This paper studies the problem of testing concurrent systems considered as blackboxes and specified using asynchronous Communicating Finite State Machines. We present an approach to derive test cases for concurrent systems in a succinct and formal way. The approach addresses the state space explosion problem by introducing a causality relation model and the concept of logical time to express true concurrency and describe timing constraints on events. The conformance relation between test cases and trace observed from the real system is defined, and a new test architecture as well as a test case application is presented according to the conformance relation defined. To improve verdict capability of test cases, the approach is enhanced by relaxing the unit-time assumption to any natural number. And a computationally efficient algorithm for the enhanced approach is presented and the algorithm is evaluated in terms of computational efficiency and verdict capability. Finally the approach is generalized to describe timing constraints by any real numbers.

As business values pursued by today's organizations are abstract concepts, measurement of these values and their achievement is not straightforward. This paper proposes a value achievement measuring and managing framework, which recursively decomposes business values to construct a value hierarchy and then links it with the business process hierarchy. The framework makes it possible to measure value achievement, trace values to processes, and take necessary actions in response to the measured progress in value achievement.

The ultimate purpose of a business process is to promote business values. Thus, any process that fails to enhance or promote business values should be improved or adjusted so that business values can be achieved. Therefore an organization should have the capability of confirming whether a business value is achieved; furthermore, in order to cope with the changes of business environment, it should be able to define the necessary measures on the basis of business values. This paper proposes techniques for measuring a business process based on business values, which can be used to monitor and control business activities focusing on the attainment of business values. To show the feasibility of the techniques, we compare their monitoring and controlling capabilities with those of the current fulfillment process of a company. The results show that the proposed techniques are effective in linking business values to relevant processes and integrating each measurement result in accordance with the management level.

Providing seamless QoS guarantees for multimedia services is one of the most critical requirements in the mobile Internet. However, the effects of host mobility make it difficult to provide such services. The next steps in signaling (NSIS) was proposed by the IETF as a new signaling protocol, but it fails to address some mobility issues. This paper proposes a new QoS NSIS signaling layer protocol (QoS NSLP) using a cross-layer design that supports mobility. Our approach is based on the advance discovery of a crossover node (CRN) located at the crossing point between a current and a new signaling path. The CRN then proactively reserves network resources along the new path that will be used after handoff. This proactive reservation significantly reduces the session reestablishment delay and resolves the related mobility issues in NSIS. Only a few amendments to the current NSIS protocol are needed to realize our approach. The experimental results and simulation study demonstrate that our approach considerably enhances the current NSIS in terms of QoS performance factors and network resource usage.