The number of service-oriented jobs has increased locally and nationally, and organizations are spending millions of dollars to train front-line employees to maintain customer satisfaction and compete in the service industry. Despite the financial investments of these training programs, little research has investigated the holistic effectiveness of customer-focused training (CFT) programs. Researchers found positive relationships between the constructs under investigation and reported that when CFT programs are delivered on a consistent basis with leadership support, they help build a service-oriented culture. The purpose of this case study was to investigate employee perceptions of CFT and relationships between performance, engagement, and building a service-oriented culture, where the questions were designed to address front-line employees in the transit system of Southeastern Pennsylvania. The conceptual framework for this study was by Service Quality, where the concepts for the framework support organizational culture and social exchange. The total number of participants was 36 with 27 for interviews and 9 for a focus group. The participants were selected using a purposeful sampling approach. The data were analyzed by coding for categories, themes, and patterns to reflect in-depth understanding and reporting of CFT among front-line employees. The participants felt that CFT programs were beneficial for them and could help improve customer service. Given these findings, similarly-situated employees may view training in a positive light and may be willing to engage in more training to improve customer service. Human resource personnel may be encouraged from the positive results of this study to develop and implement more training, which may help employees and leaders build a credible service-oriented culture.

Business process analysis and integration are key endeavours for today's enterprises. Recently, Web services have been widely adopted for the implementation and integration of business processes within and across enterprises. In this dissertation, we investigate the problem of enabling the analysis of service interactions, in today's enterprises, in the context of business process executions, and that of service integration. Our study shows that only fraction of interactions in the enterprise are supported by process-aware systems. However, enabling above-mentioned analyses requires: (i) a model of the underlying business process to be used as a reference for the analysis, and (ii) the ability to correlate events generated during service interactions into process instances. We refer to a process model and the corresponding process instances as a "process view". We propose the concept of process space to refer to all process related information sources in the enterprise, over which various process views are defined. We propose the design and development of a system called "process space discovery system" (PSDS) for discovering process views in a process space. We introduce novel approaches for the correlation of events into process instances, focusing on the public processes of Web services (business protocols), and also for the discovery of the business protocol models from the process instances of a process view. Analysis of service integration approaches shows that while standardisation in Web services simplifies the integration in the communication level, at the higher levels of abstractions (e.g., services interfaces and protocol models) services are still open to heterogeneities. We characterise the mismatches between service interfaces and protocol specifications and introduce "mismatch patterns" to represent them. A mismatch pattern also includes an adapter template that aims at the resolution of the captured mismatch. We also propose semi-automated approaches for identifying the mismatches between interface and protocol specifications of two services. The proposed approaches have been implemented in prototype tools, and experimentally validated on synthetic and real-world datasets. The discovered process views, using PSDS, can be used to perform various analyses in an enterprise, and the proposed adaptation approach facilitates the adoption of Web services in business process integration.

現今企業在建置企業入口網站時，往往面臨到入口網站相關安全標準與技術眾多且繁雜，缺乏一個整合式安全機制建置解決方案來遵從，造成企業在規劃與佈署入口網站之安全性時，產生巨大成本及導入障礙。而服務導向架構概念的出現，其分散性、組合式、標準化之特色，使得企業入口網站安全機制可以在使用網路服務技術的服務導向架構環境中，被當成一種服務呈現，並透過網際網路來公布、發現與利用。 本研究的主要探討分析服務導向架構安全性與安全服務之相關文獻，針對企業入口網站之安全需求與現有安全性基礎結構做整合，提出一個服務導向企業入口網站安全服務架構，並利用二個企業入口網站個案來檢視此架構的安全涵蓋範圍，使企業能將服務導向式安全服務導入企業入口網站整合應用，拉高安全層級，建立一個備受使用者安全信賴的企業入口網站，進而提升企業競爭力。 本研究的成果及效益包括：(1)分析探討企業入口網站在服務導向架構應用下所衍生的不同安全需求(2)提出一個以服務導向企業入口網站為主的安全服務架構。(3)此架構可完整支援服務導向企業入口網站安全功能，並具有因應日後企業安全需求增加的擴充彈性，能持續強化企業入口網站安全性。 / To develop Enterprise Portal System, most enterprises always meet the problem of satisfying numerous security standards and dealing with complicated programming languages. It still lacks an integrated security solution which could provide enterprises an easy way to complete this task. Therefore, this technical problem leads to an entrance barrier and significant corresponding cost to enterprises when deploying their portal. Service-Oriented Architecture is a promising framework to improve the situation. Service-Oriented Architecture framework is distributed, combinable, standardized which and develop the security mechanisms security mechanisms in Service-Oriented Architecture environment. Considering the advantage of Service-Oriented Architecture, this study explores the possibility of building Security Services for Service-Oriented Enterprise Portal. This study analyzes Service-Oriented Architecture security and security services. In addition, the authors propose a Service-Oriented security service prototype architecture for enterprise portal to meet its security requirements. This architecture can integrate service-oriented security services into enterprise portal applications and improve security level. Accordingly, it could develop a highly reliable enterprise portal and create a better competitiveness. The work done by this study includes (1) analyzes the security requirements in a service-oriented enterprise portal, (2) proposes a new framework for enterprise portal service-oriented security services, and (3) demonstrate this framework can support complete security functions for enterprise portal, be flexibility to increase security functions for demands in the future and continue to strengthen the enterprise portal security. By considering this new framework, the design a Enterprise Portal System could be more convenient and secure and it will benefit the development of enterprise in the future.

