Bamberger Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsinformatik und Angewandten Informatik
20 search hits
- 65
-
Modelling and Validating Business Collaborations: A Case Study on RosettaNet
(2006)
-
Andreas Schönberger
- The way business processes are organised heavily influences the flexibility and the expenses of enterprises. The capability to address changing market needs in a timely manner and to provide appropriate pricing is indispensable in a world of internationalisation and growing competition. Optimising processes that cross enterprise boundaries potentially is a key success factor in achieving this goal but it requires the information systems of the participating enterprises to be consistently integrated. This gives rise to some challenging tasks. The personnel involved in building up business collaborations comes from different enterprises with different business vocabulary and background which requires extensive communication support. The lack of central technical infrastructure, typically prohibited by business politics, often calls for a distributed and computer-aided collaboration structure, so that the resulting complexity must be handled somehow. Nevertheless robustness is an important factor in building business collaborations as these may exchange goods of considerable value. This technical report proposes the use of a two step modelling approach that separates business logic, modelled in the so-called centralised perspective (CP), from its distributed implementation, modelled in the so-called distributed perspective (DP). The separation of these perspectives enables business people to concentrate on business issues and to solve communication problems in the CP whereas technical staff can concentrate on distribution issues. The use of stringent modelling rules is advised in order to provide the basis for formal analysis techniques as one means to achieve robustness. Considering the choreography of RosettaNet Partner Interface Processes (PIPs) as the subject of my analysis, UML activity diagrams for modelling the CP and WSBPEL for modelling the DP are described as enabling techniques for implementing the proposed two step modelling approach. Further, model checking is applied to validate the CP and DP models in order to detect errors in early design phases. As the adequacy of model checking tools highly depends on the detailed modelling techniques as well as the properties to be checked, a major part of our discussion covers relevant properties and requirements for a model checker.
- 66
-
Concealing Presence Information in Instant Messaging Systems
(2006)
-
Markus Dorsch
Martin Grote
Knut Hildebrandt
Maximilian Röglinger
Matthias Sehr
Christian Wilms
Karsten Loesing
Guido Wirtz
- Information about online presence allows participants of instant messaging (IM) systems to determine whether their prospective communication partners will be able to answer their requests in a timely manner, or not. That is why presence information, combined with the ability to send instant messages, makes IM more personal and closer than other forms of communication such as e-mail. On the other hand, revelation of presence constitutes a potential of misuse by untrustworthy entities. A possible risk is the generation of online logs disclosing user habits. This makes presence information a resource worth protecting. We argue, however, that current IM systems do not take reasonable precautions to protect presence information. We implemented an IM system designed to be robust against attacks to disclose a user’s presence. In contrast to existing systems, it stores presence information in a registry in a way that is only detectable and applicable for intended users and not comprehensible even for the registry itself. We use a distributed hash table (DHT) as registry and apply an anonymous communication network to protect the physical addresses of both senders and receivers of messages.
- 67
-
Decentralized Reputation Management for Cooperating Software Agents in Open Multi-Agent Systems
(2006)
-
Marco Fischer
Andreas Grünert
Sebastian Hudert
Stefan König
Kira Lenskaya
Gregor Scheithauer
Sven Kaffille
Guido Wirtz
- Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) promise a new advance in distributed computing. In MAS autonomous software agents flexibly cooperate, coordinate, and compete to provide the desired function(s) of such a system. If some components of a MAS fail or do not provide the desired functionality, the system is expected to autonomously deal with these situations. It is desirable to reduce occurrences of such situations by selecting trustworthy cooperation partners before cooperating with them. This becomes even more desirable and important in an open MAS where arbitrary heterogeneous software agents, deployed by different parties, participate in the MAS, as it becomes more likely that these agents fail or try to exploit the MAS for their own purposes without reciprocation. In order to monitor agent behavior and enable selection of trustworthy cooperation partners, trust or reputation management services can be applied. As there is no central control in an open MAS and it is completely distributed these services themselves have to be distributed. This paper proposes a fully distributed reputation management service for open MAS based on peer-to-peer technology (especially distributed hash tables). A Java-based implementation of that service, which is intended as a plug-in for multi-agent platforms, is also described.
- 69
-
A Proposal for a Web Services Agreement Negotiation Protocol Framework
(2006)
-
Sebastian Hudert
- The WS-Agreement Standard as defined in the current proposal does not accommodate negotiation between service provider and requesters to yield an agreement. It is limited to simple offers and acceptances. However, negotiations between service providers and service consumers beyond the basic mechanism are required and are also part of the charter of the GRAAP working group. There are many mechanisms for negotiating agreements between parties for different purposes, having different sets of participants, different economic properties, different interactions patterns, and different information requirements to enter the interaction. Given the generality of the WS-Agreement scope, supporting a single negotiation mechanism would not satisfy the requirements of different application scenarios. Hence, the objective of this thesis is to devise a proposal to extend the WS-Agreement specification to facilitate the integration of arbitrary negotiation protocols into the WS-Agreement interaction. This includes facilities to enable a party to advertise the negotiation protocol it supports, the role that it can take in this protocol, expectations on other roles in the negotiation, and other meta-information that is necessary to start an interaction. This thesis analyzes the scope of negotiation protocols relevant for service level agreement establishment, derives a data structure for negotiation protocol meta-data, a protocol to exchange meta-data and initiate a negotiation protocol, and obtaining the result of the negotiation, the agreement. The new functionality extends the current WS-Agreement specification seamlessly. The thesis demonstrates the viability of the approach using scenarios of specific negotiation mechanisms.
