A Model-Based Monitoring Architecture for Heterogeneous Enterprise Services and Information Systems

Runtime management of distributed information systems is a complex and costly activity. One of the main challenges that must be addressed is obtaining a complete and updated view of all the managed runtime resources. This article presents a monitoring architecture for heterogeneous and distributed information systems. It is composed of two elements: an information model and an agent infrastructure. The model negates the complexity and variability of these systems and enables the abstraction over non-relevant details. The infrastructure uses this information model to monitor and manage the modeled environment, performing and detecting changes in execution time. The agents infrastructure is further detailed and its components and the relationships between them are explained. Moreover, the proposal is validated through a set of agents that instrument the JEE Glassfish application server, paying special attention to support distributed configuration scenarios.

Toward a planning model for the peruvian university system as a competitive strategy.

University education in Peru is based on models of teacher-centered teaching and a conception of knowledge which is closed and static and under the dominance of an information model now overwhelmed by multiple factors hastened by international change. The worlds most prestigious universities have chosen cultural diversity as a sign of quality and are hence interested in the mobility of teachers and students through exchange and cooperation with foreign educational institutions. These universities respond more effectively to pressure from the international business sector, better satisfy training demands, introduce new information and communication technologies into education and research and have improved administration and management structures. While there is progress, the university system in Peru is a planning model defined "as a discipline that seeks to respond to the needs of an organization defined by new cultural and social models" (A. Cazorla, et al 2007).This paper studies the non-Euclidean thinking of planning and development of John Friedmann (2001). Based on the four domains of social practice, it proposes a planning model for Peruvian universities that meets international requirements.

An Autonomous Engine for Services Configuration and Deployment.

The runtime management of the infrastructure providing service-based systems is a complex task, up to the point where manual operation struggles to be cost effective. As the functionality is provided by a set of dynamically composed distributed services, in order to achieve a management objective multiple operations have to be applied over the distributed elements of the managed infrastructure. Moreover, the manager must cope with the highly heterogeneous characteristics and management interfaces of the runtime resources. With this in mind, this paper proposes to support the configuration and deployment of services with an automated closed control loop. The automation is enabled by the definition of a generic information model, which captures all the information relevant to the management of the services with the same abstractions, describing the runtime elements, service dependencies, and business objectives. On top of that, a technique based on satisfiability is described which automatically diagnoses the state of the managed environment and obtains the required changes for correcting it (e.g., installation, service binding, update, or configuration). The results from a set of case studies extracted from the banking domain are provided to validate the feasibility of this proposa

An architecture for a heterogeneous private IaaS management system

Cloud computing and, more particularly, private IaaS, is seen as a mature technology with a myriad solutions tochoose from. However, this disparity of solutions and products has instilled in potential adopters the fear of vendor and data lock-in. Several competing and incompatible interfaces and management styles have given even more voice to these fears. On top of this, cloud users might want to work with several solutions at the same time, an integration that is difficult to achieve in practice. In this paper, we propose a management architecture that tries to tackle these problems; it offers a common way of managing several cloud solutions, and an interface that can be tailored to the needs of the user. This management architecture is designed in a modular way, and using a generic information model. We have validated our approach through the implementation of the components needed for this architecture to support a sample private IaaS solution: OpenStack

