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The increasing population along with water scarcity give rise to water management practices. Water scarcity can be eradicated by wastewater treatment that would in turn prevent contamination of water bodies. One of the challenges in wastewater treatment is to efficiently transport and treat the sewage in a Sewage Treatment Plant (STP). Most of the existing STPs in closed campuses of Indian scenarios such as academic institutions, industries, and residential apartments employ several pumping stations in a campus and pump motors in each station that pump sewage to STP for treatment. Manual operation of such motors would lead to sump overflows that negatively impact public health and sanitation. Therefore, an IoT-based system for monitoring and controlling sewage flow is proposed in this paper that uses water level sensors and prevents sewage overflows in pumping station sumps, resulting in the utilisation of all the collected sewage for treatment. Since each campus might have different communication networks such as GPRS, WiFi, RF, or Ethernet, the proposed system is designed to work with any network. The proposed system was tested in the college campus with three pumping stations. Moreover, a test bed was simulated and tested with 100 pumping stations. It is observed that the proposed approach prevents sewage overflows in various scenarios with different constraints.

Big data applications play an important role in real time data processing. Apache Spark is a data processing framework with in-memory data engine that quickly processes large data sets. It can also distribute data processing tasks across multiple computers, either on its own or in tandem with other distributed computing tools. Spark’s in-memory processing cannot share data between the applications and hence, the RAM memory will be insufficient for storing petabytes of data. Alluxio is a virtual distributed storage system that leverages memory for data storage and provides faster access to data in different storage systems. Alluxio helps to speed up data intensive Spark applications, with various storage systems. In this work, the performance of applications on Spark as well as Spark running over Alluxio have been studied with respect to several storage formats such as Parquet, ORC, CSV, and JSON; and four types of queries from Star Schema Benchmark (SSB). A benchmark is evolved to suggest the suitability of Spark Alluxio combination for big data applications. It is found that Alluxio is suitable for applications that use databases of size more than 2.6 GB storing data in JSON and CSV formats. Spark is found suitable for applications that use storage formats such as parquet and ORC with database sizes less than 2.6GB.

An Internet of Things (IoT) are ‘things’ that com-municate in different networks. An IoT gateway which provides device connectivity and protocol translation is often expensive in case of small scale academic projects. In view of this, an Emulated IoT gateway is proposed that emulates the IoT gateway using a local computer in a cost effective way. The sensor data sent from sensor nodes connected in cellular network (GPRS), WiFi, RF, Bluetooth or in LAN using Ethernet are collected and successfully processed in cloud server.

Accurate prediction of resources is a cliallenging problem in any environment. Effective provisioning of resources for on-premise applications with varied performance requirements requires an accurate prediction of resources. Towards this objective, a prediction model, namely. Multilayer Perceptron has been proposed in this work. The prediction model is trained using a dataset generated from TPC-W benchmark based online application and tested for new requirements. Its prediction accuracy has been compared with that of two other prediction models such as Linear Regression and Support Vector Regression. The Multilayer perceptron model is found to exhibit a better accuracy of 91.8 percentage.

Service orientation is gaining momentum in distributed software applications, mainly because it facilitates interoperability. Service composition has been acknowledged as a promising approach to meet the user demands, whenever a single service cannot fulfill the needs. It is essential to ensure the reliability of the composed service, as the component services are offered by multiple providers from different organizations. The behavioral or transactional properties of component services determine the reliability of the composite service. The guaranteed values on transactional properties of every service must be recorded in a contract as agreed by a consumer and a provider, in order to avoid unpredictable performance in service provisioning. The approach proposed in this paper enables generation of contracts at runtime along with transactional guarantees, based on the frequently changing business requirements of service consumers. The approach is experimented with a case study of Scan Report Generation in healthcare domain.

A key challenge in B2B and B2C applications involving dynamic composition of workflow activities is to ensure their reliable execution, in view of frequent failures in the internet environment where a composed service is executed. Existing approaches for transactional coordination of composite web services, consider forward and backward recovery alone, in order to maintain consistency in the case of failures. However, while achieving reliable execution, service cancellability is important due to the predominance of long running processes in business applications and frequently changing user requirements and business policies. If the execution of a long running process is not cancelled in the case of a changed requirement, the completion of the process results in wastage of resources and the outcome may no longer be useful. Hence, a transactional coordination framework named as Tx-FAITH is proposed to handle the cancellation recovery under the external interruption and cancellation of transactions. Tx-FAITH considers hierarchically composed web services whose components are recursively nested to form a composition and adapts a coordination approach based on context information. The proposed coordination and recovery approach when tested with 200 simultaneous users and with a database size of 0.35 million records, incurs only 10 seconds to process a request.

