Today’s cloud infrastructure platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) allow to deploy and run complex services without having to worry about scalability, reliability and general maintenance tasks. However, with distributed services running on multiple instances and on potentially untrusted nodes, the protection of data and in particular the preservation of privacy has become a huge challenge: On the one hand, data storage must be achieved in a way that an attacker with access to the file system, or in some use cases also the cloud operator, is not able to retrieve critical information such as personal data. On the other hand, the combination of individual data chunks to privacy critical information at runtime must be prevented when creating distributed applications. For example, a commercial location-based service needs information about the location of a device, as well as personal data of the owner for billing issues. Today, both of these details (location and personal data) are kept at the service although a combination of the two is not necessarily needed: a location-based service can operate without knowledge about personal data of the owner and a related billing service without the exact location. This talk focuses on such scenarios and presents ongoing work that is carried out in the BMWi-funded research project Shared EFleet. The research project Shared E-Fleet develops a cloud-based e-mobility platform for electric fleets in corporate environments. The main idea is to share electric vehicles between different companies to increase their efficiency and to minimize costs. For example, a technology park consisting of many individual companies may operate a fleet and host the Shared E-Fleet cloud infrastructure allowing companies to book and use vehicles in a flexible way. One of the challenges here is that on the one hand different companies share a common fleet of electric vehicles through a common platform, while on the other hand the companies might be competitors. Thus, the separation of data storage, as well as the careful aggregation of data stored in the platform is needed. The Shared E-Fleet architecture is composed of multiple web-services, each one dedicated to a specific functionality either related to the management and booking of the fleet or to services needed at runtime. Thus, each of these services collects and stores data to operate properly: general management services hold static information about the customers and vehicles (e.g. company names, user accounts, addresses and billing

Computer simulation is widely regarded as a useful activity during various phases of research. However, depending on its context, the meaning, definition, and focus of the term can vary: In traffic planning, for example, simulation is used to determine useful configurations of a road network, thus focusing on the environment. An entirely different perspective is used within multi-agent systems. In such settings, the environment of the agents remains static, while the interesting research questions concern the behavior of the agents themselves. The research focuses on the microscopic level and the resulting emergent behavior. This article puts such diverse meanings in the context of a research process that treats descriptive and prescriptive research as two sides of the same coin. We develop a framework to classify different types of simulation, based on the actual research activity they are intended to be used for. Two case studies supplement the framework.

Smart connected electromobility will leverage the cross-domain cooperation along a new value chain of stakeholders from the automotive and energy industry. Intelligent charge management, i.e. charging the electric vehicle as a tradeoff between charging costs and personal or operational constraints, represents an important service in an electronic service market for electromobility. The market features the energy supplier as a service provider, the electric vehicle as a service consumer along with intermediate brokers in between. All of them continuously interact to exchange data, thus implementing the vision of an open and global Internet of Services in an electromobile ecosystem. A joint service life cycle management which considers both, the build-time and the runtime view of a service, is essential for such a service market. It allows the service provider to design, implement and deploy services while investigating systems of deployed services and their on-demand consumption at run-time. In this paper we present such an integrated service life cycle model for electronic electromobility market places. The life cycle model will be elaborated by means of an intelligent charge management use case.

Cloud computing technologies enable the provisioning of computing infrastructure/resources, platforms, and software applications over the Internet. Using clouds can help improve scalability and flexibility of computing infrastructure and reduce its total cost of ownership as they can be bought on demand. However, a variety of challenges arise in complex and dynamic cloud-based systems that are becoming frequent in enterprises and governments. The goal of the IEEE CEC 2011 workshop Clouds for Enterprises (C4E) 2011 is to contribute to the multi-perspective exchange of knowledge and ideas, dissemination of research results and the identification and analysis of open cloud research and adoption/exploitation issues. The workshop program consists of an invited keynote, 3 full and 5 short anonymously peer-reviewed research papers, and a discussion session.

Researchers and industry envision the next generation Internet to be a global, socio-technical information infrastructure, where humans as well as software agents continuously interact to trade electronic services, forming a digital economy of its own. For an economically successful participation in the IoS a dedicated management approach for electronic services is needed. In this paper we present a proposal for such a service-centric life cycle model acting as a conceptual basis for (automated) service management at both, build and run time. It is used in a second step to define a comprehensive spiral model of service development and usage for electronic service markets. A real-world business case is finally used to demonstrate the benefits of our approach.