Le travail de recherche présenté dans ce mémoire s'intéresse aux problèmes d'interopérabilité dans le domaine du Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) et vise à proposer une méthodologie capable d'y remédier. Nous définissons l'objectif stratégique du PLM comme la maîtrise de la complexité qui caractérise le développement et le suivi des produits. Dans ce cadre, l'objectif de l'interopérabilité est le contrôle des interactions entre constituants de ce système complexe PLM. Nous montrons que cet objectif est atteint si on assure la continuité et la conservation du flux sémantique qui circule dans le système. Notre étude est restreinte aux seuls domaines de la conception et de la production, mais a l'ambition de pouvoir s'appliquer à d'autres domaines. La continuité du flux sémantique est assurée par une architecture que nous avons baptisée « médiation multi-échelle orientée services ». Le cœur de cette architecture, le médiateur, se charge d'orienter les flux sémantiques vers les systèmes concernés, et met en correspondance sémantique les informations échangées en s'appuyant sur un méta-modèle d'unification. Nous montrons que pour assurer la robustesse, la flexibilité et l'agilité du système ainsi constitué, il faut privilégier le choix d'un méta-modèle standard générique et extensible. A cet effet, nous proposons une cartographie du standard STEP permettant de choisir le méta-modèle pertinent. Nous illustrons le choix et la définition de ce méta-modèle dans le cas de deux problèmes d'interopérabilité des domaines de la conception et de la production : l'interopérabilité CAO/PDM et l'interopérabilité PDM/ERP. Nous expliquons notre démarche dans la mise en œuvre de la norme PLCS. Par ailleurs, nous introduisons un modèle d'annotations sémantiques du produit qui permet de reconstruire des vues multiples correspondant à différents besoins métiers. Un ensemble de démonstrateurs permet de valider nos propositions et nos résultats.

The emergence of Grid computing infrastructures enables researchers to shareresources and collaborate in more efficient ways than before, despite belongingto different organizations and being geographically distributed. While the Gridcomputing paradigm offers new opportunities, it also gives rise to newdifficulties. This thesis investigates methods, architectures, and algorithmsfor a range of topics in the area of Grid resource management. One studiedtopic is how to automate and improve resource selection, despite heterogeneityin Grid hardware, software, availability, ownership, and usage policies.Algorithmical difficulties for this are, e.g., characterization of jobs andresources, prediction of resource performance, and data placementconsiderations. Investigated Quality of Service aspects of resource selectioninclude how to guarantee job start and/or completion times as well as how tosynchronize multiple resources for coordinated use through coallocation.Another explored research topic is architectural considerations for frameworksthat simplify and automate submission, monitoring, and fault handling for largeamounts of jobs. This thesis also investigates suitable Grid interactionpatterns for scientific workflows, studies programming models that enable dataparallelism for such workflows, as well as analyzes how workflow compositiontools should be designed to increase flexibility and expressiveness. We today have the somewhat paradoxical situation where Grids, originally aimed tofederate resources and overcome interoperability problems between differentcomputing platforms, themselves struggle with interoperability problems causedby the wide range of interfaces, protocols, and data formats that are used indifferent environments. This thesis demonstrates how proof-of-concept softwaretools for Grid resource management can, by using (proposed) standard formatsand protocols as well as leveraging state-of-the-art principles fromservice-oriented architectures, be made independent of current Gridinfrastructures. Further interoperability contributions include an in-depthstudy that surveys issues related to the use of Grid resources in scientificworkflows. This study improves our understanding of interoperability amongscientific workflow systems by viewing this topic from three differentperspectives: model of computation, workflow language, and executionenvironment. A final contribution in this thesis is the investigation of how the design ofGrid middleware tools can adopt principles and concepts from softwareengineering in order to improve, e.g., adaptability and interoperability.

