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Accurate situational assessment is key to any decision maker and especially crucial in military command and control, air traffic control, and complex system decision making. Endsley described three dependent levels of situational awareness, (1) perception, (2) understanding, and (3) projection. This research was focused on Endsley's second-level situational awareness (understanding) as it applies to service-oriented information technology environments in the context of the Semantic Web. Specifically, this research addressed the problem of developing accurate situational assessments related to the status or health of information technology (IT) services, especially composite, dynamic IT services, when some of Endsley's first level (perceived) information was inaccurate or incomplete. Research had not adequately addressed the problem of how to work with inaccuracy and situational awareness information in order to produce accurate situational assessments for Semantic Web services. This problem becomes especially important as the current Web moves towards a Semantic Web where information technology is expected to be represented and processed by machines. Costa's probabilistic Web ontology language (PR-OWL), as extended by Carvalho (PR-OWL2), is a framework for storage of and reasoning with uncertainty information as part of the Semantic Web. This study used Costa's PR-OWL framework, as extended by Carvalho, to build an ontology that supports reasoning with service-oriented information in the context of the Semantic Web and then assessed the effectiveness of the developed ontology through the use of competency questions, as described by Gruninger and Fox and verified through the use of an automated reasoner. This research resulted in a Web Ontology Language for Services (OWL-S), PR-OWL2 based ontology, and its associated Multi-Entity Bayesian Network which are flexible and highly effective in calculating situational assessments through the propagation of posterior probabilities using Bayesian logic. Specifically, this research (1) identifies sufficient information required for effective situational awareness reasoning, (2) specifies the predicates and semantics necessary to represent service components and dependencies, (3) applies Multi-Entity Bayesian Network to reason with situational awareness information, (4) ensures the correctness and consistency of the situational awareness ontology, and (5) accurately estimates posterior probabilities consistent with situational awareness information.

The field of Smart Logistics is attracting interest in several areas of research, including Business Process Management. Awide range of research works are carried out to enhance the capability of monitoring the execution of ongoing logistics processes and predict their likely evolvement. In order to do this, it is crucial to have in place an IT infrastructure that provides the capability of automatically intercepting the digitalised transportation-related events stemming from widespread sources, along with their elaboration, interpretation and dispatching. In this context, we present here the service-oriented software architecture of such an event-based information engine. In particular, we describe the requisites that it must meet. Thereafter, we present the interfaces and subsequently the service-oriented components that are in charge of realising them. The outlined architecture is being utilised as the reference model for an ongoing European research project on Smart Logistics, namely GET Service.

Since the early 2000s, Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have played a key role in the development of complex applications within a virtual organization (VO) context. Grids and workflows have emerged as vital technologies for addressing the (SOA) paradigm. Given the variety of Grid middleware, scientific workflow systems and Grid workflows available, bringing the two technologies together in a flexible, reusable and generalized way has been largely overlooked, particularly from a scientific end user perspective. The lack of domain focus in this area has led to a slow uptake of Grid technologies. This thesis aims to design a framework for Grid-enabling workflows, which identifies the essential technological components, how these components fit together in layered architecture and the interactions between them. To produce such a framework, this thesis first investigates the definition of a Grid-workflow architecture and mapping Grid functionality to workflow nodes, focusing on striking a balance between performance, usability and the Grid functionality supported. Next, it presents an examination of framework extensions for supporting various forms of Grid heterogeneity, essential for ii VO based collaboration. Given the complex nature of Grid technologies, the work presented here investigates abstracting Grid based workflows through high-level definitions and resolution using semantic technologies. Finally, this thesis presents a way to resolves abstract Grid workflows using semantic technologies and intelligent, autonomous agents. The frameworks presented in this thesis are tested and evaluated within the context of domain-based case studies defined in the SIMDAT, BRIDGE and ARGUGRID EU funded research projects.

Web services are increasingly gaining acceptance as a framework for facilitating application-to-application interactions within and across enterprises. It is commonly accepted that a service description should include not only the interface, but also the business protocol supported by the service. The present work focuses on the formalization of the important category of protocols that include time-related constraints (called timed protocols), and the impact of time on compatibility and replaceability analysis. We formalized the following timing constraints: CInvoke constraints define time windows of availability while MInvoke constraints define expirations deadlines. We extended techniques for compatibility and replaceability analysis between timed protocols by using a semantic-preserving mapping between timed protocols and timed automata, leading to the novel class of protocol timed automata (PTA). Specifically, PTA exhibit silent transitions that cannot be removed in general, yet they are closed under complementation, making every type of compatibility or replaceability analysis decidable. Finally, we implemented our approach in the context of a larger project called ServiceMosaic, a model-driven framework for web service life-cycle management.

