Survey of Uncertainty Handling in Cloud Service Discovery and Composition
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paper_title: The Uncertainty of Valuation

paper_content:

Valuation is often said to be “an art not a science” but this relates to the techniques employed to calculate value not to the underlying concept itself. Valuation is the process of estimating price in the market place. Yet, such an estimation will be affected by uncertainties. These input uncertainties will translate into an uncertainty with the output figure, the valuation. The degree of the uncertainties will vary according to the level of market activity; the more active a market, the more credence will be given to the input information. In the UK at the moment the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) is considering ways in which the uncertainty of the valuation can be conveyed to the use of the valuation, but as yet no definitive view has been taken apart from a single Guidance Note (GN5). One of the major problems is that valuation models (in the UK) are based on comparable information and rely on single inputs. They are not probability‐based, yet uncertainty is probability driven. This paper discusses the issues underlying uncertainty in valuations and suggests a probability‐based model (using Crystal Ball) to address the shortcomings of the current model.
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paper_title: Quantitative Risk Analysis for Mobile Cloud Computing: A Preliminary Approach and a Health Application Case Study

paper_content:

Mobile cloud computing is presented as the next logical step in the adoption of cloud based systems. However, there are number of issues inherent in it that may limit its uptake. These issues are best understood as "risks" which span the whole structure and the life cycle of mobile clouds and could be as varied as security, operations, performance, and end-users behaviours. This paper is a first step in developing a quantitative risk model suitable for a dynamic mobile cloud environment. We also use this model to analyse a mobile cloud based health application and report our findings, which have implications for cloud computing as a whole.
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paper_title: Cloud Computing: The New Frontier of Internet Computing

paper_content:

Cloud computing is a new field in Internet computing that provides novel perspectives in internetworking technologies and raises issues in the architecture, design, and implementation of existing networks and data centers. The relevant research has just recently gained momentum, and the space of potential ideas and solutions is still far from being widely explored.
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paper_title: Dynamic audit services for integrity verification of outsourced storages in clouds

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a dynamic audit service for verifying the integrity of an untrusted and outsourced storage. Our audit service is constructed based on the techniques, fragment structure, random sampling and index-hash table, supporting provable updates to outsourced data, and timely abnormal detection. In addition, we propose a probabilistic query and periodic verification for improving the performance of audit services. Our experimental results not only validate the effectiveness of our approaches, but also show our audit system verifies the integrity with lower computation overhead, requiring less extra storage for audit metadata.
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paper_title: Dynamic audit services for integrity verification of outsourced storages in clouds

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a dynamic audit service for verifying the integrity of an untrusted and outsourced storage. Our audit service is constructed based on the techniques, fragment structure, random sampling and index-hash table, supporting provable updates to outsourced data, and timely abnormal detection. In addition, we propose a probabilistic query and periodic verification for improving the performance of audit services. Our experimental results not only validate the effectiveness of our approaches, but also show our audit system verifies the integrity with lower computation overhead, requiring less extra storage for audit metadata.
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paper_title: Cloud Computing: The New Frontier of Internet Computing

paper_content:

Cloud computing is a new field in Internet computing that provides novel perspectives in internetworking technologies and raises issues in the architecture, design, and implementation of existing networks and data centers. The relevant research has just recently gained momentum, and the space of potential ideas and solutions is still far from being widely explored.
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paper_title: An Effective Architecture for Automated Appliance Management System Applying Ontology-Based Cloud Discovery

paper_content:

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm which allows access of computing elements and storages on-demand over the Internet. Virtual Appliances, pre-configured, ready-to-run applications are emerging as a breakthrough technology to solve the complexities of service deployment on Cloud infrastructure. However, an automated approach to deploy required appliances on the most suitable Cloud infrastructure is neglected by previous works which is the focus of this work. In this paper, we propose an effective architecture using ontology-based discovery to provide QoS aware deployment of appliances on Cloud service providers. In addition, we test our approach on a case study and the result shows the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed work.
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paper_title: Environmental Modeling and Health Risk Analysis (Acts/Risk)

paper_content:

1. Introduction 2. Principles of Environmental Modeling 3. Conservation Principles, and Environmental Transformation and Transport 4. Air Pathway Analysis 5. Groundwater Pathway Analysis 6. Surface Water Pathway Analysis 7. Uncertainty and Variability Analysis 8. Health Risk Analysis 9. Application: Pesticide Transport in Shallow Groundwater and Environmental Risk Assessment APPENDIX A. Definitions of Acronyms and Abbreviations APPENDIX B. Environmental Modeling and Exposure Analysis Terms APPENDIX C. Definitions and Operations of the ACTS/RISK Software APPENDIX D. MCL levels of contaminants APPENDIX E. Conversion tables and Properties of Water
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paper_title: A Generalization of Bayesian Inference

paper_content:

Procedures of statistical inference are described which generalize Bayesian inference in specific ways. Probability is used in such a way that in general only bounds may be placed on the probabilities of given events, and probability systems of this kind are suggested both for sample information and for prior information. These systems are then combined using a specified rule. Illustrations are given for inferences about trinomial probabilities, and for inferences about a monotone sequence of binomial pi. Finally, some comments are made on the general class of models which produce upper and lower probabilities, and on the specific models which underlie the suggested inference procedures.
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paper_title: Possibility theory and statistical reasoning

paper_content:

Numerical possibility distributions can encode special convex families of probability measures. The connection between possibility theory and probability theory is potentially fruitful in the scope of statistical reasoning when uncertainty due to variability of observations should be distinguished from uncertainty due to incomplete information. This paper proposes an overview of numerical possibility theory. Its aim is to show that some notions in statistics are naturally interpreted in the language of this theory. First, probabilistic inequalites (like Chebychev's) offer a natural setting for devising possibility distributions from poor probabilistic information. Moreover, likelihood functions obey the laws of possibility theory when no prior probability is available. Possibility distributions also generalize the notion of confidence or prediction intervals, shedding some light on the role of the mode of asymmetric probability densities in the derivation of maximally informative interval substitutes of probabilistic information. Finally, the simulation of fuzzy sets comes down to selecting a probabilistic representation of a possibility distribution, which coincides with the Shapley value of the corresponding consonant capacity. This selection process is in agreement with Laplace indifference principle and is closely connected with the mean interval of a fuzzy interval. It sheds light on the ''defuzzification'' process in fuzzy set theory and provides a natural definition of a subjective possibility distribution that sticks to the Bayesian framework of exchangeable bets. Potential applications to risk assessment are pointed out.
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paper_title: When upper probabilities are possibility measures

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Abstract A characteristic property is given for a pair of upper and lower probabilities (induced by lower probability bounds on a finite set of events) to coincide with possibility and necessity measures. Approximations of upper probabilities by possibility measures are discussed. The problem of combining possibility distributions viewed as upper probabilities is investigated, and the basic fuzzy set intersections are justified in this framework.
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paper_title: Quantitative Risk Analysis for Mobile Cloud Computing: A Preliminary Approach and a Health Application Case Study

paper_content:

Mobile cloud computing is presented as the next logical step in the adoption of cloud based systems. However, there are number of issues inherent in it that may limit its uptake. These issues are best understood as "risks" which span the whole structure and the life cycle of mobile clouds and could be as varied as security, operations, performance, and end-users behaviours. This paper is a first step in developing a quantitative risk model suitable for a dynamic mobile cloud environment. We also use this model to analyse a mobile cloud based health application and report our findings, which have implications for cloud computing as a whole.
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paper_title: Evolution in Relation to Risk and Trust Management

paper_content:

In this paper, a methodology within risk and trust management in general, and risk and trust assessment in particular, isn't well equipped to address trust issues in evolution.
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paper_title: A QoS-aware service discovery method for elastic cloud computing in an unstructured peer-to-peer network

paper_content:

SUMMARY ::: Traditionally, service discovery is often promoted by the centralized approach that typically suffers from single point of failure, poor reliability, poor scalability, to name a few. In view of this challenge, a QoS-aware service discovery method is investigated for elastic cloud computing in an unstructured peer-to-peer network in this paper. Concretely speaking, the method is deployed by two phases, that is, service registering phase and service discovery phase. More specifically, for a peer node engaged in the unstructured peer-to-peer network, it firstly registers its functional and nonfunctional information to its neighbors in a flooding way. With the multiple registered information, the QoS-aware service discovery is promoted in a probabilistic flooding way according to the network traffic. At last, extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the feasibility of our method. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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paper_title: A Trustworhty Model for Reliable Cloud Service Discovery

paper_content:

computing is a new model for delivering new applications and services. Its adoption is gaining ground because most of the services provided by the cloud are of low cost and readily available for use. Despite many promises by the cloud service providers, users remain much concerned about the general risk associated with the adoption of the cloud. The availability of many cloud service providers on one hand promotes competition in the cloud market and gives end users more freedom to choose the best cloud provider however it became a tedious and time consuming task for potential cloud users to evaluate and compare the available cloud offerings in the market. Hence, discovering a reliable service is a daunting task. This research proposed a trustworthy model for reliable cloud service discovery.
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paper_title: A QoS-Satisfied Prediction Model for Cloud-Service Composition Based on a Hidden Markov Model

paper_content:

Various significant issues in cloud computing, such as service provision, service matching, and service assessment, have attracted researchers’ attention recently. Quality of service (QoS) plays an increasingly important role in the provision of cloud-based services, by aiming for the seamless and dynamic integration of cloud-service components. In this paper, we focus on QoS-satisfied predictions about the composition of cloud-service components and present a QoS-satisfied prediction model based on a hidden Markov model. In providing a cloud-based service for a user, if the user’s QoS cannot be satisfied by a single cloud-service component, component composition should be considered, where its QoS-satisfied capability needs to be proactively predicted to be able to guarantee the user’s QoS. We discuss the proposed model in detail and prove some aspects of the model. Simulation results show that our model can achieve high prediction accuracies.
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paper_title: Cloud Architecture for Dynamic Service Composition

paper_content:

Service composition provides value-adding services through composing basic Web services, which may be provided by various organizations. Cloud computing presents an efficient managerial, on-demand, and scalable way to integrate computational resources hardware, platform, and software. However, existing Cloud architecture lacks the layer of middleware to enable dynamic service composition. To enable and accelerate on-demand service composition, the authors explore the paradigm of dynamic service composition in the Cloud for Pervasive Service Computing environments and propose a Cloud-based Middleware for Dynamic Service Composition CM4SC. In this approach, the authors introduce the CM4SC 'Composition as a Service' middleware layer into conventional Cloud architecture to allow automatic composition planning, service discovery and service composition. The authors implement the CM4SC middleware prototype utilizing Windows Azure Cloud platform. The prototype demonstrates the feasibility of CM4SC for accelerating dynamic service composition and that the CM4SC middleware-accelerated Cloud architecture offers a novel way for realizing dynamic service composition.
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paper_title: A multi-dimensional trust-aware cloud service selection mechanism based on evidential reasoning approach

paper_content:

In the last few years, cloud computing as a new computing paradigm has gone through significant development, but it is also facing many problems. One of them is the cloud service selection problem. As increasingly boosting cloud services are offered through the internet and some of them may be not reliable or even malicious, how to select trustworthy cloud services for cloud users is a big challenge. In this paper, we propose a multi-dimensional trust-aware cloud service selection mechanism based on evidential reasoning (ER) approach that integrates both perception-based trust value and reputation based trust value, which are derived from direct and indirect trust evidence respectively, to identify trustworthy services. Here, multi-dimensional trust evidence, which reflects the trustworthiness of cloud services from different aspects, is elicited in the form of historical users' feedback ratings. Then, the ER approach is applied to aggregate the multi-dimensional trust ratings to obtain the real-time trust value and select the most trustworthy cloud service of certain type for the active users. Finally, the fresh feedback from the active users will update the trust evidence for other service users in the future.
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paper_title: Dynamic service composition enabled by introspective agent coordination

paper_content:

Service composition has received much interest from many research communities. The major research efforts published to date propose the use of service orchestration to model this problem. However, the designed orchestration approaches are static since they follow a predefined plan specifying the services to be composed and their data flow, and most of them are centralized around a composition engine. Further, task decomposition is made prior to service composition, whereas it should be performed according to the available competencies. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose to model a dynamic approach for service composition. The studied approach relies on the decentralized and autonomous collaboration of a set of services whose aim is to achieve a specific goal. In our work, this goal is to satisfy requirements in software services that are freely expressed by human users (i.e. not predefined through a composition plan). We propose to enable the service collaborations through a multi-agent coordination protocol. In our model, agents offer services and are endowed with introspective capabilities, that is, they can access and reason on their state and actions at runtime. Thereby, the agents are capable of decomposing a monolithic task according to their service skills, and dynamically coordinating with their acquaintances to cover the whole task achievement. This paper presents the adaptive agent-based approach we propose for dynamic service composition, describes its architecture, specifies the underlying coordination protocol, called omposer, verifies the protocol's main properties, and validates it by unfolding an implemented scenario.
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paper_title: What's inside the Cloud? An architectural map of the Cloud landscape

paper_content:

We propose an integrated Cloud computing stack architecture to serve as a reference point for future mash-ups and comparative studies. We also show how the existing Cloud landscape maps into this architecture and identify an infrastructure gap that we plan to address in future work.
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paper_title: A QoS-aware service discovery method for elastic cloud computing in an unstructured peer-to-peer network

paper_content:

SUMMARY ::: Traditionally, service discovery is often promoted by the centralized approach that typically suffers from single point of failure, poor reliability, poor scalability, to name a few. In view of this challenge, a QoS-aware service discovery method is investigated for elastic cloud computing in an unstructured peer-to-peer network in this paper. Concretely speaking, the method is deployed by two phases, that is, service registering phase and service discovery phase. More specifically, for a peer node engaged in the unstructured peer-to-peer network, it firstly registers its functional and nonfunctional information to its neighbors in a flooding way. With the multiple registered information, the QoS-aware service discovery is promoted in a probabilistic flooding way according to the network traffic. At last, extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the feasibility of our method. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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paper_title: Compatibility-Aware Cloud Service Composition under Fuzzy Preferences of Users

paper_content:

When a single Cloud service (i.e., a software image and a virtual machine), on its own, cannot satisfy all the user requirements, a composition of Cloud services is required. Cloud service composition, which includes several tasks such as discovery, compatibility checking, selection, and deployment, is a complex process and users find it difficult to select the best one among the hundreds, if not thousands, of possible compositions available. Service composition in Cloud raises even new challenges caused by diversity of users with different expertise requiring their applications to be deployed across difference geographical locations with distinct legal constraints. The main difficulty lies in selecting a combination of virtual appliances (software images) and infrastructure services that are compatible and satisfy a user with vague preferences. Therefore, we present a framework and algorithms which simplify Cloud service composition for unskilled users. We develop an ontology-based approach to analyze Cloud service compatibility by applying reasoning on the expert knowledge. In addition, to minimize effort of users in expressing their preferences, we apply combination of evolutionary algorithms and fuzzy logic for composition optimization. This lets users express their needs in linguistics terms which brings a great comfort to them compared to systems that force users to assign exact weights for all preferences.
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paper_title: Reasoning With Partially Ordered Information in a Possibilistic Logic Framework

paper_content:

In many applications, the reliability relation associated with available information is only partially defined, while most of existing uncertainty frameworks deal with totally ordered pieces of knowledge. Partial pre-orders offer more flexibility than total pre-orders to represent incomplete knowledge. Possibilistic logic, which is an extension of classical logic, deals with totally ordered information. It offers a natural qualitative framework for handling uncertain information. Priorities are encoded by means of weighted formulas, where weights are lower bounds of necessity measures. This paper proposes an extension of possibilistic logic for dealing with partially ordered pieces of knowledge. We show that there are two different ways to define a possibilistic logic machinery which both extend the standard one.
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Title: Survey of Uncertainty Handling in Cloud Service Discovery and Composition

Section 1: CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICE
Description 1: This section discusses the different types of cloud services, including IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, detailing their functionalities and the level of user control and flexibility they offer.

Section 2: UNCERTAINTY THEORY AND CLOUD RISK MODELING
Description 2: This section introduces uncertainty theory and cloud risk modeling, explaining the different theories related to uncertainty (probability, belief function, and possibility theories) and their application to cloud risk management.

Section 3: CLOUD SERVICE DISCOVERY
Description 3: This section explores methods and challenges in cloud service discovery, focusing on how trust and uncertainty affect the process and presenting various approaches and models used to enhance service discovery.

Section 4: CLOUD SERVICE COMPOSITION
Description 4: This section examines service composition in the cloud, differentiating between static and dynamic compositions, and discusses the impact of uncertainty on the reliability and quality of composite services.

Section 5: DISCUSION
Description 5: This section provides an analysis of the current challenges and limitations in cloud service discovery and composition, highlighting the importance of managing uncertainty and comparing different approaches.

Section 6: CONCLUSIONS
Description 6: This section summarizes the findings of the survey, emphasizing the significance of uncertainty handling in cloud service discovery and composition, and suggesting directions for future research.