Web service discovery among large service pools utilising semantic similarity and clustering

With the rapid development of electronic business, Web services have attracted much attention in recent years. Enterprises can combine individual Web services to provide new value-added services. An emerging challenge is the timely discovery of close matches to service requests among large service pools. In this study, we first define a new semantic similarity measure combining functional similarity and process similarity. We then present a service discovery mechanism that utilises the new semantic similarity measure for service matching. All the published Web services are pre-grouped into functional clusters prior to the matching process. For a user’s service request, the discovery mechanism first identifies matching services clusters and then identifies the best matching Web services within these matching clusters. Experimental results show that the proposed semantic discovery mechanism performs better than a conventional lexical similarity-based mechanism.     

A service governance mechanism based on process mining for cloud-based applications

ABSTRACT

With the widely use of cloud computing in enterprise information systems, service governance becomes critical for an enterprise to adapt to a changing business environment. In order to provide a dynamic strategy for continuous service governance, in this paper a comprehensive service analysis solution is proposed to address both design time and run-time requirements for cloud applications. First, a process-centric Semantic Scene Model is composed to combines static business requirements with dynamic execution information. Then service analysis is conducted referring both to the business process mining results from event logs and the Semantic Scene Model given by business model designers. Service governance strategies are generated from the service analysis results and are performed to qualitatively classify the Quality of Service (QoS) of the services. Finally the approach is verified with a transportation logistics service application in a cloud platform. The result shows that our method can get continuous service governance through combining business processes with run-time service analysis.     

Advanced manufacturing systems: supply–demand matching of manufacturing resource based on complex networks and Internet of Things

ABSTRACT

After investigation on the existing advanced manufacturing systems (AMSs), it is found that supply–demand matching of manufacturing resource is one of the common issues to be addressed in all AMSs, and methods for addressing this issue have evolved from P2P (peer-to-peer)-based, to information centre-based, and to platform (or system)-based matching, and are moving towards socialisation and service-based solutions. In order to adapt to this trend, a new method for manufacturing resource supply–demand matching based on complex networks and Internet of Things (IoT) is proposed, and a four-layered architecture for implementing this method is designed. In this method, IoT technology is employed to realise the intelligent perception and accessing of various manufacturing resources and capabilities (MR&C), which enables logical aggregation of various distributed MR&C in the form of services. Then complex networks model and theory are used to realise the efficient manufacturing service management, optimal-allocation, and supply–demand matching. In this article, the specific key technologies for implementing the method are presented, including key technologies for manufacturing service generation and aggregation, manufacturing demand/task management, supply–demand matching of MR&C in the form of services, and value/utility adding based on manufacturing service network (MSN), manufacturing task network (MTN) and manufacturing enterprises collaborative network (ECN).     

Operationalizing Co-Production in Public Services Delivery: The contribution of service blueprinting

Abstract

We have argued for public services to move away from product-dominant logic towards a service approach. By taking a services orientation, the experience, inter-organizational, and systemic nature of public services delivery can be considered along with the role of the service user as a co-producer. In this article, we unpack how co-production can be operationalized through the application of service blueprinting. This article presents an example within higher education where the creation of a blueprint brought together staff and students to focus on the design of student enrolment, resulting in improved student experience and supporting co-production.     

Towards factories of the future: migration of industrial legacy automation systems in the cloud computing and Internet-of-things context

ABSTRACT

The vision of factories-of-the-future is motivating many industrial companies to modernise their existing portfolio of systems and services to maintain market share and improve business agility. For long-lived industrial systems, it is challenging to adapt legacy assets to a service-oriented stream in cloud computing and Internet-of-things contexts. For this reason, many research studies have proposed techniques and methodologies to migrate legacy industrial functions and systems at different hierarchy levels of automation control. This paper presents an overview of these techniques and methodologies, as well as industry practices to achieve the vision of factories of the future. Better understanding the challenges encountered in legacy migration processes will help researchers and practitioners in their further efforts.     

Applications integration in a hybrid cloud computing environment: modelling and platform

With the development of application services providers and cloud computing, more and more small- and medium-sized business enterprises use software services and even infrastructure services provided by professional information service companies to replace all or part of their information systems (ISs). These information service companies provide applications, such as data storage, computing processes, document sharing and even management information system services as public resources to support the business process management of their customers. However, no cloud computing service vendor can satisfy the full functional IS requirements of an enterprise. As a result, enterprises often have to simultaneously use systems distributed in different clouds and their intra enterprise ISs. Thus, this article presents a framework to integrate applications deployed in public clouds and intra ISs. A run-time platform is developed and a cross-computing environment process modelling technique is also developed to improve the feasibility of ISs under hybrid cloud computing environments.     

