. Two common IP based services i.e. IPTV and IP telephones has been discussed in context of the recent developments surrounding them, their advantages over traditional services have been highlighted. This paper concludes by discussing issues that must be resolved before these services are available commercially.

Protos: a cross-organizational business modeling tool (demonstration)

Abstract: Traditional approaches to cross-organizational business modeling use low-level abstractions such as data and control flow. These approaches result in rigid models that over-constrain business execution. Further, because such approaches ignore the underlying business relationships that drive process execution, they lack the notion of business level correctness.Telang and Singh [5] propose a high-level business modeling approach based upon (social) commitments to address these short-comings. The high-level model captures the business relationships in terms of commitments between the participants. Telang and Singh [5] develop a method for verifying if a low-level interaction model satisfies a high-level business model. They propose a top-down methodology in which a Business analyst first develops a high-level business model. An IT analyst then develops UML 2.0 sequence diagrams, and verifies if they satisfy the high-level model.Protos is an Eclipse-based tool that implements Telang and Singh's [5] methodology. It enables: (a) the development of a high-level business model using reusable patterns, (b) the development of UML 2.0 sequence diagrams, as a low-level operational representation, and (c) the automated verification of the UML 2.0 sequence diagrams with respect to the high-level business model.

Energy Band Based Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: Clustering is one of the widely used techniques to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks in environments where battery replacement of individual sensor nodes is not an option after their deployment. However, clustering overheads such as cluster formation, its size, cluster head selection & rotation, directly affects the lifetime of WSN. This paper introduces and analyzes a new Single Hop Energy Band Based clustering protocol (EBBCP) which tries to minimize the above said overheads resulting in a prolonged life for the WSN. EBBCP works on static clusters formed on the basis of energy band in the setup phase. The protocol reduces per round overhead of cluster formation which has been proved by the simulation result in MATLAB. The paper contains an in-depth analysis of the results obtained during simulation and compares EBBCP with LEACH. Unlike LEACH, EBBCP achieves evenly distributed Cluster Head throughout the target area. This protocol also produces evenly distributed dead nodes. EEBCP beats LEACH in total data packet received and produces better network life time. EBBCP uses the concept of grid node to eliminate the need of position finding system like GPS to estimating the transmission signal strength.

Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering: Concepts and Principles

Abstract: Following established tradition, software engineering today is rooted in a conceptually centralized way of thinking. The primary SE artifact is a specification of a machine -- a computational artifact -- that would meet the (elicited and) stated requirements. Therein lies a fundamental mismatch with (open) sociotechnical systems, which involve multiple autonomous social participants or principals who interact with each other to further their individual goals. No central machine governs the behaviors of the various principals. We introduce Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering (IOSE) as an approach expressly suited to the needs of open sociotechnical systems. In IOSE, specifying a system amounts to specifying the interactions among the principals as protocols. IOSE reinterprets the classical software engineering principles of modularity, abstraction, separation of concerns, and encapsulation in a manner that accords with the realities of sociotechnical systems. To highlight the novelty of IOSE, we show where well-known SE methodologies, especially those that explicitly aim to address either sociotechnical systems or the modeling of interactions among autonomous principals, fail to satisfy the IOSE principles.

Collaborative assessment of functional reliability in wireless networks

Abstract: Nodes that are part of a multihop wireless network, typically deployed in mission critical settings, are expected to perform specific functions. Establishing a notion of reliability of the nodes with respect to each function (referred to as functional reliability or FR) is essential for efficient operations and management of the network. This is typically assessed based on evidence collected by nodes with regards to other nodes in the network. However, such evidence is often affected by factors such as channel induced effects and interference. In multihop contexts, unreliable intermediary relays may also influence evidence. We design a framework for collaborative assessment of the FR of nodes, with respect to different types of functions; our framework accounts for the above factors that influence evidence collection. Each node (say Chloe) in the network derives the FR of other nodes (say Jack) based on two types of evidence: (i) direct evidence, based on her direct transactions with each such node and (ii) indirect evidence, based on feedback received regarding Jack from others. Our framework is generic and is applicable in a variety of contexts. We also design a module that drastically reduces the overhead incurred in the propagation of indirect evidence at the expense of slightly increased uncertainty in the assessed FR values. We implement our framework on an indoor/outdoor wireless testbed. We show that with our framework, each node is able to determine the FR for every other node in the network with high accuracy. Our indirect evidence propagation module decreases the overhead by 37% compared to a simple flooding based evidence propagation, while the accuracy of the FR computations is decreased only by 8%. Finally, we examine the effect of different routing protocols on the accuracy of the assessed values.