Web services are increasingly gaining acceptance as a framework for facilitating application-to-application interactions within and across enterprises. It is commonly accepted that a service description should include not only the interface, but also the business protocol supported by the service. The present work focuses on the formalization of the important category of protocols that include time-related constraints (called timed protocols), and the impact of time on compatibility and replaceability analysis. We formalized the following timing constraints: CInvoke constraints define time windows of availability while MInvoke constraints define expirations deadlines. We extended techniques for compatibility and replaceability analysis between timed protocols by using a semantic-preserving mapping between timed protocols and timed automata, leading to the novel class of protocol timed automata (PTA). Specifically, PTA exhibit silent transitions that cannot be removed in general, yet they are closed under complementation, making every type of compatibility or replaceability analysis decidable. Finally, we implemented our approach in the context of a larger project called ServiceMosaic, a model-driven framework for web service life-cycle management.

No âmbito industrial, o custo empregado na manutenção de equipamentos ainda representa uma grande parcela dos investimentos. Dessa forma, o desenvolvimento de técnicas de manutenção, e o seu correto planejamento, cada vez mais estão assumindo papeis de grande importância nesse setor, visto que impactam diretamente no fator econômico das empresas. Neste sentido, o trabalho em questão apresenta a proposta de uma arquitetura orientada a serviços para um sistema de manutenção inteligente, a fim de possibilitar a integração de forma facilitada entre equipamentos e as ferramentas de análise de degradação. A arquitetura é composta por diferentes entidades, cada uma responsável por determinada tarefa para o funcionamento do sistema. No trabalho, as entidades são implementadas e experimentos são realizados a fim de validar a solução proposta. / In the industrial field, the costs associated with equipment’s maintenace still represents a large portion of the financial resources available to a company. Therefore, new researches in maintenance systems, and the correct task planning, are growing, since they impact directly on the economic side of the companies. Thus, current work presents a service-oriented architecture for maintenance systems integration. The proposed architecture intends to facilitate the integration of equipments and degradation analysis tools. The architecture is comprised of several entities, where each one is responsible for executing a given task in order to keep the system running properly. In this work, all the entities are implemented and experiments are performed in order to validate the proposed system.

No âmbito industrial, o custo empregado na manutenção de equipamentos ainda representa uma grande parcela dos investimentos. Dessa forma, o desenvolvimento de técnicas de manutenção, e o seu correto planejamento, cada vez mais estão assumindo papeis de grande importância nesse setor, visto que impactam diretamente no fator econômico das empresas. Neste sentido, o trabalho em questão apresenta a proposta de uma arquitetura orientada a serviços para um sistema de manutenção inteligente, a fim de possibilitar a integração de forma facilitada entre equipamentos e as ferramentas de análise de degradação. A arquitetura é composta por diferentes entidades, cada uma responsável por determinada tarefa para o funcionamento do sistema. No trabalho, as entidades são implementadas e experimentos são realizados a fim de validar a solução proposta. / In the industrial field, the costs associated with equipment’s maintenace still represents a large portion of the financial resources available to a company. Therefore, new researches in maintenance systems, and the correct task planning, are growing, since they impact directly on the economic side of the companies. Thus, current work presents a service-oriented architecture for maintenance systems integration. The proposed architecture intends to facilitate the integration of equipments and degradation analysis tools. The architecture is comprised of several entities, where each one is responsible for executing a given task in order to keep the system running properly. In this work, all the entities are implemented and experiments are performed in order to validate the proposed system.

No âmbito industrial, o custo empregado na manutenção de equipamentos ainda representa uma grande parcela dos investimentos. Dessa forma, o desenvolvimento de técnicas de manutenção, e o seu correto planejamento, cada vez mais estão assumindo papeis de grande importância nesse setor, visto que impactam diretamente no fator econômico das empresas. Neste sentido, o trabalho em questão apresenta a proposta de uma arquitetura orientada a serviços para um sistema de manutenção inteligente, a fim de possibilitar a integração de forma facilitada entre equipamentos e as ferramentas de análise de degradação. A arquitetura é composta por diferentes entidades, cada uma responsável por determinada tarefa para o funcionamento do sistema. No trabalho, as entidades são implementadas e experimentos são realizados a fim de validar a solução proposta. / In the industrial field, the costs associated with equipment’s maintenace still represents a large portion of the financial resources available to a company. Therefore, new researches in maintenance systems, and the correct task planning, are growing, since they impact directly on the economic side of the companies. Thus, current work presents a service-oriented architecture for maintenance systems integration. The proposed architecture intends to facilitate the integration of equipments and degradation analysis tools. The architecture is comprised of several entities, where each one is responsible for executing a given task in order to keep the system running properly. In this work, all the entities are implemented and experiments are performed in order to validate the proposed system.

Active Documents is a technique for automating the handling and control of documents by making them a combination of service providers (mobile agents) and resources (compound documents) in the form of autonomous agents. The main focus of this solution is to provide an encapsulation of documents, including their data structures and related functionality, but also to enable documents to reflect upon themselves in respect of their computational environment, and take actions accordingly.