Modelling of combinable relationship-based composition service network and the theoretical proof of its scale-free characteristics

Existing works on service composition are primarily based on the requirements of service composition, such as describing language supporting service composition, service composition framework, mechanism and method for service composition, and service composition validation. Few works have been carried out from the perspective of combinable relationship among composite services and composition service network. This article emphasises on combinable relationship-based composition service network, i.e. CoRCS-Net. The principles for establishing and modelling CoRCS-Net were studied, and nine combinable relationships among services in CoRCS-Net were investigated and 14 elementary evolving operators for CoRCS-Net dynamic evolution were designed. According to the definition of scale-free network (SFN) and the investigations on its related research achievements, it is supposed that ‘CoRCS-Net is a scale-free network’ in this study. In order to prove the theoretical hypothesis, the concepts of combinable strength and variation of combinable strength were introduced, and combinable strength is used to describe the invoking times of a service being invoked for service composition. First we calculate the real time variation of combinable strength of an arbitrary service in CoRCS-Net, and then obtain the corresponding real time combinable strength and investigate its distribution for all services in CoRCS-Net. It is discovered that ‘like many nature and social phenomenon, CoRCS-Net is “scale-free”, and it is constructed by few “active services” and a great deal of “silent services”. In the process of service composition, the invoking times for majority services are very small, while only few services are invoked frequently, and the probability (or invoking times) for the services in a CoRCS-Net to be invoked for service composition decays as a power-law’.     

A structural compendium on service quality and customer satisfaction: A survey of banks in India

ABSTRACT

The core aim of the research is to measure and analyze the quality of services offered by the top three public- and private-sector banks in India and to attempt to know how bank services quality affects customer satisfaction. By administering both questionnaires and personal interviews, researchers garnered the opinions of a total of 600 respondents with BANKQUAL statement. The authors applied Cronbach’s alpha to test reliability and the selected hypotheses have been proven with Chi-square tests and t-tests. All the public-sector banks chosen for the study lead in the satisfaction index over the private-sector banks by demonstrating differences in the dimensions of credibility, influence, and geographic spread. The research is most precious to diverse stakeholders of the Indian banking industry, particularly to banks who want to know about their existing service quality for further improvement. For the first time, the researchers introduced the comprehensive BANKQUAL statement to test out the quality of bank services in India.     

The complementarity of IT and HRM capabilities for competitive performance: a configurational analysis of manufacturing and industrial service SMEs

ABSTRACT

Building on the resource-based view (RBV) perspective, we analyse the combined effects of two highly-valued organizational resources, namely information technology (IT) capabilities and human resource management (HRM) capabilities, on the competitive performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Three resource configurations are derived from data on 227 SMEs (121 from the manufacturing sector and 106 from the industrial services sector) through a cluster analysis. These resource configurations are labelled IT Capabilities-dominant Configuration (ITC), e-Business Capabilities-dominant Configuration (e-BC), and HRM Capabilities-dominant Configuration (HRC). This last configuration is the best-performing, followed by the e-BC, with the ITC as the worst-performing. The results also show that manufacturing and service firms are very unevenly distributed within HRC and ITC configurations, suggesting notable differences between the two sectors regarding their respective IT and non-IT capability-building. The fact that service SMEs are overwhelmingly represented (93%) in the worst-performing configuration and completely absent (0%) in the most effective configuration while displaying the strongest IT infrastructure capabilities confirms that the IT productivity paradox is aggravated in service SMEs and calls for further research on this issue.     

An intelligent service matching method for mechanical equipment condition monitoring using the fibre Bragg grating sensor network

Due to the advantages of being able to function under harsh environmental conditions and serving as a distributed condition information source in a networked monitoring system, the fibre Bragg grating (FBG) sensor network has attracted considerable attention for equipment online condition monitoring. To provide an overall conditional view of the mechanical equipment operation, a networked service-oriented condition monitoring framework based on FBG sensing is proposed, together with an intelligent matching method for supporting monitoring service management. In the novel framework, three classes of progressive service matching approaches, including service-chain knowledge database service matching, multi-objective constrained service matching and workflow-driven human-interactive service matching, are developed and integrated with an enhanced particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm as well as a workflow-driven mechanism. Moreover, the manufacturing domain ontology, FBG sensor network structure and monitoring object are considered to facilitate the automatic matching of condition monitoring services to overcome the limitations of traditional service processing methods. The experimental results demonstrate that FBG monitoring services can be selected intelligently, and the developed condition monitoring system can be re-built rapidly as new equipment joins the framework. The effectiveness of the service matching method is also verified by implementing a prototype system together with its performance analysis.     

