Dynamic and Optimal Interactive Voice Response System for Automated Service Discovery

Thirumaran.Ma , Dhavachelvan.Pb, Naga Venkata Kiran. Gc

a,c,d b

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Pondicherry Engg College, India. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Pondicherry University, India.

Abstract
In telecommunications, IVR systems made service interaction easy and compact for customers by speech recognition and IVR dialogue. However IVR is sometimes criticized as being unhelpful and difficult to use due to poor design and lack of appreciation of the customers needs. This is due to lack of dynamism to facilitate the required response to the customers, performing business critical emergency changes reliably and sophistically by itself without depending on the agents. Over decades, IVR has been used in various application domains for improving human interaction and reduce the process workflow . In this paper, we propose a novel approach for discovering set of composed services through dynamic IVR systems. This approach makes the service discovery process more accurate and reliable with respect to user targeted QoS and set of business policy constraints. We use F Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) for analyzing the dependency existing between the composed set of services and for optimization of request-reply dialog process between the service provider and consumer of the IVR systems. Further we extend the IVR architecture with decision making system for efficient service discovery which automates the change request through a set of re-configurable dialog patterns that leads to the efficient discovery of the required service. Keywords: Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) ,Service Discovery,Interactive Voice Response System,Dialog Patterns,Decision Making System,Knowledge Media,Policy Rule Engine. I. Introduction

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a structured technique for organizing and analyzing complex decisions. Users of the AHP first decompose their decision problem into a hierarchy of more easily comprehended subproblems, each of which can be analyzed independently. The elements of the hierarchy can relate to any aspect of the decision problem .Once the hierarchy is built, the decision makers systematically evaluate its various elements by comparing them to one another two at a time, with respect to their impact on an element above them in the hierarchy. In making the comparisons, the decision makers can use concrete data about the elements, but they typically use their judgments about the elements' relative meaning and importance. It is the essence of the AHP that human judgments, and not just the underlying information, can be used in performing the evaluations. The AHP converts these evaluations to numerical values that can be processed and compared over the entire range of the problem. A numerical weight or priority is derived for each element of the hierarchy, allowing diverse and often incommensurable elements to be compared to one another in a rational and consistent way. This capability distinguishes the AHP from other decision making techniques. In the final step of the process, numerical priorities are calculated for each of the decision alternatives. These numbers represent the alternatives' relative ability to achieve the decision goal, so they allow a straightforward consideration of the various courses of action. Hence a

web service can be consumed by a client application. Different types of client applications can consume a web service. In todays software environment, almost every application needs a web service to enhance its functionality. The important advantage of a web service is that it returns its results in xml format, which can be consumed by different types of clients like browser based clients, rich desktop clients, spreadsheets, wireless devices, interactive voice response (IVR) systems and other business applications. Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows a computer to interact with humans through the use of voice and DTMF keypad inputs. In telecommunications, IVR allows customers to interact with a companys database via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which they can service their own inquiries by following the IVR dialogue. IVR systems can respond with prerecorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed. IVR applications can be used to control almost any function where the interface can be broken down into a series of simple interactions. IVR systems deployed in the network are sized to handle large call volumes. IVR technology is also being introduced into automobile systems for hands-free operation. Current deployment in automobiles revolves around satellite navigation, audio and mobile phone systems. Hence technology is required which includes accessing information throughout a local area network or the internet using a phone system equipped with IVR software. Systems accessing information in this fashion are referred to as voice portals. A voice portal is an automated computer interface between a telephone caller and a digital information source. In telephony, it's the point of entry for a person using an interactive voice response or voice recognition system. A voice portal is also referred to as a vortal. It is a service or web site that is accessible to a caller wishing to obtain information such as weather, account balances, sporting scores, or stock quotes. Voice portal phone systems can automatically access information from computer systems and web servers using XML pull logic, retrieving web information and converting this to voice. Voice portal web information access logic that enables IVR Phone Systems to make external requests for information via the internet. Using this technique, callers can be given information maintained anywhere on the web. Using Text To Speech application software, text information can be retrieved via discreet messages to other web sites (or servers) and this information converted into a phone message that is automatically played to the caller. Virtually any type of information can now be relayed to a caller using the phone system. IVR call flows are created in a variety of ways. A traditional IVR depended upon proprietary programming or scripting languages, whereas modern IVR applications are generated in a similar way to Web pages, using standards such as VoiceXML, CCXML, SRGS and SSML. The ability to use XML-driven applications allows a Web server to act as the application server, freeing the IVR developer to focus on the call flow. Higher level IVR development tools are available to further simplify the application development process. A call flow diagram can be drawn with a GUI tool and the presentation layer (typically VoiceXML) can be automatically generated. In addition, these tools normally provide extension mechanisms for software integration, such as an HTTP interface to a Web site and a Java interface for connecting to a database. Related Works Discovery of Web services is a fundamental area of research in ubiquitous computing. Many researchers have focused on discovering Web services through a centralized UDDI registry [1,2,3]. Although centralized registries can provide effective methods for the discovery of Web services, they suffer from problems associated with having centralized systems such as single point of failure, and bottlenecks. In addition, other issues relating to II.

