Systems-on-a-chip (SoC) represents a rupture on the traditional HPC infrastructure and started to be adopted together OS-level virtualization to provide services in Fog and Edge computing scenarios. In this work, we analyzed the performance of OS-level virtualization solutions - Linux Containers (LXC) and Docker - for HPC activities running in SoC systems in order to discover how OS-level virtualization and resource sharing affects the performance of virtualized environments. We evaluated CPU and (network and inter-process) communication performance taking in account two different scenarios: without communication between benchmark processes in execution and; with processes communication in a cooperative way. Results shows that both tools are suitable for HPC applications in SoC systems, despite the notice of some performance reduction due resource sharing.

Organizations need process data in real time. Cloud Computing is a common choice but it presents high latency on data transfer. As an alternative to reduces the latency, Edge computing based on System-on-a-Chip systems (SoC-based systems) can retain part of the data processing, allowing resource sharing among multiple requests through the use of OS-level virtualization. In this work, we analyze the performance of two popular OS-level virtualization solutions - Linux Containers (LXC) and Docker - for I/O-bound activities running in SoC systems, in order to understand how resource sharing affects the processing performance.

Pervasive Information System (PIS) represents a new generation of Information Systems (IS) available anytime, anywhere in a pervasive environment. In this paper, we propose to enhance PIS transparency and efficiency through a context-aware intentional service prediction approach. This approach allows anticipating user's future needs, offering and recommending him the most suitable service in a transparent and discrete way. We detail in this paper our service prediction mechanism and present encouraging experimental results demonstrating our proposition.

To specify process modeling language semantics and build corresponding enactment engine is a challenging problem. We propose a model driven approach which combines structural and event-based behavioral meta-modeling techniques. These specifications are transformed into a software architecture for a process enactment engine that exploits publish-subscribe patterns and message based asynchronous execution.

Information Systems (IS) have massively adopted service orientation by exposing their functionalities as services. With the evolution of mobile technologies (smartphones, 3G/4G networks, etc.), such systems are now confronted with a new pervasive environment for which they were not originally designed. Indeed, pervasive environments are characterized by their heterogeneity and dynamicity due to their evolving context and their need for transparency. None of these features are particularly considered in traditional IS designed for stable and controlled office environments. In our new vision for service-oriented Pervasive Information Systems (PIS), the user becomes the center of these systems. This paper presents a user-centric service-oriented vision for PIS based on a context-aware intentional approach, which considers the user intention and the context in which this intention arises as a guiding principle for service description, discovery, prediction and recommendation.

Building software tools to support a new modeling formalism is a complex, error prone and time consuming task. Previous experiences have taught us that maintainability and portability are key issues which are poorly supported when development is realized in and ad-hoc manner. To overcome these limitations, we are investigating a meta-model driven (MDE) approach for specifying at design phase not only the structural part of a process meta-model, but also its operational semantics in order to derive in a systematic manner an enactment engine. In this paper, we show how process model operational semantics are expressed by defining the architecture of an interactive enactment engine, and how the engine's behavior is formally specified using an event based notation. This approach includes an implementation step in which the engine behavior meta-model is transformed into a running system that is based on the publish/subscribe pattern.

Pervasive Information System (PIS) provides a new vision of Information System available anytime and anywhere. The users of these systems must evolve in a space of services, in which several services are offered to him. However, PIS should enhance the transparency and efficiency of the system. We believe that a user-centric vision is needed to ensure a transparent access to the frequently changing space of services regardless of how to perform it. In this paper, we propose a new approach of PIS, both context-aware and intentional called IPIS. In this approach, services are proposed in order to satisfy user's intention in a given context. Then, we propose a context-aware intentional service discovery mechanism. Such mechanism is based on an extension of OWL-S taking into account the notion of context and intention. We present in this paper IPIS platform. Then, we detail the proposed service discovery mechanism and present experimental results that demonstrate the advantage of using our proposition.

With the increasing growth in popularity of Web services, it is still difficult for business users to fully benefit from the SOA if it remains at the software level. The introduction of intentional services has been proposed to bridge the gap between low level, technical software-service descriptions and high level, strategic expressions of business needs for services. This proposal leverages on the SOA to an intentional level, and introduces the iSOA architecture. As current Web services technology based on UDDI and WSDL does not make use of this “intention” and therefore fails to address the problem of matching between capabilities of services and business user needs, we are interested in this work in extending existing approaches for the description of intentional services. Our proposed approach is an extension of the W3C recommendation on semantic annotation for Web services (SAWSDL). The semantic annotations added to the descriptor are based on intentional service ontology. This ontology is built upon the intentional service model and the goal model; it contains all necessary concepts for defining the goal and the intentional service. We introduce the intentional service descriptor to be published in an extended registry, and illustrate our work with an example.

