Service engineering

  • Business analysis and requirements engineering. The purpose is to determine the business objectives and business constraints of a service-oriented system, to design and assess its business model, then to produce a specification of that system. Methodologies have been developed to perform, organize, and optimize business analysis and requirements engineering and evaluate and improve existing processes in companies.
  • Service selection. The engineering of a service-oriented information system requires the selection of most appropriate services from known service providers according to the business requirements identified by business analysis and requirements engineering. Algorithms have been developed for the automated selection of services based on requirements.
  • Service QoS and reputation. As providers of similar services come online, competition becomes significant. The reputation needs to be assessed by potential users, so that different metrics have been adopted to establish reputations of service providers. An accurate reputation assessment system in which service providers are selfish and maximize utility is proposed.
  • Communities of Web services.  As the number of Web services through the Internet continues to increase, the needs for discovering and engaging these Web services in more complex and complete business solutions are stressed out, leading to very rich settings for market competition. In this context, the PReCISE research centre proposed, along with partners, the notion of community of Web services to gather Web services having the similar functionalities e.g., flight booking and travel reservation, in the same “virtual” space permitting to create pockets of expertise.
  • Authorization and trust. Access to services may be restricted or conditional to fulfilment of access conditions, which requires policies to be defined in a consistent and interoperable way.
  • User interactions within Web Service Composition (WSC). Current WSC languages like BPEL are expressive enough to
    describe fully automated processes to build Web service compositions. However, full-automated processes cannot represent all real-life scenarios specially those that need user interactions. PReCISE works on extending BPEL with user interaction expressions.

 

Scientific results

 

  • Business analysis and Requirements engineering: PReCISE has made advances in the principles for the engineering and optimization of Business analysis and Requirements engineering processes, as well as in informal and mathematical modelling notations to record, analyse, clarify and help negotiate requirements. They have led notably  to analysis and management methods for inconsistent requirements.
  • Service selection: algorithms have been developed for the automatic selection of service combinations which are capable of implement business processes.
  • Communties of Web services: our research has established the mechanisms that permit implementing this gathering in terms of attracting Web services into a community, retaining the good ones, and expelling the poor ones. These mechanisms rely on the reputation of Web services, their social behavior and their utility-driven behavior.
  • Authorization: we have designed and implemented an interoperable standard-based authorization protocol, applied to cross-organization multi-layer web invocation in a widget-based environment.

 

Industrial results

 

The expertise of the Service engineering group of PReCISE spans all steps of service-based systems engineering processes, from business analysis and requirements engineering to the monitoring and improvement of service QoS and trust.

 

Resources

  • Selected publications 
  • KHOSRAVIFAR B., ALISHASHI M., BENTAHAR J., THIRAN Ph. A Game Theoretic Approach for Analyzing the Efficiency of Web Services in Collaborative Networks. In Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2011), 2011. Ranked A in CORE. Acceptance rate: 17%.
  • KHOSRAVIFAR B., BENTAHAR J., MAOZIN A., THIRAN Ph. On the Reputation of Agent-based Web Services. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-10), pages 1352–1357, 2010. Ranked A* in CORE.
  • KHOSRAVIFAR B., BENTAHAR J., THIRAN Ph., MOAZIN A., GUIOT A. An Approach to Incentive-based Reputation for Communities of Web Services, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), 2009. Ranked A in CORE. Acceptance rate: 15.6 %
  • BENTAHAR J., MAAMAR Z., BENSLIMANE J., THIRAN Ph. An argumentation framework for communities of web services. In IEEE Intelligent Systems, volume 22, issue 6, pages 75–83, 2008. Impact factor: 2.57. Ranked A in CORE.
  • MAAMAR Z., BENSLIMANE J., THIRAN Ph., GHEDIRA Ch., DUSTDAR S., SATTANATHAN S. Towards a Context-based Multi-Type Policy Approach for Web Services Composition, Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE), volume 62, issue 2, pp. 327-351, 2008. Impact factor: 1.717. Ranked A in CORE.
  • Softwares

 

Contributing projects

  • Communties of Web services (Similar Web services, Selection, Reputation, QoS monitoring, Agent-based Web services)
  • UsiXML (Model-driven approach for UI design, BPEL with user interactions)
  • E-health: health services monitoring for home caring

 

Senior members

 

Researchers