Abstract: The rise of virtualized and distributed infrastructures has led to new challenges to accomplish the effective use of compute resources through the design and orchestration of distributed applications. As legacy, monolithic applications are replaced with service-oriented applications, questions arise about the steps to be taken in order to maximize the usefulness of the infrastructures and to provide users with tools for the development and execution of distributed applications. One of the issues to be solved is the existence of multiple cloud solutions that are not interoperable, which forces the user to be locked to a specific provider or to continuously adapt applications. With the objective of simplifying the programmers challenges, ServiceSs provides a straightforward programming model and an execution framework that helps on abstracting applications from the actual execution environment. This paper presents how ServiceSs transparently interoperates with multiple providers implementing the appropriate interfaces to execute scientific applications on federated clouds.

Abstract: Product recalls are often painful to endure, but they also create important opportunities for learning. Although past research implicitly treats recalls as monolithic, our grounded theory investigation uncovered four types of recalls. Each type of recall provides insight about the adequacy of a firm's resource endowments and how a firm orchestrates the activities around its resources. For researchers, our study highlights the value of examining the confluence of recalls, resource gaps, and resource orchestration shortfalls to better understand the role of resources within supply chain management. For managers, our study highlights the value of knowing what type of recall a firm is facing and how to remedy the problems that led to the recall.

Abstract: Most governance is indirect, carried out through intermediaries. Governors do not govern targets directly, but bring in third parties to increase efficiency, effectiveness or legitimacy. Sometimes these third parties are "internal" to the governor, as in the case of government bureaucracies, but often they are "external", operating at some distance from the governor. It has become common to treat indirect governance as a process of delegation to be analyzed through Principal-Agent theory (the P-A approach). We agree that much indirect governance can be understood in this way. Yet not all indirect governance can be properly understood as P-A delegation. Governors do not always have hard control over their agents. Often they lack the authority or power to grant or rescind third parties’ authority (at acceptable cost), and rely instead on soft inducements to mobilize intermediaries and keep them in line. In a recent book (Abbott et al. 2014a), we develop Orchestrator-Intermediary theory (O-I theory) to analyze soft, indirect forms of governance. Here we introduce O-I theory and contrast it to P-A theory. We highlight the commonalities and differences between orchestration and delegation, discuss the governor’s calculus of choice between them, and consider the relative effectiveness of orchestration.

Abstract: The automation of application provisioning is one of the most important issues in Cloud Computing. The Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) supports automating provisioning by two different flavors: (i) declarative processing is based on interpreting application topology models by a runtime that infers provisioning logic whereas (ii) imperative processing employs provisioning plans that explicitly describe the provisioning tasks to be executed. Both flavors come with benefits and drawbacks. This paper presents a means to combine both flavors to resolve drawbacks and to profit from benefits of both worlds: we propose a standards-based approach to generate provisioning plans based on TOSCA topology models. These provisioning plans are workflows that can be executed fully automatically and may be customized by application developers after generation. We prove the technical feasibility of the approach by an end-to-end open source toolchain and evaluate its extensibility, performance, and complexity.

Abstract: This paper addresses automatic service composition (ASC) as a means to create new value-added services dynamically and automatically from existing services in service-oriented architecture and cloud computing environments. Manually composing services for relatively static applications has been successful, but automatically composing services requires advances in the semantics of processes and an architectural framework that can capture all stages of an application's lifecycle. A framework for ASC involves four stages: planning an execution workflow, discovering services from a registry, selecting the best candidate services, and executing the selected services. This four-stage architecture is the most widely used to describe ASC, but it is still abstract and incomplete in terms of scalable goal composition, property transformation for seamless automatic composition, and integration architecture. We present a workflow orchestration to enable nested multilevel composition for achieving scalability. We add to the four-stage composition framework a transformation method for abstract composition properties. A general model for the composition architecture is described herein and a complete and detailed composition framework is introduced using our model. Our ASC architecture achieves improved seamlessness and scalability in the integrated framework. The ASC architecture is analyzed and evaluated to show its efficacy.

Abstract: This paper explores opportunities for supporting the orchestration of innovation ecosystems, hence contributing to a fundamental capability in the networked world. We present analysis, evaluation and interpretation toward the objective of decision support and insights for transforming innovation ecosystems with a case study of EIT ICT Labs, a major initiative intended to turn Europe into a global leader in ICT innovation. Towards this, we use a data-driven, relationship-based and network centric approach to operationalise the ‘innovation ecosystems transformation framework’. Our results indicate that with coordinated and continuously improved use of visual and quantitative social network analysis, special characteristics, significant actors and connections in the innovation ecosystem can be revealed to develop new insights. We conclude that the IETF transformation framework can be used to develop shared vision and to support the orchestration of innovation ecosystem transformations.

