Alert based disaster notification and resource allocation

When a disaster occurs, timely actions in response to urgent requests conveyed by critical messages (known as alerts) constitute a vital key to effectiveness. These actions include notifying potentially affected parties so that they can take precautionary measures, gathering additional information, and requesting remedial actions and resource allocation. However, there are different types of disasters such as epidemic outbreaks, natural disasters, major accidents, and terrorist attacks. At the same time, there are also many different parties involved such as governments, healthcare institutions, businesses, and individuals. To address these problems, we introduce a Disaster Notification and Resource Allocation System (DNRAS) based on an Alert Management System (AMS) implemented through Web services. This unified platform supports timely interactions among various parties, focusing on notification and monitoring, resource enquiry and allocation, as well as the mobility of information. We detail the mechanisms of these functions in our system, illustrating the Web services interface parameters for communications and interoperability. We illustrate the applicability of our approach with an example of an epidemic outbreak and discuss the advantage of our approach with respect to various stakeholders of our system.     

Transform-based graph topology similarity metrics

Neural Computing and Applications - Graph signal processing has recently emerged as a field with applications across a broad spectrum of fields including brain connectivity networks, logistics and...     

Workflow View Based E-Contracts in a Cross-Organizational E-Services Environment

In an e-service environment, workflow involves not only a single organization but also a number of business partners. Therefore, workflow inter-operability in such an environment is an important issue for enacting workflows. In this article, we introduce our approach of using workflow views as a fundamental support for E-service workflow inter-operability and for controlled visibility of (sub-)workflows by external parties. We discuss various aspects of a workflow view, and their semantics with example usage. Furthermore, we develop a contract model based on workflow views and demonstrate how management of e-contracts can be facilitated, with an Internet start-up E-service inter-organization workflow example.     

Workflow View Driven Cross-Organizational Interoperability in a Web Service Environment

Workflow technology has recently been employed not only within businesses but also as a framework for implementing e-services over the Internet. Such e-services typically require collaborative enactment of workflows across multiple organizations. In this paper, we propose the use of workflow views as a fundamental support mechanism for the interoperability of multiple workflows across business organizations. We present a meta-model of workflow views and their semantics using a cross-organization workflow example based on a supply-chain e-service. We also formulate an interoperation model of workflow views and its consistency criteria. Finally, this paper presents an implementation of the model based on XML and contemporary Web services technologies, with adaptation to our E-ADOME workflow engine.     

End-to-end privacy control in service outsourcing of human intensive processes: A multi-layered Web service integration approach

With the recent adoption of service outsourcing, there have been increasing general demands and concerns for privacy control, in addition to basic requirement of integration. The traditional practice of a bulk transmission of the customers’ information to an external service provider is no longer adequate, especially in the finance and healthcare sectors. From our consultancy experience, application-to-application privacy protection technologies at the middleware layer alone are also inadequate to solve this problem, particularly when human service providers are heavily involved in the outsourced process. Therefore, we propose a layered architecture and a development methodology for enforcing end-to-end privacy control policies of enterprises over the export of personal information. We illustrate how Web services, augmented with updated privacy facilities such as Service Level Agreement (SLA), Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P), and the P3P Preference Exchange Language (APPEL), can provide a suitable interoperation platform for service outsourcing. We further develop a conceptual model and an interaction protocol to send only the required part of a customer’s record at a time. We illustrate our approach for end-to-end privacy control in service outsourcing with a tele-marketing case study and show how the software of the outsourced call center can be integrated effectively with the Web services of a bank to protect privacy.

Automated management of assets based on RFID triggered alarm messages

Asset management has long been considered as an important issue in enterprises. With the maturing of the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, automated management of assets (particularly for mobile ones) in an enterprise using RFID becomes practical. We have developed a RFID-based Asset Management System (RAMS) for a large telecommunication enterprise and this paper details how we maintain the whole life-cycle of assets from their acquisition, transfer, maintenance, audit taking, to retirement. Our system also displays spatial information of assets on an electronic geographical map using Web-based Geographical Information System (WebGIS) technology. Further asset security is improved by automated notification of asset movement and malfunction alarm through Short Message System (SMS). To improve the sending time of the alarm SMSs that have high priority, we also develop a Maximum Position First (MPF) speed-up algorithm for their scheduling. Our initial deployment shows that our system can improve the availability of assets and reduce the asset management cost dramatically.     

Alerts in mobile healthcare applications: requirements and pilot study

Recent advances in mobile technologies have greatly extended traditional communication technologies to mobile devices. At the same time, healthcare environments are by nature "mobile" where doctors and nurses do not have fixed workspaces. Irregular and exceptional events are generated in daily hospital routines, such as operations rescheduling, laboratory/examination results, and adverse drug events. These events may create requests that should be delivered to the appropriate person at the appropriate time. Those requests that are classified as urgent are referred to as alerts. Efficient routing and monitoring of alerts are keys to quality and cost-effective healthcare services. Presently, these are generally handled in an ad hoc manner. In this paper, we propose the use of a healthcare alert management system to handle these alert messages systematically. We develop a model for specifying alerts that are associated with medical tasks and a set of parameters for their routing. We design an alert monitor that matches medical staff and their mobile devices to receive alerts, based on the requirements of these alerts. We also propose a mechanism to handle and reroute, if necessary, an alert message when it has not been acknowledged within a specific deadline.     

A three-tier view-based methodology for M-services adaptation

With recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures, there are increasing demands for ubiquitous access to networked services. These services, generally known as m-services, extend supports from Web browsers on personal computers to handheld devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs. However, in general, the capabilities and bandwidth of these devices are significantly inferior to desktop computers over wired connections, which have been assumed by most Internet services. Instead of redesigning or adapting m-services in an ad-hoc manner for multiple platforms available in handheld devices, we propose a methodology for such adaptation based on three tiers: user interface views, data views, and process views. These views provide customization and help balance security and trust. User interface views provide alternative presentations of inputs and outputs. Data views summarize data over limited bandwidth and map heterogeneous data sources. In addition, we introduce a novel approach of applying process views to m-service adaptation, where mobile users may execute a more concise version or modified procedures of the original process. The process view also serves as the key mechanism for integrating user interface views and data views. In addition, we present a formal model on view consistency and integrity in our methodology. We demonstrate the feasibility of our methodology by extending a service negotiation subsystem into an m-service with multi-platform support.     

Ubiquitous enterprise service adaptations based on contextual user behavior

Recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures have created the demand for ubiquitous access to enterprise services from mobile handheld devices. Further, with the invention of new interaction devices, the context in which the services are being used becomes an integral part of the activity carried out with the system. Traditional human–computer interface (HCI) theories are now inadequate for developing these context-aware applications, as we believe that the notion of context should be extended to different categories: computing contexts, user contexts, and physical contexts for ubiquitous computing. This demands a new paradigm for system requirements elicitation and design in order to make good use of such extended context information captured from mobile user behavior. Instead of redesigning or adapting existing enterprise services in an ad hoc manner, we introduce a methodology for the elicitation of context-aware adaptation requirements and the matching of context-awareness features to the target context by capability matching. For the implementation of such adaptations, we propose the use of three tiers of views: user interface views, data views, and process views. This approach centers on a novel notion of process views to ubiquitous service adaptation, where mobile users may execute a more concise version or modified procedure of the original process according to their behavior under different contexts. The process view also serves as the key mechanism for integrating user interface views and data views. Based on this model, we analyze the design and implementation issues of some common ubiquitous access situations and show how to adapt them systematically into a context-aware application by considering the requirements of a ubiquitous enterprise information system.