Visions of the next-generation Internet of Services are driven by digital resources traded on a global scope. For the resulting economic setting, automated on-line techniques for handling services and resources themselves, for advertising and discovering as well as for the on-the-fly negotiation of proper terms for their use are needed. Hence, a flexible infrastructure for the respective management of services and associated service level agreements is mandatory. This thesis presents the results of my dissertation project. They comprise a service infrastructure, able to support the structured discovery and protocol-generic negotiation of electronic service level agreements (SLAs) and thus services themselves. (...)

in der öffentlichen Verwaltung-Ein Vorschlag für einen strukturierten Erhebungsprozess und die resultierende Anforderungsdokumentation" (2011). Schlüsselwörter Anforderungsanalyse, Informationssysteme in deröffentli-chen Verwaltung, Anforderungsdokumentation

Visions of 21st century's information systems show highly specialized digital services and resources, which interact continuously and with a global reach. Today's internet of mainly human interaction evolves to a global, socio-technical information infrastructure, where humans as well as software agents acting on their behalf continuously interact to exchange data and computational resources. Such infrastructures will possibly consist of millions of service providers (SP), consumers (SC) and a multitude of possible intermediaries like brokers, workflow orchestrators and others, thus forming a global economic environment. Electronic services and resources traded on a global scope will eventually realize the vision of an open and global Internet of Services (IoS) (Schroth and Janner, 2007, pp. 36-41). For a broad adoption of this vision in a commercial context it is important to have a mechanism in place to guarantee quality of service (QoS) for each service invocation, even across enterprise boundaries. This becomes crucial when parts of mission critical workflows will be executed on external services. A very simple use case would be an engineering company purchasing basic storage and computation services from the Amazon Web Services (AWS)1 as well as specific fluid simulation services from a specialized application service provider. Since such scenarios inherently lack the applicability of centralized QoS management, guarantees must be obtained in the form of bior even multi-lateral service level agreements (SLAs) assuring service quality across individual sites (Ludwig et al., 2003, pp. 43-59). Representing qualitative guarantees placed on services, SCs can benefit from SLAs because they make nonfunctional properties of services predictable and subsequently the corresponding services dependable as needed in a business context. In order to support a comprehensive SLA-based management for such settings,

Visions of 21st century's information systems show highly specialized digital services and resources, which interact continuously and with a global reach. Today's internet of mainly human interaction evolves to a global, socio-technical information infrastructure, where humans as well as software agents acting on their behalf continuously interact to exchange data and computational resources. Such infrastructures will possibly consist of millions of service providers (SP), consumers (SC) and a multitude of possible intermediaries like brokers, workflow orchestrators and others, thus forming a global economic environment. Electronic services and resources traded on a global scope will eventually realize the vision of an open and global Internet of Services (IoS) (Schroth and Janner, 2007, pp. 36-41). For a broad adoption of this vision in a commercial context it is important to have a mechanism in place to guarantee quality of service (QoS) for each service invocation, even across enterprise boundaries. This becomes crucial when parts of mission critical workflows will be executed on external services. A very simple use case would be an engineering company purchasing basic storage and computation services from the Amazon Web Services (AWS)1 as well as specific fluid simulation services from a specialized application service provider. Since such scenarios inherently lack the applicability of centralized QoS management, guarantees must be obtained in the form of bior even multi-lateral service level agreements (SLAs) assuring service quality across individual sites (Ludwig et al., 2003, pp. 43-59). Representing qualitative guarantees placed on services, SCs can benefit from SLAs because they make nonfunctional properties of services predictable and subsequently the corresponding services dependable as needed in a business context. In order to support a comprehensive SLA-based management for such settings,

Visions of 21st century information systems show highly specialized digital services and resources, which interact continuously and with a global reach. Especially with the emergence of technologies, such as the semantic web or software agents, intelligent services within these settings can be implemented, automatically communicating and negotiating over the Internet about digital resources without human intervention. Such environments will eventually realize the vision of an open and global Internet of Services (IoS). In this paper we present an agent-based simulation model and toolkit for the IoS: 'SimIS - Simulating an Internet of Services'. Employing SimIS, distributed management mechanisms and protocols can be investigated in a simulated IoS environment before their actual deployment.