Reliability is one of the main challenges while composing web services. Due to the inherent heterogeneity of web services, it is important to predict the behaviour of the overall composite service. Existing works that deal with reliable web service composition consider only three basic transactional properties such as pivot, retriable, and compensatable. When a service fails, its results can be ignored if it is pivot; it can be retried until it succeeds if it is retriable; or the previously completed services must be rolled back if they are compensatable, in order to achieve reliable execution. In general, business applications involve long running services. Service execution must be interrupted to adapt to dynamically changing user preferences since execution of the service to completion with the older requirements is no longer meaningful. Hence, service composition requires additional transactional support beyond the three transactional properties. To address this need, we introduce cancelable services and investigate the transactional properties of composite services that involve cancelable component services. The valid compositions, which result in a reliable execution are identified and formally verified.

In Service-Oriented Computing (SOC), a business transaction comprises of several web services provided by multiple enterprises. The transactional behaviour of individual web services must be considered for service selection so that the composition of web services results in a reliable execution. It is difficult for a business analyst to envisage the desired business policies of a process in terms of transactional properties of the corresponding service. Hence, an abstract mechanism that enables the business analyst to specify the transactional properties in a simple manner must be introduced. Towards this objective, it is proposed to express the transactional properties in terms of the recoverability of services. The transactional web services are grouped into different levels of recoverability based on their recovery cost. The estimated recovery costs are empirically verified and validated.

With the advent of web services, Quality of Service (QoS) serves as a benchmark to differentiate various available services and their providers. QoS characterizes the nonfunctional aspects of a web service and plays a crucial role in the area of dynamic composition of web services. There have been many works on QoS-based negotiation and service selection in deriving an appropriate web service composition. However, automated negotiation is more complex in the context of composite services. The negotiation between a service provider for a composite service and a requester has to be translated into complex one-to-many negotiations that involve the providers of the component services. In this context, this paper proposes an approach, namely, QUANCE that automates the negotiation of QoS parameter values between the service consumer and the service provider of a composite service in a service-oriented environment. This approach is tested using scenarios of an e-governance application that caters to the various operations related to vehicle registration.

Policies of engineering education system, learning styles of most engineering students, and teaching practices of engineering professors are incompatible in several dimensions. These mismatches lead to poor student performance, professorial frustration, and the society looses many potentially talented engineers. Most of the students focus on the results and recruitments. Unfortunately, focus towards acquiring knowledge takes a back seat. In consequence, students become bored and inattentive in class which further affects the quality of the student. Towards improving the quality of engineering graduates, this paper advocates for a paradigm shift in the mindset of education providers, policy makers, recruiters, parents, and future technocrats, and proposes a few practices for strengthening the knowledge acquisition process.

Transactions are one of the basic building blocks in all business applications. The notion of a transaction originated in the seventies and has evolved over time to cater to complex business applications that are distributed, heterogeneous, and loosely coupled. The literature on transaction models is extensive and most of them illustrate the ideas with case studies on different applications. Since the applications are different, it is diffcult to understand the limitations of the models for the general case. However, such an understanding is essential in order to develop a new transaction model that caters to the changing business requirements. This motivated us to investigate the evolution of existing transaction models and to analyze their shortcomings using a case study, Vehicle Registration system. A taxonomy of the various transaction models based on conceptual evolution has also been presented. Further, the suitability of SOA to large scale e-governance applications and the need for developing better SOA Governance transaction frameworks have been demonstrated.

Monitoring composition of web services is important to ensure provisioning of a valid business process. Most of the existing works on service monitoring focused either on QoS violations or service interactions during execution of services that are statically composed. However, dynamic composition of services wherein the services are discovered and composed at runtime based on user requirements and outcome of previously composed services is significant for business applications with frequently changing user requirements and business policies. In such scenarios, the order in which the services are composed must be monitored to comply with business polices. Otherwise, the composition leads to incorrect and inconsistent results. To address this issue, a runtime monitoring framework is proposed in this paper that monitors composition order of services that are dynamically composed, validates it using predefined rules and initiates corrective actions in case of violations from rules. The web services and the rules for composition flow have been expressed as event calculus axioms that are useful in validating the composition order. The performance of the proposed framework has been assessed and it is found out that it introduces only a marginal overhead on turnaround time of the user request as compared to absence of monitoring.