Desarrollo de un servicio de enlace entre HL7 RIM y terminologías médicas

Hoy día, en la era post genómica, los ensayos clínicos de cáncer implican la colaboración de diversas instituciones. El análisis multicéntrico y retrospectivo requiere de métodos avanzados para garantizar la interoperabilidad semántica. En este escenario, el objetivo de los proyectos EURECA e INTEGRATE es proporcionar una infraestructura para compartir conocimientos y datos de los ensayos clínicos post genómicos de cáncer. Debido en gran parte a la gran complejidad de los procesos colaborativos de las instituciones, provoca que la gestión de una información tan heterogénea sea un desafío dentro del área médica. Las tecnologías semánticas y las investigaciones relacionadas están centradas en búsqueda de conocimiento de la información extraída, permitiendo una mayor flexibilidad y usabilidad de los datos extraidos. Debido a la falta de estándares adoptados por estas entidades y la complejidad de los datos procedentes de ensayos clínicos, una capacidad semántica es esencial para asegurar la integración homogénea de esta información. De otra manera, los usuarios finales necesitarán conocer cada modelo y cada formato de dato de las instituciones participantes en cada estudio. Para proveer de una capa de interoperabilidad semántica, el primer paso es proponer un\Common Data Model" (CDM) que represente la información a almacenar, y un \Core Dataset" que permita el uso de múltiples terminologías como vocabulario compartido. Una vez que el \Core Dataset" y el CDM han sido seleccionados, la manera en la que realizar el mapping para unir los conceptos de una terminología dada al CDM, requiere de una mecanismo especial para realizar dicha labor. Dicho mecanismo, debe definir que conceptos de diferentes vocabularios pueden ser almacenados en determinados campos del modelo de datos, con la finalidad de crear una representación común de la información. El presente proyecto fin de grado, presenta el desarrollo de un servicio que implementa dicho mecanismo para vincular elementos de las terminologías médicas SNOMED CT, LOINC y HGNC, con objetos del \Health Level 7 Reference Information Model" (HL7 RIM). El servicio propuesto, y nombrado como TermBinding, sigue las recomendaciones del proyecto TermInfo del grupo HL7, pero también se tienen en cuenta cuestiones importantes que surgen al enlazar entre las citadas terminologas y el modelo de datos planteado. En este proceso de desarrollo de la interoperabilidad semántica en ensayos clínicos de cáncer, los datos de fuentes heterogéneas tienen que ser integrados, y es requisito que se deba habilitar una interfaz de acceso homogéneo a toda esta información. Para poder hacer unificar los datos provenientes de diferentes aplicaciones y bases de datos, es esencial representar todos estos datos de una manera canónica o normalizada. La estandarización de un determinado concepto de SNOMED CT, simplifica las recomendaciones del proyecto TermInfo del grupo HL7, utilizadas para poder almacenar cada concepto en el modelo de datos. Siguiendo este enfoque, la interoperabilidad semántica es conseguida con éxito para conceptos SNOMED CT, sean o no post o pre coordinados, así como para las terminologías LOINC y HGNC. Los conceptos son estandarizados en una forma normal que puede ser usada para unir los datos al \Common Data Model" basado en el RIM de HL7. Aunque existen limitaciones debido a la gran heterogeneidad de los datos a integrar, un primer prototipo del servicio propuesto se está utilizando con éxito en el contexto de los proyectos EURECA e INTEGRATE. Una mejora en la interoperabilidad semántica de los datos de ensayos clínicos de cáncer tiene como objetivo mejorar las prácticas en oncología.

Modelo de arquitectura para gestión cooperativa de sistemas y servicios distribuidos basado en agentes autónomos

