Modelling users' dynamic behaviour in e-business environments using navigations

Abstract

The second World Wide Web generation is increasingly oriented to services. This generation is rich in requests for dynamic and personalised content, which represents an important segment of current internet traffic. E-business applications are a particular case of the dynamic web, where dynamism and personalisation play an important role in business strategy. Understanding the characteristics of the users' workloads is very important when designing and providing web services. In e-business the importance is even greater, because this analysis is used to extract the knowledge needed to take business decisions. Workload characterisation techniques introduce some drawbacks when representing the dynamism of client behaviour. This drawback implies that most of the current workload generators model this characteristic in a simple and inaccurate way. This paper focuses on the dynamism of e-business applications and the new techniques to characterise user workloads. Our work is addressed to building a dynamic workload generator that considers the new behaviour of web clients.

Modeling continuous changes of the user's dynamic behavior in the WWW

“…In previous work [9,10] we described the core of our generator proposal (GUERNICA) based on the navigation characteristics in order to represent such dynamism. In the current work we present the new features of our generator: i) the workload test, that allows GUERNICA to model different user behaviors, and continuous changes between them, and ii) multithread support, that reduces the experimental execution time, and allows to simulate several users browsing simultaneously.…”

“…The GUERNICA (Universal Generator of Dynamic Workload under WWW Platforms) generator proposed in [9,10], results from cooperation between the Web Performance Research Group of the Polytechnic University of Valencia and Intelligent Software Components (iSOCO).…”

“…PCA-Plugin is the XML file that defines, by using the PCA scripting language, the user's behavior. More details about how the navigation engine works can be found in [9,10].…”

“…In a previous work [9,10], we proposed a workload generator called GUERNICA which represents user dynamism in the workload model. In this preliminar work, the dynamism considers only typical user patterns of the second web generation, using the navigation concept, which defines the user behavior while interacting with the web; but it does not model changes in the nature of this behavior.…”