Reusing process fragments for fast service composition: a clustering-based approach

With the proliferation of Web services over the Internet and due to the increasing complexity of users’ needs, Web service composition has emerged as a powerful method of software reuse, allowing to deliver complete business processes as a set of interacting services. To guarantee a rapid and secure service composition, fragments of available business processes at different granularities may be considered as a composition unit and recombined to deliver effective compositions. Despite the benefits of this method, most of the existing works do not take into consideration the reuse of service process fragments (SPF). Reusing SPFs allows, not only to minimize the composition time, but also to improve the reliability of the composition process. In this paper, we propose a Web service composition approach that aims to combine service process fragments rather that atomic services. We adopt a powerful mathematical model called Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to define the relationships between services and fragments. Moreover, we exploit the regrouping capabilities of FCA by proposing algorithms for the extraction of candidate fragments’ combinations. A scoring function is also defined to determine the quality level of each SPF and its ability to participate in a composition. The experimental studies proved the effectiveness of our FCA-based approach compared to existing state-of-the-art solutions.     

Handbook on development policy and management

ABSTRACT

Although the public service logic (PSL) has been an important equipoise to the predominant goods-manufacturing logic, there is potential to broaden its scope. An explicit integration of social context may contribute to an enhanced conceptual understanding of the PSL, at the same time addressing a major challenge in healthcare: disparities among population groups. A ‘representative co-production’ approach is suggested. In such an approach, group representatives’ knowledge and skills are used in evaluating, designing, and delivering services with the purpose of supporting other group members’ value co-creation. A case is provided, demonstrating representative co-production in access to preventive health services.     

Does Adaptive Capacity Influence Service Delivery? Evidence from Swedish Emergency Management Collaborations

Abstract

The relationship between adaptive capacity and collaborative performance is a central issue within public management research but has rarely been subjected to systematic empirical testing. Using survey data on emergency preparedness collaborations in Swedish municipalities (N = 263), this article investigates the relationship between three adaptive capacity variables – diversity, interaction, and learning – and outcomes in terms of goal attainment, risk analysis, and public satisfaction with rescue services. The findings suggest a positive relationship between the number of collaboration partners and goal attainment, while learning and accessibility of collaboration venues were unassociated with service delivery variables.     

An agent-based peer-to-peer architecture for semantic discovery of manufacturing services across virtual enterprises

With the development of virtual enterprise (VE) paradigm, the usage of serviceoriented architecture (SOA) is increasingly being considered for facilitating the integration and utilisation of distributed manufacturing resources. However, due to the heterogeneous nature among VEs, the dynamic nature of a VE and the autonomous nature of each VE member, the lack of both sophisticated coordination mechanism in the popular centralised infrastructure and semantic expressivity in the existing SOA standards make the current centralised, syntactic service discovery method undesirable. This motivates the proposed agent-based peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture for semantic discovery of manufacturing services across VEs. Multi-agent technology provides autonomous and flexible problemsolving capabilities in dynamic and adaptive VE environments. Peer-to-peer overlay provides highly scalable coupling across decentralised VEs, each of which exhibiting as a peer composed of multiple agents dealing with manufacturing services. The proposed architecture utilises a novel, efficient, two-stage search strategy – semantic peer discovery and semantic service discovery – to handle the complex searches of manufacturing services across VEs through fast peer filtering. The operation and experimental evaluation of the prototype system are presented to validate the implementation of the proposed approach.     

Bringing Networks In: A model of organizational socialization in the public sector

Abstract

Integrating new employees so that they perform well, fit in well and are committed to the agency is a salient concern for public managers. Organizational socialization is the process by which new employees learn the knowledge, skills and values required to become organizational members. This article develops a model of organizational socialization grounded in newcomer social networks and set within a context of public service identity. Social network theory and methods offer a means for examining and interpreting patterns of interactions between newcomers and organizational members. This article concludes with propositions for future studies of organizational socialization and social networks.     

Adapting public–private governance to the local context

Abstract

The article analyses the reform of water and sanitation services in Italy, which was introduced in 1994 and is still not fully implemented in many important respects. The introduction of a purchaser–provider split as envisaged in the national reform has had to come to terms with local power relationships and industrial and managerial status quo. In particular, network structures, leadership, and stakeholders' trade off along the top–down process from the policy design to final impacts prove to be relevant not only in reducing, but also in radically redefining objectives and outcomes of the policy. Thus, the concepts of governance and regulation at the local level are critically assessed in view of their dependence on the interplay of actors in local arenas, where power remains a prominent factor in determining processes and outcomes.     