La creciente complejidad, heterogeneidad y dinamismo inherente a las redes de telecomunicaciones, los sistemas distribuidos y los servicios avanzados de información y comunicación emergentes, así como el incremento de su criticidad e importancia estratégica, requieren la adopción de tecnologías cada vez más sofisticadas para su gestión, su coordinación y su integración por parte de los operadores de red, los proveedores de servicio y las empresas, como usuarios finales de los mismos, con el fin de garantizar niveles adecuados de funcionalidad, rendimiento y fiabilidad. Las estrategias de gestión adoptadas tradicionalmente adolecen de seguir modelos excesivamente estáticos y centralizados, con un elevado componente de supervisión y difícilmente escalables. La acuciante necesidad por flexibilizar esta gestión y hacerla a la vez más escalable y robusta, ha provocado en los últimos años un considerable interés por desarrollar nuevos paradigmas basados en modelos jerárquicos y distribuidos, como evolución natural de los primeros modelos jerárquicos débilmente distribuidos que sucedieron al paradigma centralizado. Se crean así nuevos modelos como son los basados en Gestión por Delegación, en el paradigma de código móvil, en las tecnologías de objetos distribuidos y en los servicios web. Estas alternativas se han mostrado enormemente robustas, flexibles y escalables frente a las estrategias tradicionales de gestión, pero continúan sin resolver aún muchos problemas. Las líneas actuales de investigación parten del hecho de que muchos problemas de robustez, escalabilidad y flexibilidad continúan sin ser resueltos por el paradigma jerárquico-distribuido, y abogan por la migración hacia un paradigma cooperativo fuertemente distribuido. Estas líneas tienen su germen en la Inteligencia Artificial Distribuida (DAI) y, más concretamente, en el paradigma de agentes autónomos y en los Sistemas Multi-agente (MAS). Todas ellas se perfilan en torno a un conjunto de objetivos que pueden resumirse en alcanzar un mayor grado de autonomía en la funcionalidad de la gestión y una mayor capacidad de autoconfiguración que resuelva los problemas de escalabilidad y la necesidad de supervisión presentes en los sistemas actuales, evolucionar hacia técnicas de control fuertemente distribuido y cooperativo guiado por la meta y dotar de una mayor riqueza semántica a los modelos de información. Cada vez más investigadores están empezando a utilizar agentes para la gestión de redes y sistemas distribuidos. Sin embargo, los límites establecidos en sus trabajos entre agentes móviles (que siguen el paradigma de código móvil) y agentes autónomos (que realmente siguen el paradigma cooperativo) resultan difusos. Muchos de estos trabajos se centran en la utilización de agentes móviles, lo cual, al igual que ocurría con las técnicas de código móvil comentadas anteriormente, les permite dotar de un mayor componente dinámico al concepto tradicional de Gestión por Delegación. Con ello se consigue flexibilizar la gestión, distribuir la lógica de gestión cerca de los datos y distribuir el control. Sin embargo se permanece en el paradigma jerárquico distribuido. Si bien continúa sin definirse aún una arquitectura de gestión fiel al paradigma cooperativo fuertemente distribuido, estas líneas de investigación han puesto de manifiesto serios problemas de adecuación en los modelos de información, comunicación y organizativo de las arquitecturas de gestión existentes. En este contexto, la tesis presenta un modelo de arquitectura para gestión holónica de sistemas y servicios distribuidos mediante sociedades de agentes autónomos, cuyos objetivos fundamentales son el incremento del grado de automatización asociado a las tareas de gestión, el aumento de la escalabilidad de las soluciones de gestión, soporte para delegación tanto por dominios como por macro-tareas, y un alto grado de interoperabilidad en entornos abiertos. A partir de estos objetivos se ha desarrollado un modelo de información formal de tipo semántico, basado en lógica descriptiva que permite un mayor grado de automatización en la gestión en base a la utilización de agentes autónomos racionales, capaces de razonar, inferir e integrar de forma dinámica conocimiento y servicios conceptualizados mediante el modelo CIM y formalizados a nivel semántico mediante lógica descriptiva. El modelo de información incluye además un “mapping” a nivel de meta-modelo de CIM al lenguaje de especificación de ontologías OWL, que supone un significativo avance en el área de la representación y el intercambio basado en XML de modelos y meta-información. A nivel de interacción, el modelo aporta un lenguaje de especificación formal de conversaciones entre agentes basado en la teoría de actos ilocucionales y aporta una semántica operacional para dicho lenguaje que facilita la labor de verificación de propiedades formales asociadas al protocolo de interacción. Se ha desarrollado también un modelo de organización holónico y orientado a roles cuyas principales características están alineadas con las demandadas por los servicios distribuidos emergentes e incluyen la ausencia de control central, capacidades de reestructuración dinámica, capacidades de cooperación, y facilidades de adaptación a diferentes culturas organizativas. El modelo incluye un submodelo normativo adecuado al carácter autónomo de los holones de gestión y basado en las lógicas modales deontológica y de acción.