The popularity of web services has largely influenced the way in which enterprise business is conducted. Since web services enable easy accessibility of data, dynamic connections, and relatively less human interventions, ensuring confidentiality and integrity of data that is transmitted via web services protocols becomes more significant. If a single service does not fulfill the service consumer requirements, it is necessary to compose several web services, which together satisfy the user requirements. Security attacks occur on SOAP messages that are communicated among web services while accessing a service or during service composition. Most of the existing works on web services security have provided solutions only for ensuring client authentication, confidentiality, and integrity of information in network layer and not in application layer. WS-Security and XML based web service security also provides message layer security in network layer and not in application layer. Hence, a novel approach that prevents the message alteration attack on SOAP messages and a security solution that detects and overcomes XML injection attack have been proposed in this paper. Our approach uses pluggable APIs in the service provider side and security services in the middleware side. The attacks were simulated and non-vulnerability of the proposed solutions to these attacks have been verified.

The Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) is a standard for business process modeling which provides notation for expressing complex business process semantics in the form of a workflow. The workflow represents an abstraction of real work as a sequence of connected steps. When multiple organizations are involved in offering a service to the consumers, workflow can be used to define the execution order of the processes. Whenever, a workflow involves a composition of multiple services offered by different organizations, the behaviour of any given service may affect other services and the overall reliability of the workflow. A transactional workflow is considered reliable, if its execution satisfies the Failure Atomicity Requirements (FAR). For example, failure of a payment service requires undoing the order processing service that has been completed already. Thus, it is necessary to represent behavioural dependencies among the constituent services of the workflow and generate its FAR which is useful for checking the reliability of the workflow. However, existing workflow generation tools and methodologies do not model the transactional workflows which depict the transactional dependencies among the services involved in the workflows. Towards fulfilling this need, the present work proposes a pattern based modeling approach to construct transactional workflows. This approach involves the identification of FAR of each service in the workflow.

In Web services paradigm, whenever a single service cannot meet the requirements of a user, many services need to be composed that can collectively satisfy the user expectations. Existing research focuses on service selection based solely on non-functional properties for composition, whenever there is more than one service provider who is offering services with similar functionality. However, the transaction behavioral aspects of a service, which ensure the reliability of a composite service has not been considered till now. Currently, the transactional properties cannot be represented as a part of service definition. To address this need, it is proposed to specify transactional properties using WS-Policy language and integrate it with the service definition. The transactional requirements of service consumer are matched with transactional policies of service providers and the correct set of services is selected for composition that will result in reliable execution. This approach is experimented with a case study of Scan Report Generation process in health care domain.

Automated Web service composition is currently one of the major research problems in the area of service oriented computing. Web services facilitate seamless business-to-business integration. Whenever it becomes difficult to find a single service for a particular task, a composition of services that can together perform the given task, is required. In general, this is accomplished using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). However, the requirements of the users are frozen before the system locates, composes and executes the required services. The response is not personalized to the user environment. Further, conventional web services cannot handle the context and the context aware web services need to contain the context processing logic. Hence, we propose a framework for dynamic composition of Web services using templates in SOA. This framework allows maximum flexibility for the users to change their requirements at runtime and provides adaptive composition irrespective of whether a web service is context enabled or not.

The Service Level Agreements (SLA) are e-Contracts that need to be established among business partners and monitored to ensure that web services comply with the agreed Quality of Service (QoS) values. Existing approaches deal with automated contract generation for simple Web Services. Many business enterprises implement their core business service, while outsourcing other application services. When a single service cannot satisfy the user requirements, multiple Web Services must be composed which can together fulfill the request. Therefore, establishment of SLA among the component services of a composite service and the users becomes important. Hence, we have designed and implemented a framework for generating and monitoring e-Contracts for business applications involving composite Web Services. We have demonstrated our work using the scenarios of an Insurance application. A template based approach is used for composing the Web Services dynamically.

Web service composition, that recursively constructs a composite web service out of the existing services based on a business workflow has been acknowledged as a promising approach to meet the user demands, whenever a single service alone cannot fulfil the needs. In view of frequent failures in the internet environment where the composed service is executed, reliability of the composed service must be ensured. The reliability is determined by the behavioral or transactional properties of component services. The component services for each activity of the workflow must be selected based on their behavior so that their execution results in a consistent termination. Service selection must happen at run-time in order to consider the services available in a service registry at the time of execution. Towards this need, a dynamic transaction aware web service selection approach is proposed in this paper. Further, whenever user requirements change, a long running transaction must be interrupted and cancelled which is not addressed by any of the existing works. Hence, service cancellability property is proposed in this paper and incorporated in the dynamic selection approach. The overhead of the proposed run-time selection approach is assessed and the impact of increased services on its performance is also measured.