服务经济的文化内核:服务精神的内涵及其功能

服务经济的发展是产业结构调整和升级的一个必然结果。商业服务、社会服务等多种类型的服务行业构成了多元化的服务经济体系,服务经济的竞争将呈现出完全自由的市场竞争态势。服务经济的发展必须依赖服务经济核心竞争力的提升,而服务作为快速、无形的消费品,技术和产品质量等有形的竞争力都将通过一个最基本的事实体现出来,这就是服务精神。服务精神是服务经济发展的基础,也是促使服务经济不断成长的基本动力,如何理解服务精神及其对服务经济成长和生产率的影响是服务经济学研究的基本内容,将对服务精神的内涵进行全面分析,并分析服务精神和服务经济之间的关系。     

An approach to define semantics for BPM systems interoperability

This article proposes defining semantics for Business Process Management systems interoperability through the ontology of Electronic Business Documents (EBD) used to interchange the information required to perform cross-organizational processes. The semantic model generated allows aligning enterprise’s business processes to support cross-organizational processes by matching the business ontology of each business partner with the EBD ontology. The result is a flexible software architecture that allows dynamically defining cross-organizational business processes by reusing the EBD ontology.

For developing the semantic model, a method is presented, which is based on a strategy for discovering entity features whose interpretation depends on the context, and representing them for enriching the ontology. The proposed method complements ontology learning techniques that can not infer semantic features not represented in data sources. In order to improve the representation of these entity features, the method proposes using widely accepted ontologies, for representing time entities and relations, physical quantities, measurement units, official country names, and currencies and funds, among others. When the ontologies reuse is not possible, the method proposes identifying whether that feature is simple or complex, and defines a strategy to be followed. An empirical validation of the approach has been performed through a case study.     

Research on manufacturing grid resource service optimal-selection and composition framework

In order to address the resource service optimal-selection (RSOS) and composition problem in manufacturing grid (MGrid) system and provide high-quality service to users, an MGrid RSOS and composition framework (MGrid-RSOSCF) is investigated in this study. The process of RSOS and composition is divided into the following five steps in MGrid-RSOSCF: (1) decomposing the submitted manufacturing task into several subtasks (i.e. single resource service requested task) if the submitted task is a multiple resource service requested task; (2) searching out the qualified resource service for each decomposed subtask and generating the corresponding candidate resource service set; (3) retrieving, evaluating and comparing the quality of service (QoS) for each candidate resource service, and provide data for service optimal-selection and composition –if the submitted task is a single resource service requested task; (4) evaluating synthetically the overall quality of each candidate resource service and ranking them, and selecting the optimal one for the task – if the submitted manufacturing task is an multiple resource service requested task; (5) selecting one candidate resource service from each candidate resource service set and constructing a new composite resource service according to the submitted task requirements, and collecting all the possible resource service composite execution paths (RSCEP) and selecting the optimal paths to execute the task. The proposed MGrid-RSOSCF consists of five layers and each layer provides the corresponding necessary services and algorithms to address one problem mentioned above. The five layers are: (1) T-layer, responsible for MGrid task decomposition; (2) S-layer, responsible for resource service match and search; (3) Q-layer, responsible for QoS processing; (4) O-layer, responsible for evaluating and ranking the candidate resource service and (5) C-layer is responsible for resource service composition and optimal-selection. The case study and comparison of performances of the algorithms demonstrate that the proposed methods are sound on success rate and executing efficiency.     

A method towards Web service combination for cross-organisational business process using QoS and cluster

How to quickly combine various Web services to support cross-organisational business processes is the key technical problem in service computing. Because of the changeability of QoS of Web services, the traditional methods are unadaptable to the new environments. In this paper, a new service composition method, called Improved Self-organising neural network Method for Web Service Composition, is proposed to achieve QoS-aware Web service combination, according to using the clustering technology. First, fuzzy mathematics is used to express each QoS attribute and the improved self-organising neural network is used to cluster services to reduce the number of candidate services. Secondly, all the centre of each cluster is selected and formed a composite service by using an exhaustive algorithm. Thirdly, the service cluster that is represented by the concrete services. Finally, the optimal service combination can be selected using integer programming or genetic algorithm. The experimental result shows the efficiency of Web service composition and demonstrates the applicability.