---ABSTRACT---The growing complexity, heterogeneity and dynamism inherent in telecommunications networks, distributed systems and the emerging advanced information and communication services, as well as their increased criticality and strategic importance, calls for the adoption of increasingly more sophisticated technologies for their management, coordination and integration by network operators, service providers and end-user companies to assure adequate levels of functionality, performance and reliability. The management strategies adopted traditionally follow models that are too static and centralised, have a high supervision component and are difficult to scale. The pressing need to flexibilise management and, at the same time, make it more scalable and robust recently led to a lot of interest in developing new paradigms based on hierarchical and distributed models, as a natural evolution from the first weakly distributed hierarchical models that succeeded the centralised paradigm. Thus new models based on management by delegation, the mobile code paradigm, distributed objects and web services came into being. These alternatives have turned out to be enormously robust, flexible and scalable as compared with the traditional management strategies. However, many problems still remain to be solved. Current research lines assume that the distributed hierarchical paradigm has as yet failed to solve many of the problems related to robustness, scalability and flexibility and advocate migration towards a strongly distributed cooperative paradigm. These lines of research were spawned by Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) and, specifically, the autonomous agent paradigm and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). They all revolve around a series of objectives, which can be summarised as achieving greater management functionality autonomy and a greater self-configuration capability, which solves the problems of scalability and the need for supervision that plague current systems, evolving towards strongly distributed and goal-driven cooperative control techniques and semantically enhancing information models. More and more researchers are starting to use agents for network and distributed systems management. However, the boundaries established in their work between mobile agents (that follow the mobile code paradigm) and autonomous agents (that really follow the cooperative paradigm) are fuzzy. Many of these approximations focus on the use of mobile agents, which, as was the case with the above-mentioned mobile code techniques, means that they can inject more dynamism into the traditional concept of management by delegation. Accordingly, they are able to flexibilise management, distribute management logic about data and distribute control. However, they remain within the distributed hierarchical paradigm. While a management architecture faithful to the strongly distributed cooperative paradigm has yet to be defined, these lines of research have revealed that the information, communication and organisation models of existing management architectures are far from adequate. In this context, this dissertation presents an architectural model for the holonic management of distributed systems and services through autonomous agent societies. The main objectives of this model are to raise the level of management task automation, increase the scalability of management solutions, provide support for delegation by both domains and macro-tasks and achieve a high level of interoperability in open environments. Bearing in mind these objectives, a descriptive logic-based formal semantic information model has been developed, which increases management automation by using rational autonomous agents capable of reasoning, inferring and dynamically integrating knowledge and services conceptualised by means of the CIM model and formalised at the semantic level by means of descriptive logic. The information model also includes a mapping, at the CIM metamodel level, to the OWL ontology specification language, which amounts to a significant advance in the field of XML-based model and metainformation representation and exchange. At the interaction level, the model introduces a formal specification language (ACSL) of conversations between agents based on speech act theory and contributes an operational semantics for this language that eases the task of verifying formal properties associated with the interaction protocol. A role-oriented holonic organisational model has also been developed, whose main features meet the requirements demanded by emerging distributed services, including no centralised control, dynamic restructuring capabilities, cooperative skills and facilities for adaptation to different organisational cultures. The model includes a normative submodel adapted to management holon autonomy and based on the deontic and action modal logics.