- 74
-
Open Chord version 1.0.4 User's Manual
(2007)
-
Sven Kaffille
Karsten Loesing
- In recent years peer-to-peer networks have developed from unstructured to structured overlay networks. Structured peer-to-peer overlay networks facilitate a bounded number of messages in the number of peers for querying and publishing content opposed to unstructured networks, which usually flood the network with messages. To prevent the messages from overflooding the network they have a bounded life time, which may cause that some published content will be lost. Structured peer-to-peer networks guarantee that all published content can be found. One well known structured overlay network is the chord distributed hash table. An implementation of chord is only available in C, but not in Java, which is used widely and often in computer science education. This manual describes an open source implementation of chord in Java - called Open Chord - and how it can be used in Java-based applications. It provides a console-based experimentation environment to explore the functionality of chord, as well.
- 75
-
Extended Abstracts of the Second Privacy Enhancing Technologies Convention (PET-CON 2008.1)
(2008)
-
Dominik Herrmann
Karsten Loesing
Sebastian Pape
Johannes Renner
Rolf Wendolsky
Benedikt Westermann
- PET-CON, the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Convention, is a forum for researchers, students, developers, and other interested people to discuss novel research, current developments and techniques in the area of Privacy Enhancing Technologies. PET-CON was first conceived in June 2007 at the 7th International PET Symposium in Ottawa, Canada. The idea was to set up a bi-annual convention in or nearby Germany to be able to meet more often than only once a year at some major conference.
- 76
-
Applying Business Process Management Systems - a Case Study
(2008)
-
Gregor Scheithauer
Guido Wirtz
- Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) aim to support the Business Process Management paradigm and to ease legacy application integration. Often, they rely on Service-oriented Architecture (SoA). However, do such systems really meet real-world requirements? This paper introduces and discusses a set of criteria which are important for BPMS and applies these criteria in comparing tools from three important vendors, namely IDS Scheer, Oracle and Intalio based on a case study.
- 77
-
Improving the Tor Hidden Service Protocol Aiming at Better Performances
(2008)
-
Christian Wilms
- Offering services anonymously on the Internet using so-called location-hidden services requires complex protocols with many different nodes involved. These properties result in performance problems, e.g. a simple website request taking tens of seconds. This work describes a setup to measure the performance of hidden services using the worldwide Tor network. It analyzes the results and proposes changes to the protocol to improve the performance without losing anonymity.
- 78
-
A Service Description Framework for Service Ecosystems
(2008)
-
Gregor Scheithauer
Matthias Winkler
- Recently, service orientation has strongly influenced the way enterprise applications are built. Service ecosystems, which provide means to trade services between companies like goods, are an evaluation of service orientation. To allow service ordering, discovering, selection, and consumption, a common way to describe services is a necessity. This paper discusses existing approaches to describe certain service aspects. Finally, a Service Description Framework for service ecosystems is proposed and exemplified.
- 80
-
QoS-Enabled B2B Integration
(2009)
-
Thomas Benker
Stefan Fritzemeier
Matthias Geiger
Simon Harrer
Tristan Kessner
Johannes Schwalb
Andreas Schoenberger
Guido Wirtz
- Business-To-Business Integration (B2Bi) is a key mechanism for enterprises to gain competitive advantage. However, developing B2Bi applications is far from trivial. Inter alia, agreement among integration partners about the business documents and the control flow of business document exchanges as well as applying suitable communication technologies for overcoming heterogeneous IT landscapes are major challenges. At the same time, choreography languages such as ebXML BPSS (ebBP), orchestration languages such as WS-BPEL and Web Services are promising to provide the foundations for seamless interactions among business partners. Automatically translating choreography agreements of integration partners into partner-specific orchestrations is an obvious idea for ensuring conformance of orchestration models to choreography models. Moreover, the application of such model-driven development methods facilitates productivity and cost-effectiveness whereas applying a service oriented architecture (SOA) based on WS-BPEL and Web Services leverages standardization and decoupling. By now, the realization of QoS attributes has not yet received the necessary attention that makes such approaches suitable for B2Bi. In this report, we describe a proof-of-concept implementation of the translation of ebBP choreographies into WS-BPEL orchestrations that respects B2Bi-relevant QoS attributes.