the scalability of data replication, providing notifications to all subscribers when performing any system upgrades, and handling versioning of services from the same provider have driven researchers to find other alternatives. T. Witkowski has proposed an multi-objective decision making and search space system for the evaluation of production process scheduling in order to formulate the scheduling problem and also to evaluate the schedules for various optimality criteria, he describes the basic heuristics used for optimization schedules and the various approaches that use domination method, fuzzy method, and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for comparing schedules in accordance with multiple objectives. The effectiveness of this algorithm has been tested and new search space for the evaluation and generation of shop scheduling problem under multiple objectives has been created and also he described that the three- dimensional space can be used for the analyzing and controlling the production system [4]. Other approaches focused on having multiple public/private registries grouped into registry federations [5] such as METEOR-S for enhancing the discovery process. METEOR-S provides a discovery mechanism for publishing Web services over federated registries but this solution does not provide the means for articulating advanced search techniques which are essential for locating appropriate business applications. In addition, having federated registry environments can potentially provide inconsistent policies to be employed which will have a significant impact on the practicability of conducting inquiries across them. Furthermore, federated registry environments will have increased configuration overhead, additional processing time, and poor performance in terms of execution time when performing service discovery operations. Chih-Ming Liu developed on a performance evaluation model based on Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method which can be used for Evaluating the performance of a smaller number of business unit .this method maintains all the important features of the original DEA method like the objectivity by using data for analyzing the evaluation problem and the ability to suggest the improvement directions for each business unit under evaluation [6]. A desirable solution would be a Web services crawler engine such as WSCE that can facilitate the aggregation of Web service references, resources, and description documents, and can provide clients with a standard, universal access point for discovering Web services distributed across multiple register i.e. Several approaches focused on applying traditional Information Retrieval (IR) techniques or using keyword-based matching [7,8] which primarily depend on analyzing the frequency of terms. An Agent based Approach was introduces by Goreti Marreiros and Paulo Novais to simulate group decision system using argumentation which consists of a multiagent model to simulate group decision making tasks. Here different type of agents such as Facilitator agent, Voting agent, Information agent and Participant agents are used to choice best alternative among the various other group element [9]. Other attempts focused on schema matching [10,11] which try to understand the meanings of the schemas and suggest any trends or patterns. Other approaches studied the use of supervised classification and unsupervised clustering of Web services [12], artificial neural networks [13], or using unsupervised matching at the operation level [14]. Other approaches focused on the peer-to-peer framework architecture for service discovery and ranking [15], providing a conceptual model based on Web service reputation [16], and providing keyword based search engine for querying Web services [17]. However, many of these approaches provide a very limited set of search methods (i.e. search by business name, business location, etc.) and attempt to apply traditional IR techniques that may not be suitable for services discovery since Web services often contain or provide very brief textual description of what they offer. In addition, the Web services structure is complex and only a small portion of text is often provided. WSCE enhances the process of discovering Web services by providing advanced search capabilities for locating proper business applications across one or more UDDI registries and any other searchable repositories. In addition, WSCE allows for high performance and reliable discovery mechanism while current approaches are mainly dependent on external resources which in turn can significantly impact the ability to provide accurate and meaningful results. Furthermore, current techniques do not take into consideration the ability to predict, detect, recover from failures at the Web service host, or keep track of any dynamic updates or service changes. III. IVR enabled Web Service Discovery The request may be issued by the end user or the person in need of a particular service. Request is a kind of rule well formed according to the stipulation of representation. A component which is used in the processing of request is the analyzer, which in turn converts the request into a complete report. Request analyzer evaluates request

