Speaker:　　  Dr. Vladimir Tosic

　　　　NICTA (Australia),　 University of New South Wales (Australia), 　University of Sydney (Australia)

Time: 10.30-11:30am,　 2010-11-1

Venue: Lecture room, Lab for Computer Science, Level 3 Building #5, Institute of Software, CAS

Abstract:

The existing IT (information technology) system management solutions are predominantly focused on optimization of technical QoS metrics (e.g., response time, availability). However, financial (e.g., profit) and other business value metrics (e.g., customer satisfaction) are more important than technical QoS metrics. This presentation discusses challenges and some achieved results in business value driven management of business processes implemented with service-oriented architectures.

We begin with a brief overview of the context of this research – the ongoing NICTA work on advanced business process modeling, analysis, implementation, monitoring, and adaptation, as well as our collaboration with the lending industry in Australia.

Then, we focus on the sub-project on modeling of business value and business strategies and use of this additional information for run-time adaptation that maximizes business value. We explain the need to model business strategies (e.g., maximizing customer satisfaction) and diverse types of business values (not only financial ones). To illustrate how some of these challenges can be addressed, we first present WS-Policy4MASC, our language for specification of monitoring and control (particularly, adaptation) policies. It extends the Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy) by defining new types of policy assertions (goal, action, utility, probability, and meta-policy assertions). Among its original contributions are specification of diverse business values and specification of various control strategies maximizing different business values. We evaluated feasibility of the WS-Policy4MASC solutions by using this language and the corresponding algorithms for business value maximization in the several middleware middleware frameworks: MASC (Manageable and Adaptable Service Compositions), MiniMASC, and MiniMASC+MiniZinc. In particular, the use of the powerful constraint programming language MiniZinc and its solver in MiniMASC+MiniZinc enables finding globally optimal (from the business viewpoint) adaptation of multiple business processes executing at the same time. We examined usefulness of these solutions on a set of realistic scenarios. Further, to facilitate development of Web service systems that can be managed with WS-Policy4MASC and the MASC middleware and to improve alignment between run-time management activities and design-time models, we developed novel Unified Modeling Language (UML) profiles for WS-Policy4MASC.

Dr. Tosic is a Researcher in the Managing Complexity research theme of NICTA (previously known as National ICT Australia); Conjoint Lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia; Honorary Associate at the School of Information Technologies, the University of Sydney, Australia. He was previously an Adjunct Research Professor at the Department of Computer Science, the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada; a Research Officer at UNSW; an Assistant Professor at the Department of Software Engineering, Lakehead University, Canada; and an NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) post-doctoral fellow at UWO. He completed his Ph.D. degree at the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Canada. For his academic successes, he received a number of awards, including the 2001 Upsilon Pi Epsilon / IEEE Computer Society Award for Academic Excellence. Before his Ph.D. studies, Dr. Tosic worked at the Network and Systems Management (OpenView Software) Division of Hewlett-Packard Company in Germany. He published more than 50 refereed papers in international journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters, as well as a number of non-refereed papers and presentations. The majority of these publications were in the area of quality of service (QoS) specification and management of XML (Extensible Markup Language) Web services and their compositions. Dr. Tosic also presented several tutorials about this topic at international conferences. In addition, he has been a co-organizer of a several international workshops (notably, the Middleware for Web Services – MWS workshops in 2005-2008) and a program committee member of a number of international conferences and workshops (e.g., the Business-Driven IT Management – BDIM workshops in 2006-2010). Further information about Dr. Tosic can be found at: http://www.nicta.com.au/people/tosicv.