Abstract: DevOps is an emerging paradigm to tightly integrate developers with operations personnel. This is required to enable fast and frequent releases in the sense of continuously delivering software. Users and customers of today's Web applications and mobile apps running in the Cloud expect fast feedback to problems and feature requests. Thus, it is a critical competitive advantage to be able to respond quickly. Beside cultural and organizational changes that are necessary to implement DevOps in practice, tooling is required to implement end-to-end automation of deployment processes. Automation is the key to efficient collaboration and tight integration between development and operations. The DevOps community is constantly pushing new approaches, tools, and open-source artifacts to implement such automated processes. However, as all these proprietary and heterogeneous DevOps automation approaches differ from each other, it is hard to integrate and combine them to deploy applications in the Cloud. In this paper we present a systematic classification of DevOps artifacts and show how different kinds of artifacts can be transformed toward TOSCA, an emerging standard in this field. This enables the seamless and interoperable orchestration of arbitrary artifacts to model and deploy application topologies. We validate the presented approach by a prototype implementation, show its practical feasibility by a detailed case study, and evaluate its performance.

Abstract: This chapter examines contemporary frameworks for analysing teacher expertise which are relevant to the integration of digital technologies into everyday teaching practice. It outlines three such frameworks, offering a critical appreciation of each, and then explores some commonalities, complementarities and contrasts between them: the Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework (Koehler & Mishra, Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(1), 2009); the Instrumental Orchestration framework (Trouche, L. (2005). Instrumental genesis, individual and social aspects. In D. Guin, K. Ruthven, & L. Trouche (Eds.), The didactical challenge of symbolic calculators: Turning a computational device into a mathematical instrument (pp. 197–230). New York: Springer.); and the Structuring Features of Classroom Practice framework (Ruthven, Education & Didactique, 3(1), 2009). To concretise the discussion, the use of digital technologies for algebraic graphing, a now well established form of technology use in secondary school mathematics, serves as an exemplary reference situation: each of the frameworks is illustrated through its application in a study of teacher expertise relating to this topic (respectively Richardson, Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(2), 2009; Drijvers, Doorman, Boon, Reed, & Gravemeijer, Educational Studies in Mathematics, 75(2), 213–234, 2010; Ruthven, Deaney, & Hennessy, Educational Studies in Mathematics, 71(3), 279–297, 2009).

Abstract: Cloud technology has the potential for widening access to high-performance computational resources for e-science research, but barriers to engagement with the technology remain high for many scientists. Workflows help overcome barriers by hiding details of underlying computational infrastructure and are portable between various platforms including cloud; they are also increasingly accepted within e-science research communities. Issues arising from the range of workflow systems available and the complexity of workflow development have been addressed by focusing on workflow interoperability, and providing customised support for different science communities. However, the deployments of such environments can be challenging, even where user requirements are comparatively modest. RESWO (Reconfigurable Environment Service for Workflow Orchestration) is a virtual platform-as-a-service cloud model that allows leaner customised environments to be assembled and deployed within a cloud. Suitable distributed computation resources are not always easily affordable and can present a further barrier to engagement by scientists. Desktop grids that use the spare CPU cycles available within an organisation are an attractively inexpensive type of infrastructure for many, and have been effectively virtualised as a cloud-based resource. However, hosts in this environment are volatile: leading to the tail problem, where some tasks become randomly delayed, affecting overall performance. To solve this problem, new algorithms have been developed to implement a cloudbursting scheduler in which durable cloud-based CPU resources may execute replicas of jobs that have become delayed. This paper describes experiences in the development of a RESWO instance in which a desktop grid is buttressed with CPU resources in the cloud to support the aspirations of bioscience researchers. A core component of the architecture, the cloudbursting scheduler, implements an algorithm to perform late job detection, cloud resource management and job monitoring. The experimental results obtained demonstrate significant performance improvements and benefits illustrated by use cases in bioscience research.

Abstract: Home and building automation (HBA) trends toward the Ambient Intelligence paradigm, which aims to autonomously coordinate and control appliances and subsystems in a given environment. Nevertheless, HBA is based on an explicit user-home interaction and basically enables static and predetermined scenarios. This paper proposes a more flexible multi-agent approach, leveraging semantic-based resource discovery and orchestration for HBA applications. Backward-compatible enhancements to EIB/KNX domotic standard allow to support the semantic characterization of user profiles and device functionalities, thus enabling: 1) negotiation of the most suitable home services/functionalities according to implicit and explicit user needs and 2) device-driven interaction for adapting the environment to context evolution. A power-management problem in HBA is presented as a case study to better clarify the proposal and assess its effectiveness.