Die Strukturierung und Nutzung von unternehmensinternen IT-Infrastrukturen auf Grundlage dienstorientierter Architekturen (SOA) und etablierter XML-Technologien ist in den vergangenen Jahren stetig gewachsen. Lag der Fokus anfänglicher SOA-Realisierungen auf der flexiblen Ausführung klassischer, unternehmensrelevanter Geschäftsprozesse, so bilden heutzutage zeitnahe Datenanalysen sowie die Überwachung von geschäftsrelevanten Ereignissen weitere wichtige Anwendungsklassen, um sowohl kurzfristig Probleme des Geschäftsablaufes zu identifizieren als auch um mittel- und langfristige Veränderungen im Markt zu erkennen und die Geschäftsprozesse des Unternehmens flexibel darauf anzupassen. Aufgrund der geschichtlich bedingten, voneinander unabhängigen Entwicklung der drei Anwendungsklassen, werden die jeweiligen Anwendungsprozesse gegenwärtig in eigenständigen Systemen modelliert und ausgeführt. Daraus resultiert jedoch eine Reihe von Nachteilen, welche diese Arbeit aufzeigt und ausführlich diskutiert. Vor diesem Hintergrund beschäftigte sich die vorliegende Arbeit mit der Ableitung einer konsolidierten Ausführungsplattform, die es ermöglicht, Prozesse aller drei Anwendungsklassen gemeinsam zu modellieren und in einer SOA-basierten Infrastruktur effizient auszuführen. Die vorliegende Arbeit adressiert die Probleme einer solchen konsolidierten Ausführungsplattform auf den drei Ebenen der Dienstkommunikation, der Prozessausführung und der optimalen Verteilung von SOA-Komponenten in einer Infrastruktur.

The service-oriented architecture supports the dynamic assembly and runtime reconfiguration of complex open IT landscapes by means of runtime binding of service contracts, launching of new components and termination of outdated ones. Furthermore, the evolution of these IT landscapes is not restricted to exchanging components with other ones using the same service contracts, as new services contracts can be added as well. However, current approaches for modeling and verification of service-oriented architectures do not support these important capabilities to their full extend.In this report we present an extension of the current OMG proposal for service modeling with UML - SoaML - which overcomes these limitations. It permits modeling services and their service contracts at different levels of abstraction, provides a formal semantics for all modeling concepts, and enables verifying critical properties. Our compositional and incremental verification approach allows for complex properties including communication parameters and time and covers besides the dynamic binding of service contracts and the replacement of components also the evolution of the systems by means of new service contracts. The modeling as well as verification capabilities of the presented approach are demonstrated by means of a supply chain example and the verification results of a first prototype are shown. / Service-Orientierte Architekturen erlauben die dynamische Zusammensetzung und Rekonfiguration komplexer, offener IT Landschaften durch Bindung von Service Contracts zur Laufzeit, starten neuer Komponenten und beenden von veralteten. Die Evolution dieser Systeme ist nicht auf den Austausch von Komponenten-Implementierungen bei Beibehaltung der Service-Contracts beschränkt, sondern das Hinzufügen neuer Service-Contracts wird ebenfalls unterstützt. Aktuelle Ansätze zur Modellierung und Verifikation Service-Orientierter Architekturen unterstützen diese wichtigen Eigenschaften, wenn überhaupt, nur unvollständig. In diesem Bericht stellen wir eine Erweiterung des aktuellen OMG Vorschlags zur Service Modellierung mit UML - SoaML - vor, die diese Einschränkungen aufhebt. Unser Ansatz erlaubt die Modellierung von Service Contracts auf verschiedenen Abstraktionsniveaus, besitzt eine fundierte formale Semantik für alle eingeführten Modellierungskonzepte und erlaubt die Verifikation kritischer Eigenschaften. Unser kompositionaler und inkrementeller Verifikationsansatz erlaubt die Verifikation komplexer Eigenschaften einschließlich Kommunikationsparameter und Zeit und deckt neben der dynamischen Bindung von Service Contracts sowie dem Austausch von Komponenten auch die Evolution des gesamten Systems durch das Hinzufügen neuer Service Contracts ab. Die Modellierungs- als auch die Verifikationsfähigkeiten unseres vorgestellten Ansatzes werden durch ein Anwendungsbeispiel aus dem Bereich des Lieferkettenmanagements veranschaulicht.