Computer simulation is widely regarded as a useful activity during various phases of research. However, depending on its context, the meaning, definition, and focus of the term can vary: While in traffic planning, for example, simulation is used to determine useful configurations of a road network and thus focuses on the environment, there is an entirely different perspective of simulations when used within multi-agent systems. In such settings, the environment of the agents remains static, while the interesting research questions concern the behavior of the agents themselves. The research focuses on the microscopic level and resulting emergent behavior. This article addresses the different meanings of simulation and puts them in the context of a research process that treats descriptive and prescriptive research as two sides of the same coin. Building on this abstract research process, we develop a framework to classify different types of simulation, based on the actual research activity they are intended to be used for. This framework can thus serve subsequently as a guideline on the usage of computer simulation as a research tool.

Visions of 21st century’s information systems show highly specialized digital services and resources, interacting continuously and with a global reach. For a broad adoption of this vision in a commercial context it is crucial to have a mechanism in place to guarantee quality of service and to decentrally coordinate the involved resources. Current service infrastructures try to tackle these problems by applying socioeconomic mechanisms such as electronic negotiations and service level agreements. Such technologies allow for the implementation of electronic service markets in analogy to real-world markets for everyday goods. However, economic theory claims that different market situations and negotiated products (i.e. SLAs) demand different negotiation protocols in order to reach the highest-possible overall efficiency of the system. Thus we argue that next generation service infrastructures will be based on a global service economy where several different service markets and thus protocols are present at any given point in time. In this paper we present a novel approach for such an infrastructure, based on structured protocol descriptions and software-agent technology.

The current Web Services Agreement specification draft proposes a simple request-response protocol for agreement creation only addressing bilateral offer exchanges. This paper proposes a framework augmenting this WS-Agreement to enable negotiations according to a variety of bilateral and multilateral negotiation protocols. The framework design is based on a thorough analysis of taxonomies for negotiations from the literature in order to allow for capturing a variety of different negotiation models within a single, WS-Agreement compatible, framework. In order to provide for the intended flexibility, the proposed protocol takes a two-stage approach: a meta-protocol is conducted among interested parties to agree on a common negotiation protocol first before the real negotiation is carried out in the second step due to the protocol established in the first step.

The vision of an open and global Internet of services (IoS) is driven by globalization and fast changing settings when trading on a world-wide scope. It requires automated on-line techniques for handling services and resources themselves, for advertising and discovery as well as for the on-the-fly negotiation of proper terms for their use. In such a setting covering completely different branches and traditions of business, a flexible infrastructure for negotiating service level agreements is mandatory. In this paper, we propose an extended service usage cycle suitable for IoS along with an expressive but still machine manageable protocol description language capable of specifying a multitude of different negotiation protocols. It supports the extended usage cycle and permits choosing services with appropriate SLA negotiation styles as well as performing SLA negotiations based on the style agreed by potential business partners.

Grid computing has recently become an important paradigm for managing computationally demanding applications, composed of a collection of services. The dynamic discovery of services, and the selection of a particular service instance providing the best value out of the discovered alternatives, poses a complex multi-attribute n:m allocation decision problem, which is often solved using a central resource broker. However, decentralized approaches to this service allocation problem represent a much more flexible alternative, thus promising improvements in the efficiency of the resulting negotiations and service allocations. This paper compares centralized and decentralized service allocation mechanisms in Grid market scenarios according to a defined set of metrics.

Recent developments have shown the emergence of electronic negotiation systems and electronic markets used to efficiently allocate electronic resources, such as web services. Electronic negotiations exhibit much of the same problems real life negotiations have, such as coalition formation, efficient offer matching etc. However, some problems become more crucial in electronic environments due to the anonymity of the users and the sheer amount of negotiations that can be executed in short time spans. In this paper we investigate the trust issue in electronic negotiations, dealing with how to trust a potential transaction partner and how to choose such partners based on their past behaviour in the system. In particular, we want to investigate the efficiency or even applicability of reputation mechanisms for different negotiation protocols and market flavors. Based on social science findings we derive hypotheses on the effects of various commonly used negotiation protocols on the efficient usage of reputation mechanism. We conclude with a set of such hypotheses that can be used to give recommendations to designers of electronic negotiation systems or markets on which protocols to use, so that they can apply reputation mechanisms and therefore tackle the trusting issue.

Nicolas Repp is head of the IT architectures research group at the Multimedia Communications Lab at Technische Universität Darmstadt. His research focuses on the management of distributed workflows, the monitoring of service quality as well as IT governance in large heterogeneous systems. He primarily works for the E-Finance Lab Frankfurt am Main e.V. research partnership. Nicolas received a diploma in Business Informatics from Technische Universität Darmstadt.