Abstract: How to deploy and flexibly manage complex multi-service applications in the cloud is one of the emerging problems in the cloud era. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) [1] aims at contributing to solve this problem by providing a language to describe and manage complex cloud applications in a portable, vendor-agnostic way. The objective of this paper is twofold: To provide a compact and easy-to-access introduction to TOSCA, and to discuss possible research directions for TOSCA.

Abstract: The modern information systems on the Internet are often implemented as composite services built from multiple atomic services. These atomic services have their interfaces publicly available while their inner structure is unknown. The quality of the composite service is dependent on both the availability of each atomic service and their appropriate orchestration. In this paper, we present LUCS, a formal model for predicting the availability of atomic web services that enhances the current state-of-the-art models used in service recommendation systems. LUCS estimates the service availability for an ongoing request by considering its similarity to prior requests according to the following dimensions: the user's and service's geographic location, the service load, and the service's computational requirements. In order to evaluate our model, we conducted experiments on services deployed in different regions of the Amazon cloud. For each service, we varied the geographic origin of its incoming requests as well as the request frequency. The evaluation results suggest that our model significantly improves availability prediction when all of the LUCS input parameters are available, reducing the prediction error by 71 percent compared to the current state-of-the-art.

Abstract: Recent advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Web of Things (WoT) accompany a smart life where real world objects, including sensing devices, are interconnected with each other. The Web representation of smart objects empowers innovative applications and services for various domains. To accelerate this approach, Web of Objects (WoO) focuses on the implementation aspects of bringing the assorted real world objects to the Web applications. In this paper; we propose an emergency fire management system in the WoO infrastructure. Consequently, we integrate the formation and management of Virtual Objects (ViO) which are derived from real world physical objects and are virtually connected with each other into the semantic ontology model. The charm of using the semantic ontology is that it allows information reusability, extensibility and interoperability, which enable ViOs to uphold orchestration, federation, collaboration and harmonization. Our system is context aware, as it receives contextual environmental information from distributed sensors and detects emergency situations. To handle a fire emergency, we present a decision support tool for the emergency fire management team. The previous fire incident log is the basis of the decision support system. A log repository collects all the emergency fire incident logs from ViOs and stores them in a repository.

Abstract: This article presents a plastic architecture for the advanced 5G infrastructure based on the latest advances of SDN, NFV and edge computing. The novel approach consists of three levels of control, i.e. Device, Edge and Orchestration Controllers, fully decupled from the user plane and backwards compatible to current and future 3GPP releases. The proposed control layers implement a unified security, connection, mobility and routing management for 5G networks. The new concept of SDN-based connectivity between virtualized network functions (applications) enables multidimensional carrier grade communication paths without the utilization of tunneling protocols. Our architectural solution dramatically reduces the end-to-end latency for mission critical type of traffic, yet guarantying a large degree of freedom, dependability and reliability, which are the most important and stringent requirements of 5G.

Abstract: End-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning for supporting diverse application requirements is a challenging problem in the Internet. Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) in the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm offers a promising approach to addressing this challenge. In this paper, the author first presents a framework for applying NaaS in SDN that enables network service orchestration for supporting inter-domain end-to-end QoS. Then a high-level abstraction model for network service capabilities is proposed and a technique for determining required bandwidth in network services to achieve QoS guarantee is developed. Network calculus is employed in the proposed modeling and analysis, which makes the developed techniques general and applicable to networking systems consisting of heterogeneous autonomous domains.

Abstract: In a dynamic world, information technology (IT) systems are expected to provide capabilities that can be used to address evolving needs. Recent work has adopted notions of capability to model how IT systems meet enterprise goals. In this paper we draw upon theories of dynamic capabilities from strategic management to model enterprise capabilities, reason on their development choices, orchestration alternatives and deployment configurations. The modeling approach builds uponi* and proposes to model capabilities as actors.i* modeling supports reasoning about intangible and tangible requirements of capabilities and trade-offs among alternatives. We illustrate with examples from the insurance industry. The examples show how social and non-functional dependencies among capabilities affect decisions about development, orchestration and configuration alternatives.

