To satisfy new market requirements, manufacturing industry has shifted from mass production that takes advantage of the scale of production, to quality management that optimizes the internal enterprise functions, to e-manufacturing era that leverage intellectual capital via collaborative innovation. In the same time, the product itself is becoming the most important asset for sustainable business success. Consequently, the effectiveness, efficiency and innovation for the development of the product across the whole product lifecycle are becoming key business factors for manufacturing enterprise to obtain competitive advantages for survival. To tackle such challenges, a new business model called collaborative product services in virtual enterprise is proposed in this paper. The architecture of this new model is developed based on the framework and the application of web service and process management for collaboration product service in virtual enterprise. Indeed, it is hoped that this architecture will lay the foundation for further research and development of effective product lifecycle management in virtually collaborative enterprise environment. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Due to rapid development of the internet, it changes the life style of the human. The internet expert had reported that we are now in Web2.0 era. This research tries to explore how web GIS can fullfil the spirit of the Web2.0 and its possible applications. The first step of the research is to review the related techniques and applications of Geospatial web services and Web2.0. Then, a system with open GIS data structure was proposed and a web system was also established according to the spirit of Web2.0 - ¡§user participation¡¨. Web Map Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS) defined by Open Geospatial Consortium(OGC) were used in Geospatial web services system to search and view Geospatial data on the internet. Users can integrate spatial data from various sources on the internet and their own geospatial data and save as Web Map Context (WMC) file format. Then, WMC can be exchanged by other OGC Geospatial web services. In addition, the system supports file format transformation from WMC to KML, which is compatible with Google Earth. So users can use Google Earth to view the spatial layer information more easily. This study also developed a platform to demonstrate geospatial information in the blog, so users can share their Geospatial data in open GIS format with other bloggers. The system also use Google Map API and folksonomy in the data sharing process in order to speed up the web flow and to communicate their comments more easily.

Tying web services together to build large, distributed, collaborative applications has gathered noticeable momentum and a lot of research is being put in it. Along with composition of the web services, coordination is one key aspect that has been considered keenly. Many frameworks, languages and protocols have been proposed for web service composition and coordination. With the advancement in wireless technology and rapid deployment of mobile services, collaborative application development for small devices using such composed web services finds a new research area. Much less work has been done in the area of web service coordination for mobile environment. In this thesis, we propose a new distributed approach in service composition and coordination and show that our approach works well in an environment containing mobile heterogeneous devices. We discuss a novel approach of SyD (System on Devices)wrapper framework for dynamically creating and executing web bonds among various heterogeneous web services. The wrapper is a lightweight SyD application object that encapsulates composition and coordination logic and provides higher level of coordination among bonded entities. The wrapper framework gives small devices full capability to run distributed collaborative applications that use heterogeneous web services. We have also developed and analyzed experiments to showcase the performance of SyD Wrapper Framework.

Detta examensarbete har utförts på SSAB- Tunnplåt i Borlänge under vårterminen 2004 och omfattar 10 veckors arbete.SSAB sköter idag sin kommunikation med distributionslagren via fax, telefon eller e-post. Eftersom detta är ett ganska tidskrävande kommunikationssätt, vill SSAB ha en smidigare och snabbare kommunikationslösning. Den lösning som SSAB vill ha är en extern Web-service-lösning för att upprätta en säker kommunikation med sina distributionslager.Parallellt med byggandet av Web-service-lösningen arbetades en förvaltningsmodell fram. Den beskriver hur förvaltningsorganisationen med dess rutiner kan se ut vid implementering av lösningen.För att skapa en säker förbindelse med Web-servicen skall en webbklient användas som i sin tur anropar en COM+ komponent. Detta för att kunna skicka med certifikatet ifrån webbklienten till webbservern där Web-servicen ligger. COM+ komponenten måste få tillgång till en användarprofil när den kommunicerar med Web-servicen. Detta för att kunna upprätta en SSL-förbindelse i det inledande skedet. SSL-förbindelsen skall läggas i den VPN-tunnel som mVPN tillhandahåller via WSSAL.