A proposal for a modular and application-aware autonomic manager of private cloud infrastructures

Recientemente, el paradigma de la computación en la nube ha recibido mucho interés por parte tanto de la industria como del mundo académico. Las infraestructuras cloud públicas están posibilitando nuevos modelos de negocio y ayudando a reducir costes. Sin embargo, una compañía podría desear ubicar sus datos y servicios en sus propias instalaciones, o tener que atenerse a leyes de protección de datos. Estas circunstancias hacen a las infraestructuras cloud privadas ciertamente deseables, ya sea para complementar a las públicas o para sustituirlas por completo. Por desgracia, las carencias en materia de estándares han impedido que las soluciones para la gestión de infraestructuras privadas se hayan desarrollado adecuadamente. Además, la multitud de opciones disponibles ha creado en los clientes el miedo a depender de una tecnología concreta (technology lock-in). Una de las causas de este problema es la falta de alineación entre la investigación académica y los productos comerciales, ya que aquella está centrada en el estudio de escenarios idealizados sin correspondencia con el mundo real, mientras que éstos consisten en soluciones desarrolladas sin tener en cuenta cómo van a encajar con los estándares más comunes o sin preocuparse de hacer públicos sus resultados. Con objeto de resolver este problema, propongo un sistema de gestión modular para infraestructuras cloud privadas enfocado en tratar con las aplicaciones en lugar de centrarse únicamente en los recursos hardware. Este sistema de gestión sigue el paradigma de la computación autónoma y está diseñado en torno a un modelo de información sencillo, desarrollado para ser compatible con los estándares más comunes. Este modelo divide el entorno en dos vistas, que sirven para separar aquello que debe preocupar a cada actor involucrado del resto de información, pero al mismo tiempo permitiendo relacionar el entorno físico con las máquinas virtuales que se despliegan encima de él. En dicho modelo, las aplicaciones cloud están divididas en tres tipos genéricos (Servicios, Trabajos de Big Data y Reservas de Instancias), para que así el sistema de gestión pueda sacar partido de las características propias de cada tipo. El modelo de información está complementado por un conjunto de acciones de gestión atómicas, reversibles e independientes, que determinan las operaciones que se pueden llevar a cabo sobre el entorno y que es usado para hacer posible la escalabilidad en el entorno. También describo un motor de gestión encargado de, a partir del estado del entorno y usando el ya mencionado conjunto de acciones, la colocación de recursos. Está dividido en dos niveles: la capa de Gestores de Aplicación, encargada de tratar sólo con las aplicaciones; y la capa del Gestor de Infraestructura, responsable de los recursos físicos. Dicho motor de gestión obedece un ciclo de vida con dos fases, para así modelar mejor el comportamiento de una infraestructura real. El problema de la colocación de recursos es atacado durante una de las fases (la de consolidación) por un resolutor de programación entera, y durante la otra (la online) por un heurístico hecho ex-profeso. Varias pruebas han demostrado que este acercamiento combinado es superior a otras estrategias. Para terminar, el sistema de gestión está acoplado a arquitecturas de monitorización y de actuadores. Aquella estando encargada de recolectar información del entorno, y ésta siendo modular en su diseño y capaz de conectarse con varias tecnologías y ofrecer varios modos de acceso. ABSTRACT The cloud computing paradigm has raised in popularity within the industry and the academia. Public cloud infrastructures are enabling new business models and helping to reduce costs. However, the desire to host company’s data and services on premises, and the need to abide to data protection laws, make private cloud infrastructures desirable, either to complement or even fully substitute public oferings. Unfortunately, a lack of standardization has precluded private infrastructure management solutions to be developed to a certain level, and a myriad of diferent options have induced the fear of lock-in in customers. One of the causes of this problem is the misalignment between academic research and industry ofering, with the former focusing in studying idealized scenarios dissimilar from real-world situations, and the latter developing solutions without taking care about how they f t with common standards, or even not disseminating their results. With the aim to solve this problem I propose a modular management system for private cloud infrastructures that is focused on the applications instead of just the hardware resources. This management system follows the autonomic system paradigm, and is designed around a simple information model developed to be compatible with common standards. This model splits the environment in two views that serve to separate the concerns of the stakeholders while at the same time enabling the traceability between the physical environment and the virtual machines deployed onto it. In it, cloud applications are classifed in three broad types (Services, Big Data Jobs and Instance Reservations), in order for the management system to take advantage of each type’s features. The information model is paired with a set of atomic, reversible and independent management actions which determine the operations that can be performed over the environment and is used to realize the cloud environment’s scalability. From the environment’s state and using the aforementioned set of actions, I also describe a management engine tasked with the resource placement. It is divided in two tiers: the Application Managers layer, concerned just with applications; and the Infrastructure Manager layer, responsible of the actual physical resources. This management engine follows a lifecycle with two phases, to better model the behavior of a real infrastructure. The placement problem is tackled during one phase (consolidation) by using an integer programming solver, and during the other (online) with a custom heuristic. Tests have demonstrated that this combined approach is superior to other strategies. Finally, the management system is paired with monitoring and actuators architectures. The former able to collect the necessary information from the environment, and the later modular in design and capable of interfacing with several technologies and ofering several access interfaces.

