When Web services are composed by linking service providers and requestors, the requestor’s requirements for a ”useful” service have to be matched against the service description offered by the provider. Among other things, service specifications (requirements or descriptions) may contain operation contracts specifying pre-conditions and effects of (required or provided) operations. In this pap...

Combinatorial auctions are increasingly used by large shippers as a method to establish service contracts with trucking companies. In order to achieve maximal benefits in these auctions, carriers must determine a bidding policy that can accurately evaluate the costs they will incur to fulfil these contracts and which can quickly examine many different possible options. In this paper, we analyze...

We propose a simple event calculus representation of contracts and a reactive belief-desire-intention agent architecture to enable the monitoring and execution of contract terms and conditions. We use the event calculus to deduce current and past obligations, obligation fulfilment and violation. By associating meta-information with the contracts, the agent is able to select which of its contrac...

Web Services are composed by linking together service providers and requestors. To ensure interoperability, the requestor’s requirements for a service have to be matched against a service description offered by the provider. Besides data types and operation signatures, this requires service specifications to include behavioral information, like contracts specifying preand post-conditions of (re...

This paper addresses the problem of production planning in a divergent lumber production environment. It aims at analyzing operational performance changes by introducing pull production flow control mechanisms into the production part of the lumber supply chain. An agent-based simulation evaluation is performed using an experimentation platform based on a distributed advanced planning and sched...

A management framework has been successfully utilized at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom to improve the process for developing and managing university-industry research collaborations. The framework has been part of a systematic approach to increase the level of research contracts from industrial sources, to strengthen the university’s academic base, and to diversify the provision...

Within the past few years, the variety of real-time multimedia streaming services on the Internet has grown steadily. Performance of streaming services is very sensitive to traffic congestion and results very often in poor service quality on today’s best effort Internet. Reasons include the lack of any traffic prioritization mechanisms on the network level and its dependence on the cooperation ...

We present formal and practical foundations for Web service composition framework with composition correctness guarantees. We introduce contractual composition model based on two isomorphic description models: Contract Definition Language (XML) and abstract machines (formal notation). Composition operators (patterns) are used to perform composition which is then formally verified with respect t...

Service Level Agreement or contract is a document that captures the functional and QoS levels agreed between the service provider and the consumer. In a service-oriented environment, individual services can be suitably composed to create a composite service. Whenever a new version of a composite service is created, for the same service consumer, in order to satisfy the change in consumer requir...

Architecture description languages define component interfaces with sequential contracts, which allow for static analysis of method call sequences in component or service interactions. However, component and service platforms like OSGi for Java do not provide mechanisms for the specification or enforcement of such sequential contracts. Thus the contracts are only defined in the documentation wh...