domain and also analyze the functions and parameters of available sets of services. The application discovery helps in the productivity of a company which uses these services by automating much business functions. Figure1: Architecture of IVR enabled Web Service Discovery

PBX/ACD

PSTN

Service Request

Service Registry

Request Analyzer Communication Manager

S
Service Discovery IVR Control Dynamic Dialog Designer Match Functionality Component Match Non Functional Requirements

Service Repository

Service Profile Grammar

Composer Interpreter

Session Manager FSM Simulator Event Delegator Decision Making Component-AHP Call Flow Monitor

Flow Decider

Voice XML

References:

Text-Speech Services

Interface Applications

Reusable Process

Business Services

Reusable Call Flow

Device Manager dev

When a request is quest by the user, is then equated with functionality component. If the quest is quenched in the service discovery then it is directed to match functionality requirement otherwise to the match non-functionality requirement which falls under the IVR control. There comes a need for summing up the rules for a particular request. So we are in need of service repository which is necessary for building the services. Both the service repository and service registry are recommended for making better solution to the queries. When a user is looking up for a service, the service registry is involved i.e. registry holds the references to the service. Repository helps in holding the services. The function behind the repository is to variegate the process of each voice ruleset according to the query and it is demanded as grammar. Once the request is set up for result, the composer and interpreter frame up the rule accordingly. As we know the purpose of the interpreter is to convert the higher level language or instruction into intermediate form. When the repository is executed through the service profile, grammar, composer and interpreter, it is then charged to the dynamic dialog designer. The solution to the query has been embedded to the dialog designer which is a dynamic component where a request will be modified whenever a recent query is summed up to the repository. A number of supplementary components as though voice XML, call flow monitor,

FSM simulator are employed to the designer. All the solution is converted to XML, as it is easy to process. Call flow monitor supervises whether the previous solution can be accessed when we are in need. The liable solution is constructed by the decision making component AHP. For better decision making the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multiple criteria decision making method, is applied as an underlying mechanism for developing a flexible and effective ranking algorithm. The flow decider and session manager are implemental in designing the suitable dialog solution and which are derived from decision making. Device manager gets the aides from voice XML and call flow monitor for reaching to the work of matching functional and non-functional requirement. Algorithm Web Service Selection using Parallel AHP with Message Passing -- Code for Processor 0 function WebServiceSelectionParallelAHP for level := 1 to n - 1 do choices := number of web service selection criteria / sub criteria at current level subchoices[i] := number of web service selection criteria / sub criteria at (level + 1)th level or number of alternative web services if level is n 1 for a particular selection criteria i for i := 1 to choices do j := subchoices[i] read pcm[i] for selection criteria i containing paired comparison of j sub criteria end for i p := number of processors chunksize := choices / p lastchunksize := chunksize + choices mod p for i := 1 to p - 2 send( to processor i, globalpriority[i * chunksize + 1], pcm[i * chunksize + 1], chunksize ) end for i send( to processor p -1, globalpriority[ (p - 1) * chunksize + 1], pcm[ (p - 1) * chunksize + 1], lastchunksize ) for i := 1 to chunksize calculate the local priority of the sub criteria of a selection criteria i compute the global priority by multiplying the local priorities with the global priority of selection criteria i end for i for i := 1 to p -1 receive( from processor i, global priorities for sub criteria sent to i) end for i end for level k := number of alternatives for i := 1 to k do totalpriority[i] := sum of global priorities of a web service i under different covering criteria for web service selection end for i bestalternative := choose the web service with the highest total priority value return bestalternative end function WebServiceSelectionParallelAHP -- Code for Processor k (where k = 1, 2, , p - 1) function CalculatePriority receive( 0, globalpriority[1:size], pcm[1:size], size) for i := 1 to size