Open distributed environments such as the World Wide Web facilitate information sharing but provide limited support to the protection of sensitive information and resources. Web services have become a part of components for quickly building a business process that satisfies the business goal of an organization, and access control is imperative to prevent the illegal access of sensitive information. In recent years, several researches have investigated the Web services-based workflow access control problem, and selection approaches for choosing the performer for each task so as to satisfy all access control constraints have been proposed. Based on the role-based access control model, we focus on two types of access control: separation of duties and binding of duties. Both role-level and participant-level of SoDs and of BoDs that need to be dynamically enforced are considered in this thesis. While dealing with complex and flexible business logics, we use rule engine to reasons with the business facts to get the result based on business rules. The proposed approach is evaluated by a workflow scenario and is shown to be flexible to develop new process with dynamic access control constraints at the cost of higher execution time.

Service-oriented Architecture is now an important issue when it comes to program development. However, there is not yet an efficient and effective way for developer to obtain appropriate component. Current researches mostly focus on either textual meaning or ontology relation of the services. In this research we propose a hybrid approach that integrates both types of information. It starts by defining important attributes and their weights for web service discovery using Multiple Criteria Decision Making. Then a method of similarity calculation based on both textual and ontological information is applied. In the experiment, we collect 103 real-world Web services, and the experimental results show that our approach generally performs better than the existing ones.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is intended for the integration of heterogeneous applications. Complex business processes are composed by a group of specific Web services using WS-BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), and these Web services may be designed by the enterprise itself or third-party services providers. Today there are many WS-BPEL engines that support the deployment and execution of WS-BPEL files. However, the WS-BPEL activities have to be pre-defined, and if at runtime a Web service call fails, the entire business process is pronounced to be failed, thereby jeopardizing the reliability of SOA. Although the WS- BPEL supports compensation mechanism, it is complex and not flexible. In this work, we propose a process design model to support dynamic Web services selection that eases the designer¡¦s job. This model has been implemented, and the prototype is evaluated to demonstrate that it indeed improves the overall business process reliability.

Because of the advance of Internet and the outsourcing, multi-company cooperation is imperative under this circumstance. In order to monitor states between partners during execution, this thesis develops exception handling mechanisms based on Web service stack. After detecting exceptions, the first step is to make use of the fault handler and compensation handler provided by the BPEL4WS specification to roll back planned or even executed business processes belonging to the same scope to the original state. The second step is to utilize the resources searching mechanism, including BE4WS and BCME, to find suitable substitutes to make a replacement or find fitting partners to cooperate with the original one. The third step is to take advantage of the extensibility, flexibility and scalability of BPEL4WS business process to adjust and re-form a new one to handle this unexpected situation. This study uses the LCD supply chain as an example to evaluate the proposed exception handling mechanisms. The result shows that the proposed methods obtain encouraging performance. The major contribution of this research is the initiation efforts on developing exception handling mechanisms based on Web service technologies to improve the exception handling performance.

As the emergence of SOA concept, web services has became a key technology to achieve the seamless system interoperability and collaborations with enterprises partners. Since many available web services provide overlapping or identical functionality, when it comes to composing a composite web service, a choice needs to be made for selecting an appropriate component web service. Dynamic web service selection refers to determining a subset of component web services to be invoked so as to orchestrate a composite web service. Previous work in web service selection usually assumes the invocations of web service operations to be independent of on another. But this assumption however does not hold in practice as both the composite and component web services often impose some orderings on the invocation of their operations to represent its business logic. Such orderings constrain the selection of component web services to orchestrate the composite web service. We therefore propose to use finite state machine (FSM) to model the invocation order of web service operations. We define a measure, called aggregated reliability, to measure the probability that a given state in the composite web service will lead to successful execution in the context where each component web service may fail with some probability. We show that the computation of aggregated reliability is equivalent to eigenvector computation. We also propose two strategies to select component web services that are likely to successfully complete the execution of a given sequence of operations. For our approach to work in a practical environment, the dominating composition language BPEL for specifying the operation invocation orders will be transformed into an abstract FSM. We also proposed a prototype for realizing our dynamic WS selection. Our experiments on a generated set of web service operation sequences show that our proposed strategies perform better than two baseline selection strategies.

Web services have emerged as a de facto standard for encapsulating services within or across organization boundaries. Various proposals have been made to compose Web services into workflow so as to meet the goal previously unaccomplished by a single entity. This thesis intends to investigate the Web services-based workflow access control problem. It starts by analyzing the various access control constraints proposed in the literatures and presenting three primitive constructs that are capable of specify these constraints. It then proposes a Web service selection approach that dynamically chooses a performer for each task in the workflow, not only to satisfy all access control constraints currently but also to increase the chance of completing the entire process in the future. The proposed approach is evaluated using synthetic data and is shown to result in the execution that is less likely to violate any specified access control constraints.