Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/aghose Recent documents in Professor Aditya K. Ghose en-us Sun, 31 May 2009 03:07:44 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/29 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/29 Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:23:50 PST IT has a role to play in the current debate on climate change. The current discourse on IT and climate change views IT in a negative light, as a polluter. What remains unrecognized is the critical role of IT as a source of solutions to the climate change problem. We live in a massive, inter-connected Planet Earth Supply Chain. IT provides a range of tools to model, manage and optimize this supply chain. The University of Wollongong Carbon-Centric Computing Initiative (CCCI) seeks to seed a program of research that addresses the climate change problem with a range of computing technologies including (but not limited to): optimization technologies, supply chain management technologies, business process management/process improvement technologies, grid computing (e.g., utility grid) and virtualization technologies, ICT-enabled conferencing and collaboration technologies as well as ICT for knowledge sharing and network-centric advocacy. The contours of this new and exciting space for research and industry development are described in this report authored by three University of Wollongong academics: Prof. Aditya Ghose (Director, Decision Systems Lab, School of Computer Science and Software Engineering), A/Prof. Helen Hasan (Director, ATUL, School of Economics) and Prof. Trevor Spedding (Head, School of Management and Marketing). The report provides insights into a set of representative points within this new space. It describes how existing web infrastructure could be leveraged to devise the optimizing web -- a massive, globally inter-connected network of optimizers helping support decisions that would reduce the global carbon footprint. It describes how computer simulation models can provide the basis for sustainable manufacturing and environmental management in the enterprise. It describes how IT based techniques can help support supply chain optimization audits to determine if and how value might be best derived from the judicious use of optimization technology. It describes the critical role ICT-enabled collaboration technologies can play in reducing the carbon footprint. It also addresses the key role ICT-based knowledge sharing and network-centric advocacy can play in obtaining broader social engagement in this debate. The report addresses the policy dimension to these issues and the need for an industry-academia consortium to drive such an agenda forward. A. Ghose http://works.bepress.com/aghose/28 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/28 Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:38:48 PDT Business processes represent the operational capabilities of an organization. In order to ensure process continuity, the effective management of risk becomes an area of key concern. In this paper we propose an approach for supporting risk identification with the use of higher-level organizational models. We provide some intuitive metrics for extracting measures of actor criticality, and vulnerability from organizational models. This helps direct risk management to areas of critical importance within organization models. Additionally, the information can be used to assess alternative organizational structures in domains where risk mitigation is crucial. At the process level, these measures can be used to help direct improvements to the robustness and failsafe capabilities of critical or vulnerable processes. We believe our novel approach, will provide added benefits when used with other approaches to risk management during business process management, that do not reference the greater organizational context during risk assessment. M. Bhuiyan http://works.bepress.com/aghose/27 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/27 Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:38:44 PDT Process inter-operation is characterized as cooperative interactions among loosely coupled autonomous constituents to adaptively fulfill system-wide purpose. Issues of inconsistency can be anticipated in inter-operating processes given their independent management and design. To reduce inconsistency (that may contribute to failures) effective methods for statically verifying behavioral interoperability are required. This paper contributes a method for practical, semantic verification of interoperating processes (as represented with BPMN models). We provide methods to evaluate consistency during process design where annotation of the immediate effect of tasks and sub-processes has been provided. Furthermore, some guidelines are defined against common models of inter-operation for scoping traceability to possible causes of inconsistency. This supports subsequent resolution efforts. G. Koliadis http://works.bepress.com/aghose/26 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/26 Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:38:39 PDT Agent-oriented conceptual modeling notations such as i* represents an interesting approach for modeling early phase requirements which includes organizational contexts, stakeholder intentions and rationale. On the other hand, Unified Modeling Language (UML) is suitable for later phases of requirement capture which usually focus on completeness, consistency, and automated verification of functional requirements for the new system. In this paper, we propose a methodology to facilitate and support the combined use of notation for modeling requirement engineering process in a synergistic fashion. For organizational modeling/early phase requirements capturing we use the i* modeling framework that describes the organizational relationships among various actors and their rationales. For late (functional) requirements