Technology independent honeynet description language

Several languages have been proposed for the task of describing networks of systems, either to help on managing, simulate or deploy testbeds for testing purposes. However, there is no one specifically designed to describe the honeynets, covering the specific characteristics in terms of applications and tools included in the honeypot systems that make the honeynet. In this paper, the requirements of honeynet description are studied and a survey of existing description languages is presented, concluding that a CIM (Common Information Model) match the basic requirements. Thus, a CIM like technology independent honeynet description language (TIHDL) is proposed. The language is defined being independent of the platform where the honeynet will be deployed later, and it can be translated, either using model-driven techniques or other translation mechanisms, into the description languages of honeynet deployment platforms and tools. This approach gives flexibility to allow the use of a combination of heterogeneous deployment platforms. Besides, a flexible virtual honeynet generation tool (HoneyGen) based on the approach and description language proposed and capable of deploying honeynets over VNX (Virtual Networks over LinuX) and Honeyd platforms is presented for validation purposes.

A model of amacrine and ganglion cells for optical information processing

Based on a previously reported logic cell structure (see SPIE, vol. 2038, p. 67-77, 1993), the two types of cells present at the inner and ganglion cell layers of the vertebrate retina and their intracellular response, as well as their connections with each other, have been simulated. These cells are amacrines and ganglion cells. The main scheme of the authors' configuration is shown in a figure. These two types of cells, as well as some of their possible interconnections, have been implemented with the authors' previously reported optical-processing element. As it has been shown, the authors' logic structure is able to process two optical input binary signals, being the output two logical functions. Moreover, if a delayed feedback from one of the two possible outputs to one or both of the inputs is introduced, a very different behaviour is obtained. Depending on the value of the time delay, an oscillatory output can be obtained from a constant optical input signal. Period and length pulses are dependent on delay values, both external and internal, as well as on other control signals. Moreover, a chaotic behaviour can be obtained too under certain conditions

VR BioViewer - A new interactive-visual model to represent medical information

Virtual reality (VR) techniques to understand and obtain conclusions of data in an easy way are being used by the scientific community. However, these techniques are not used frequently for analyzing large amounts of data in life sciences, particularly in genomics, due to the high complexity of data (curse of dimensionality). Nevertheless, new approaches that allow to bring out the real important data characteristics, arise the possibility of constructing VR spaces to visually understand the intrinsic nature of data. It is well known the benefits of representing high dimensional data in tridimensional spaces by means of dimensionality reduction and transformation techniques, complemented with a strong component of interaction methods. Thus, a novel framework, designed for helping to visualize and interact with data about diseases, is presented. In this paper, the framework is applied to the Van't Veer breast cancer dataset is used, while oncologists from La Paz Hospital (Madrid) are interacting with the obtained results. That is to say a first attempt to generate a visually tangible model of breast cancer disease in order to support the experience of oncologists is presented.

Dysfunctional 3D model based on structural and neuropsychological information

Acquired brain injury (ABI) 1-2 refers to any brain damage occurring after birth. It usually causes certain damage to portions of the brain. ABI may result in a significant impairment of an individuals physical, cognitive and/or psychosocial functioning. The main causes are traumatic brain injury (TBI), cerebrovascular accident (CVA) and brain tumors. The main consequence of ABI is a dramatic change in the individuals daily life. This change involves a disruption of the family, a loss of future income capacity and an increase of lifetime cost. One of the main challenges in neurorehabilitation is to obtain a dysfunctional profile of each patient in order to personalize the treatment. This paper proposes a system to generate a patient s dysfunctional profile by integrating theoretical, structural and neuropsychological information on a 3D brain imaging-based model. The main goal of this dysfunctional profile is to help therapists design the most suitable treatment for each patient. At the same time, the results obtained are a source of clinical evidence to improve the accuracy and quality of our rehabilitation system. Figure 1 shows the diagram of the system. This system is composed of four main modules: image-based extraction of parameters, theoretical modeling, classification and co-registration and visualization module.

Efficiency analysis of information technology and online social networks management : an integrated DEA-Model assessment

This paper analyses the relationship between productive efficiency and online-social-networks (OSN) in Spanish telecommunications firms. A data-envelopment-analysis (DEA) is used and several indicators of business ?social Media? activities are incorporated. A super-efficiency analysis and bootstrapping techniques are performed to increase the model?s robustness and accuracy. Then, a logistic regression model is applied to characterise factors and drivers of good performance in OSN. Results reveal the company?s ability to absorb and utilise OSNs as a key factor in improving the productive efficiency. This paper presents a model for assessing the strategic performance of the presence and activity in OSN.