Abstract: Web service is a widely used implementation technique under the paradigm of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). A service-based system is subjected to continuous evolution and regression testing is required to check whether new faults have been introduced. Based on the current scientific work of web service regression testing, this survey aims to identify gaps in current research and suggests some promising areas for further study. To this end, we performed a broad automatic search on publications in the selected electronic databases published from 2000 to 2013. Through our careful review and manual screening, a total of 30 papers have been selected as primary studies for answering our research questions. We presented a qualitative analysis of the findings, including stakeholders, challenges, standards, techniques, and validations employed in these primary studies. Our main results include the following: (1) Service integrator is the key stakeholder that largely impacts how regression testing is performed. (2) Challenges of cost and autonomy issues have been studied heavily. However, more emphasis should be put on the other challenges, such as test timing, dynamics, privacy, quota constraints, and concurrency issues. (3) Orchestration-based services have been largely studied, while little attention has been paid to either choreography-based services or semantic-based services. (4) An appreciable amount of web service regression testing techniques have been proposed, including 48 test case prioritization techniques, 10 test selection techniques, two test suite minimization techniques, and another collaborative technique. (5) Many regression test techniques have not been theoretically proven or experimentally analyzed, which limits their application in large-scale systems. We believe that our survey has identified gaps in current research work and reveals new insights for the future work.

Abstract: The increasing popularity of social interactions and geotagged, user-generated content has transformed the television viewing experience from laid-back video watching behavior into a "lean-forward"' socially engaged experience. This article describes a multiscreen, social TV system integrated with social sense via a second screen as a novel paradigm for content consumption. This new application is built upon the authors' cloud-centric media platform, which provides on-demand virtual machines for content platform services, including media distribution, storage, and processing. The media platform is also integrated with a Big Data social platform that crawls and mines social data related to the media content. Specifically, this new social TV approach consists of three key subsystems: interactive TV, social sense, and multiscreen orchestration. Interactive TV implements a cloud-based, social TV system, offering rich social features; social sense discovers the geolocation-aware public perception and knowledge related to the media content; and multiscreen orchestration provides an intuitive and user-friendly human-computer interface to combine the two other subsystems, fusing the TV viewing experience with social perception. The authors have built a proof-of-concept demo over a private cloud at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Feature verification and performance comparisons demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach in transforming the TV viewing experience.

Abstract: While global solution networks are among the most promising ways to address global problems, they do not necessarily emerge spontaneously. Often, organizational entrepreneurs must “orchestrate” the creation and development of GSNs, providing information to potential participants, catalyzing and encouraging cooperation, building linkages and providing diverse resources, as well as shaping GSN activities. Yet orchestration remains under-utilized: of 223 GSNs we surveyed, fewer than a quarter were products of orchestration. This paper explains how institutional innovators have initiated, supported, and shaped network solutions to global problems, and offers a practical guide to orchestration for organizational entrepreneurs.

Abstract: st Century Smart Manufacturing (SM) is manufacturing in which all information is available when it is needed, where it is needed, and in the form it is most useful (1,2) to drive optimal actions and responses. The 21st Century SM enterprise is data driven, knowledge enabled, and model rich with visibility across the enterprise (internal and external) such that all operating actions are determined and executed proactively by applying the best information and a wide range of performance metrics. SM also encompasses the sophisticated practice of generating and applying data-driven Manufacturing Intelligence throughout the lifecycle of design, engineering, planning and production. Workflow is foundational in orchestrating dynamic, adaptive, actionable decision-making through the contextualization and understanding of data. Pervasive deployment of architecturally consistent workflow applications creates the enterprise environment for manufacturing intelligence. Workflow as a Service (WfaaS) software allows task orchestration and facilitates workflow services and manage environment to integrate interrelated task components. Apps, and toolkits are required to assemble customized SM applications on a common, standards based workflow architecture and deploy on infrastructure that is accessible by small, medium, and large companies. Incorporating dynamic decision-making steps through contextualization of real-time data requires scientific workflow software such as Kepler. By combining workflow, private cloud computing and web services technologies, we built a prototype test bed to test a furnace temperature control model.

Abstract: In this paper, we describe the Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) with its main features and services. Also, we introduce the recent advances of the VCL system and its usage in research and education. The VCL is a cloud computing system that has been optimized for the educational services and research needs of the academic community. VCL is an open source cloud orchestration stack with a self-service portal that currently supports a large number of customers and commercial cloud, or cloud-related services and solutions. It was developed by NCSU with support from IBM Corporation. VCLs promise to support researchers and students in all academic levels to fulfill all their computing needs. In addition to supporting students and faculty members at NC State University and other UNC System universities, the NC VCL now also supports students at several NC community colleges. Also, we introduced cloud computing and service science related activities and achievements at Jordan University of Science and Technology.