specification, we rely on UML Activity Diagram. M. Bhuiyan http://works.bepress.com/aghose/25 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/25 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:27 PDT Web Service composition is the ability of one business to provide value-added services to its customers through the composition of basic Web services, possibly offered by different companies [12]. Because of distributed responsibilities, ownership and control, it is often not feasible to acquire all information needed for service composition. These characteristics are fundamental to service oriented computing but make it inherently difficult to avoid service conflicts. To reason about and adapt to a changing environment, in this work, we will extend current OWL-S by introducing the concept of service assumptions which allow reasoning with incomplete information. Furthermore, together with the proposed service assumptions, a sequence of rules is proposed to describe all permitted behaviors in service composition context. Z. Lu http://works.bepress.com/aghose/24 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/24 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:23 PDT Agent-oriented Conceptual Modelling (AoCM, as exemplified by the i* notation by E. Yu (1995)), represents an interesting approach to modelling early phase requirements that is particularly effective in capturing organizational contexts, stake-holder intentions and rationale. There are significant benefits in using formal methods for the development of computer systems and improving their quality. We propose a methodology which permits the use of these two otherwise disparate approaches in a complementary and synergistic fashion for requirements engineering. A. Krishna http://works.bepress.com/aghose/23 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/23 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:21 PDT Hypertree decomposition is a powerful technique for transforming near-acyclic CSPs into acyclic CSPs. Acyclic CSPs have efficient, polynomial time solving techniques, and so these conversions are of interest to the constraints community. We present here an improvement on the opt-k-decomp algorithm for finding an optimal hypertree decomposition. P. Harvey http://works.bepress.com/aghose/22 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/22 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:18 PDT Process inter-operation is characterized as cooperative interactions among loosely coupled autonomous constituents to adaptively fulfill system-wide purpose. Issues of inconsistency can be anticipated in inter-operating processes given their independent management and design. To reduce inconsistency (that may contribute to failures) effective methods for statically verifying behavioral interoperability are required. This paper contributes a method for practical, semantic verification of interoperating processes (as represented with BPMN models). We provide methods to evaluate consistency during process design where annotation of the immediate effect of tasks and sub-processes has been provided. Furthermore, some guidelines are defined against common models of inter-operation for scoping traceability to possible causes of inconsistency. This supports subsequent resolution efforts. A. K. Ghose http://works.bepress.com/aghose/21 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/21 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:15 PDT A key impediment to the widespread adoption of web services is the relatively limited set of tools available to deal with Quality-of-Service (QoS) factors. QoS factors pose several difficult challenges in how they may be articulated. While the functional requirements of a service can be represented as predicates to be satisfied by the target system, QoS factors are effectively statements of objectives to be maximized or minimized. QoS requirements occur naturally as local specifications of preference. Dealing with QoS factors is therefore a multi-objective optimization problem. In effect, these objectives are never fully satisfied, but satisficed to varying degrees. In evaluating alternative design decisions, we need to trade-off varying degrees of satisfaction of potentially mutually contradictory non-functional requirements. One key contribution of this work is the use of the Hierarchical Constraint Logical Programming (HCLP) framework in dealing with functional requirements, business process rules and Quality of Service (QoS) factors. We show how functional requirements and business process rules can be defined as hard constraints, QoS factors can be formulated as soft constraints and how the machinery associated with constraint hierarchies can be used to evaluate the alternative trade-offs involved in seeking to satisfy a set of QoS factors that might pull in different directions. We apply also this approach to the problem of reasoning about web service selection and composition, and establish that significant value can be derived from such an exercise. Y. Guan http://works.bepress.com/aghose/20 http://works.bepress.com/aghose/20 Tue, 27 May 2008 17:20:12 PDT Compliance issues impose significant management and reporting requirements upon organizations.We present an approach to enhance business process modeling notations with the capability to detect and resolve many broad compliance related issues. We provide a semantic characterization of a minimal revision strategy that helps us obtain compliant process models from models that might be initially non-compliant, in a manner that accommodates the structural and semantic dimensions of parsimoniously annotated process models. We also provide a heuristic approach to compliance resolution using a notion of compliance patterns. This allows us to partially automate compliance resolution, leading to reduced levels of analyst involvement and improved decision support. A. K. Ghose