This thesis establishes an information system which combines three credit risk models through Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The system requires the bank user inputting finance-related data and selecting options to generate a series of credit risk related results, including the probabilities of default, the recovery rates, the expected market value of assets, the volatilities of the expected market value of assets, the default points, the default distances, and four indexes from principal components analyses. In addition to exhibiting the numerical results, graphical results are also available for the user. Three credit risk models joining this system are the Moody¡¦s KMV Model with Default Point Modified, the Risk-Neutral Probability Measure Model, and the Time-Varying Jointly Estimated Model. Several previous researches have demonstrated the validity of these credit risk models, hence the purpose of this study is not to examine the practicability of these models, but to see if these models are capable of connecting each other effectively and eventually establishing a process to evaluate the credit risk of enterprises and industries by the use of testing samples. Testing samples are data from Taiwan Small and Medium Enterprise Credit Guarantee Fund. The finance-related data includes the loan amounts, the book value of assets, the data used to calculate the default point threshold (such as the short-term debt and the long-term debt), and the financial ratios with regard to growth ability (such as the revenue growth rate and the profit growth rate before tax), operation ability (such as the accounts receivable turnover rate and the inventory turnover rate), liability-paying ability (such as the current ratio and the debt ratio), and profitability (such as the return on assets and the return on equity). In addition to inputting the finance-related data, the system also require the user selecting the industrial category, the default point threshold, the way data being weighted, the data period, and the borrowing rates from the option page for every enterprise in order to acquire the results. Among the computing process, user is required to select weighted average method, either weighted by loan amounts or weighted by market value of assets, to obtain ¡§the weighted average probability of default of the industry¡¨ and ¡§the weighted average recovery rate of the industry¡¨ which are both used by the Time-Varying Jointly Estimated Model. This study also makes use of quartiles to simulate the situation when the user is near the bottom and top of the business cycle. Furthermore, the ¡§Supremum Strategy¡¨ and the ¡§Infimum Strategy¡¨ are added to this study to let the user realize the best condition and the worse condition of the ¡§Time-Varying Industrial Marginal Probabilities of Default¡¨.

Some mechanisms to enable an effective transition from domain models to web service descriptions are developed. The introduced domain modeling support provides verification and correction on the customization part. An automated mapping mechanism from the domain model to web service ontologies is also developed. The proposed approach is based on Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA), Semantic Web technologies and ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (ebBP). Major contributions of this work are the conceptualizations of a feature model for web services and a novel approach for knowledge-based elicitation of domain-specific outcomes in order to allow designing and deploying services better aligned with dynamically changing business goals, stakeholders&#039 / concerns and end-users&#039 / viewpoints. The main idea behind enabling a knowledge-based approach is to pursue automation and intelligence on reflecting business requirements into service descriptions via model transformations and automated reasoning. The proposed reference variability model encloses the domain-specific knowledge and is formalized by using Web Ontology Language (OWL). Adding formal semantics to feature models allows us to perform automated analysis over them such as the verification of model customizations through exploiting rule-based automated reasoners. This research was motivated due to the needs for achieving productivity gains, maintainability and better alignment of business requirements with technical capabilities in engineering service-oriented applications and systems.