With the increasing growth in popularity of Web services, discovering relevant Web services becomes a significant challenge. The introduction of intentional services has been proposed to bridge the gap between low level, technical softwareservice descriptions and high level, strategic expressions of business needs for services. Current Web Services technology based on UDDI and WSDL does not make use of this "intention" and therefore fails to address the problem of matching between capabilities of services and business user needs. In this work, we are interested in extending existing approaches for the description of intentional Services. Our proposed approach is an extension of the W3C recommendation on semantics for Web services (SAWSDL) and uses two types of ontologies: verb ontology representing syntactic and semantic concepts related to verbs, and product ontology, which is a Domain Ontology containing the concepts defining a common vocabulary for all objects manipulated in the business domain. We present how our approach can help publishing intentional services.

Despite its growing acceptance, Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) remains a computing mechanism to speed up the design of software applications by assembling ready-made software services. We argue that it is difficult for business people to fully benefit of SOC if it remains at the software level. The paper proposes a move toward a description of services in business terms, i.e., intentions and strategies to achieve them and to organize their publication, search, and composition on the basis of these descriptions. In this way, it leverages SOC to an intentional level, ISOC. We present ISM, the model to describe intentional services, and populate the service registry with their descriptions. We highlight its intention-driven perspective for service description, retrieval, and composition. Thereafter, we propose a methodology to determine intentional services that meet business goals and to publish them in the registry. Finally, the paper introduces a set of transformations to bridge the gap from the intentional level to the implementation one.

Services based applications are considered as support for both Business-to-Consumer interactions and Business-to-Business collaborations. However, Service Oriented Computing (SOC) remains at the software level and business people cannot exploit fully its benefits. In this context, the Intentional Service Oriented Architecture (ISOA) suggests a move from the function-driven Service Oriented Computing (SOC) to intention-driven SOC in order to provide service description understandable by business practitioners. Intentional services represented business oriented services in an intentional perspective, i.e. focusing on the goal it allows achieving rather on the functionality it performs. However, current intentional service omits the quality of service (QoS) dimension. In this paper, we focus on the quality elicitation process to apply for (1) capturing customers' Quality requirements and (2) describing the quality of service on an intentional service specification. We consider that the elicitation of the quality of a service during the requirements engineering (RE) phase can contribute to a customer-centered adaptability of service composition by selecting the service composition that will satisfy customers' quality requirements. The aim is to provide a goal driven approach to reason on quality for both documenting intentional service and discovering the quality requirements of business customers.

Over the last decade, a large number of Method Engineering (ME) approaches have been developed to adapt information system methods (ISM) to specific situations of projects at hand. However, ME has not been yet, widely spread in the professional world. Our belief is that limitations such as the lack of standards, the proposal of proprietary solutions and an excessive emphasis on engineering issues hamper the practical use of existing ME approaches. To overtake these limitations the position of this paper is to view a Method as a Service (MaaS) and to adapt the SOA architecture to make method and their components widely accessible on the Internet. The paper introduces the concept of MaaS and discusses the feasibility of its implementation using service-oriented technologies.

The connectivity generated by the Internet is opening opportunities of services composition. As a consequence, organizations are forming online alliances in order to deliver integrated value-added services. However, due to the lack of methodologies and tools, the development of such composite service across organizations is usually ad-hoc and poses problems especially in the identification, composition and orchestration issues. In this paper, we propose a goal driven approach to understand the needs of different organizations for a new added-value composite service and to model the cooperative process supporting this service provision in a declarative, goal driven manner. The goal model called Map, is then used for service elicitation, distribution and orchestration. The paper presents the approach and illustrates it with an e-government cooperative service.

This paper presents results from the first of two empirical studies which examine the effectiveness of guidelines for use case authoring. The ESPRIT 21.903 CREWS long-term research project has developed style and content guidelines for authoring use cases for requirements acquisition and validation. The effectiveness of these guidelines has been evaluated under different conditions. Results indicate that: the authoring guidelines improve the overall quality of the use case prose; the different guidelines work differently and with different levels of efficiency; and use cases are never entirely correctly written; thus, they can be systematically corrected. The paper details a qualitative and quantitative comparison between guided and non-guided use case authoring. It outlines lessons learned and implications for the CREWS software tools design.

Even though goal modeling is an effective approach to requirements engineering, it is known to present a number of difficulties in practice. The paper discusses these difficulties and proposes to couple goal modeling and scenario authoring to overcome them. Whereas existing techniques use scenarios to concretize goals, we use them to discover goals. Our proposal is to define enactable rules which form the basis of a software environment called L'Ecritoire to guide the requirements elicitation process through interleaved goal modeling and scenario authoring. The focus of the paper is on the discovery of goals from scenarios. The discovery process is centered around the notion of a requirement chunk (RC) which is a pair. The paper presents the notion of RC, the rules to support the discovery of RCs and illustrates the application of the approach within L'Ecritoire using the ATM example. It also evaluates the potential practical benefits expected from the use of the approach.