Abstract: Introduction. This paper presents the vision of the Control Exchange Point (CXP) architectural model. The model is motivated by the inflexibility and ossification of today’s inter-domain routing system, which renders critical QoS-constrained end-toend (e2e) network services difficult or simply impossible to provide. CXPs operate on slices of ISP networks and are built on basic Software Defined Networking (SDN) principles, such as the clean decoupling of the routing control plane from the data plane and the consequent logical centralization of control. The main goal of the architectural model is to provide e2e services with QoS constraints across domains. This is achieved through defining a new type of business relationship between ISPs, which advertise partial paths (so-called pathlets [7]) with specific properties, and the orchestrating role of the CXPs, which dynamically stitch them together and provision e2e QoS. Revenue from value-added services flows from the clients of the CXP to the ISPs participating in the service. The novelty of the approach is the combination of SDN programmability and dynamic path stitching techniques for inter-domain routing, which extends the value proposition of SDN over multiple domains. We first describe the challenges related to e2e service provision with the current inter-domain routing and peering model, and then continue with the benefits of our approach. Subsequently, we describe the CXP model in detail and report on an initial feasibility analysis. Motivation and Challenges. Complexity and ossification: The notorious complexity of the inter-domain routing system renders its management difficult and error-prone, leading to various inefficiencies such as suboptimal inter-domain paths. Indicatively, 60% of all Internet paths today are suffering from triangle inequality violations [9]. The current ossification of the system, hindering the introduction of new solutions, aggravates the problem further. Highly popular inter-domain services, such as highdefinition e2e real-time video streaming, already test the limits of the status quo, or are simply impossible. This is because such services require tight coordination along entire chains of ISPs demanding QoS provisioning. More advanced and mission-critical services, such as telemedical applications, are usually out of the question.

Abstract: Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm to logically centralize the network control plane and automate the configuration of individual network elements. At the same time, in Cloud Data Centers (DCs), even though network and server resources converge over the same infrastructure and typically under a single administrative entity, disjoint control mechanisms are used for their respective management. In this paper, we propose a unified server-network control mechanism for converged ICT environments. We present a SDN-based orchestration framework for live Virtual Machine (VM) management where server hypervisors exploit temporal network information to migrate VMs and minimize the network-wide communication cost of the resulting traffic dynamics. A prototype implementation is presented and Mininet is used to evaluate the impact of diverse orchestration algorithms.

Abstract: The orchestration of technology-enhanced learning situations (especially collaborative ones), that involve both Virtual Learning Environments and Web 2.0 tools (what some authors call Distributed Learning Environments, or DLEs) is often complex and burdensome, given the heterogeneous array of resources involved. In this paper we explore how GLUE!-PS (a system for the deployment and run-time management of learning designs across DLEs) supports orchestration, through its teacher usage in three authentic university courses and one teacher workshop. Our mixed methods evaluation reveals that GLUE!-PS supports multiple aspects of orchestration, especially the efficient implementation of teacher learning designs, the ability for useful and intuitive adaptations in run-time, and its adequacy to pragmatic restrictions that teachers face in authentic settings. Aside from the implications for the evaluated system itself, this article discusses the need for evaluations that address orchestration's multiple facets, and provides a practical example of such multi-faceted evaluation of educational systems, in order to assess their potential for adoption and sustainability in authentic settings.

Abstract: The integration of digital tools in mathematics education is considered both promising and problematic. To deal with this issue, notions of webbing and instrumental orchestration are developed. However, the two seemed to be disconnected, and having different cultural and theoretical roots. In this article, we investigate the distinct and joint journeys of these two theoretical perspectives. Taking some key moments in recent history as points of de- parture, we conclude that the two perspectives share an importance attributed to digital tools, and that initial differences, such as different views on the role of digital tools and the role of the teacher, have become more nuances. The two approaches share future chal- lenges to the organization of teachers'collaborative work and their use of digital resources.

Abstract: SUMMARY The behavior of composed Web services depends on the results of the invoked services; unexpected behavior of one of the invoked services can threat the correct execution of an entire composition. This paper proposes an event-based approach to black-box testing of Web service compositions based on event sequence graphs, which are extended by facilities to deal not only with service behavior under regular circumstances (i.e., where cooperating services are working as expected) but also with their behavior in undesirable situations (i.e., where cooperating services are not working as expected). Furthermore, the approach can be used independently of artifacts (e.g., Business Process Execution Language) or type of composition (orchestration/choreography). A large case study, based on a commercial Web application, demonstrates the feasibility of the approach and analyzes its characteristics. Test generation and execution are supported by dedicated tools. Especially, the use of an enterprise service bus for test execution is noteworthy and differs from other approaches. The results of the case study encourage to suggest that the new approach has the power to detect faults systematically, performing properly even with complex and large compositions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.