One of the key challenges in service-oriented systems engineering is the prediction and assurance of non-functional properties, such as the reliability and the availability of composite interorganizational services. Such systems are often characterized by a variety of inherent uncertainties, which must be addressed in the modeling and the analysis approach. The different relevant types of uncertainties can be categorized into (1) epistemic uncertainties due to incomplete knowledge and (2) randomization as explicitly used in protocols or as a result of physical processes. In this report, we study a probabilistic timed model which allows us to quantitatively reason about nonfunctional properties for a restricted class of service-oriented real-time systems using formal methods. To properly motivate the choice for the used approach, we devise a requirements catalogue for the modeling and the analysis of probabilistic real-time systems with uncertainties and provide evidence that the uncertainties of type (1) and (2) in the targeted systems have a major impact on the used models and require distinguished analysis approaches. The formal model we use in this report are Interval Probabilistic Timed Automata (IPTA). Based on the outlined requirements, we give evidence that this model provides both enough expressiveness for a realistic and modular specifiation of the targeted class of systems, and suitable formal methods for analyzing properties, such as safety and reliability properties in a quantitative manner. As technical means for the quantitative analysis, we build on probabilistic model checking, specifically on probabilistic time-bounded reachability analysis and computation of expected reachability rewards and costs. To carry out the quantitative analysis using probabilistic model checking, we developed an extension of the Prism tool for modeling and analyzing IPTA. Our extension of Prism introduces a means for modeling probabilistic uncertainty in the form of probability intervals, as required for IPTA. For analyzing IPTA, our Prism extension moreover adds support for probabilistic reachability checking and computation of expected rewards and costs. We discuss the performance of our extended version of Prism and compare the interval-based IPTA approach to models with fixed probabilities. / Eine der wichtigsten Herausforderungen in der Entwicklung von Service-orientierten Systemen ist die Vorhersage und die Zusicherung von nicht-funktionalen Eigenschaften, wie Ausfallsicherheit und Verfügbarkeit von zusammengesetzten, interorganisationellen Diensten. Diese Systeme sind oft charakterisiert durch eine Vielzahl von inhärenten Unsicherheiten, welche sowohl in der Modellierung als auch in der Analyse eine Rolle spielen. Die verschiedenen relevanten Arten von Unsicherheiten können eingeteilt werden in (1) epistemische Unsicherheiten aufgrund von unvollständigem Wissen und (2) Zufall als Mittel in Protokollen oder als Resultat von physikalischen Prozessen. In diesem Bericht wird ein probabilistisches, Zeit-behaftetes Modell untersucht, welches es ermöglicht quantitative Aussagen über nicht-funktionale Eigenschaften von einer eingeschränkten Klasse von Service-orientierten Echtzeitsystemen mittels formaler Methoden zu treffen. Zur Motivation und Einordnung wird ein Anforderungskatalog für probabilistische Echtzeitsysteme mit Unsicherheiten erstellt und gezeigt, dass die Unsicherheiten vom Typ (1) und (2) in den untersuchten Systemen einen Ein uss auf die Wahl der Modellierungs- und der Analysemethode haben. Als formales Modell werden Interval Probabilistic Timed Automata (IPTA) benutzt. Basierend auf den erarbeiteten Anforderungen wird gezeigt, dass dieses Modell sowohl ausreichende Ausdrucksstärke für eine realistische und modulare Spezifikation als auch geeignete formale Methoden zur Bestimmung von quantitativen Sicherheits- und Zuverlässlichkeitseigenschaften bietet. Als technisches Mittel für die quantitative Analyse wird probabilistisches Model Checking, speziell probabilistische Zeit-beschränkte Erreichbarkeitsanalyse und Bestimmung von Erwartungswerten für Kosten und Vergütungen eingesetzt. Um die quantitative Analyse mittels probabilistischem Model Checking durchzuführen, wird eine Erweiterung des Prism-Werkzeugs zur Modellierung und Analyse von IPTA eingeführt. Die präsentierte Erweiterung von Prism ermöglicht die Modellierung von probabilistischen Unsicherheiten mittelsWahrscheinlichkeitsintervallen, wie sie für IPTA benötigt werden. Zur Verifikation wird probabilistische Erreichbarkeitsanalyse und die Berechnung von Erwartungswerten durch das Werkzeug unterstützt. Es wird die Performanz der Prism-Erweiterung untersucht und der Intervall-basierte IPTA-Ansatz mit Modellen mit festen Wahrscheinlichkeitswerten verglichen.