calculate the local priority of the sub criteria of a selection criteria i compute the global priority by multiplying the local priorities with the global priority of selection criteria i end for i send( 0, calculated global priorities for the service selection sub criteria received ) end function CalculatePriority IV. Case Study The web service selection hierarchy for the organization is shown below

Choose the best custom bank service

Core Banking Service

Online Banking Service

Banking Service

Regular Transaction Service

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Withdraw

Deposit

Fund Transfer

Balance Enquiry

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

AHP Hierarchy for custom banking service selection

The measurements for regular transaction service can be stated with absolute function such as withdraw, deposit, fund transfer and balance enquiry. Others, such as core banking service, online banking service, banking service can be estimated with particular search of service. Search services are really dependent on the end user and are hard to state quantitatively at all. The AHP can accommodate all these types of criteria, even when they are present in a single problem. Another important fact to be noted is that the hierarchy for custom bank search selection may differ for different organizations depending on the factors / criteria they consider necessary.

To incorporate the judgments about the various elements in the hierarchy, the elements are compared two by two. The pair wise comparison begins with the various criteria present in the second row of the hierarchy. There are a total of six pairs to be compared for the four available criteria core banking/ online banking, core banking / banking service, core banking / regular transaction service. At the next level there are two sub criteria for each of the four chosen criterion. Since the hierarchy has more than one level of criteria, local and global priorities are assigned to each sub-criterion. The local priorities represent the relative weights of the nodes within a group of siblings with respect to their parent. The global priorities are obtained by multiplying the local priorities of the siblings by their parents global priority. At the alternatives row, the custom search services in each group of alternatives are compared pair-by-pair with respect to the covering criterion of the group, which is the node directly above them in the hierarchy. This comparison evaluates the search services under the various sub-criteria decided by the organization. There are four custom search services in the group of alternatives, so there will be six comparisons for each of the eight covering criteria. Intensity of Importance 1 3 Definition Equal importance Moderate importance Explanation

Two elements contribute equally to the objective Experience and judgment slightly favor one element over another 5 Strong importance Experience and judgment strongly favor one element over another 7 Very Strong importance One element is favored very strongly over another; its dominance is demonstrated in practice 9 Extreme importance The evidence favoring one element over another is of the highest possible order of affirmation Intensities of 2, 4, 6 and 8 can be used to express intermediate values.

Table 1: Fundamental Scale for pair wise Comparisons

Consider the first pair wise comparison, online banking versus core banking service. The organization can choose the search service with good performance or if cost is of utmost importance the organization can choose the service with optimal cost but trading off performance. Once a decision is made a number indicating the importance of the selected choice is assigned. The scale mentioned in table 1 is used during the comparison. The judgments for the 6 pair wise comparison for the four criteria chosen by the organization is shown below. Criteria More Important Intensity A B Core banking Core banking Core banking Online banking Online banking Banking service Online banking Banking service Regular transaction Banking service Regular transaction Regular transaction A A A B B A 6 2 2 6 6 6

Table 2: Judgments for Banking Service Selection criteria

Based on the judgments of comparison the following priorities are assigned to the various criteria. Next, the various sub-criteria are considered for pair wise comparison. Based on the judgments priorities are assigned as shown below.

Choose the best custom Bank Service

Core Banking Service (0.378)

Online Banking Service(0.176)

Banking Service(0.045 )

Regular Transaction Service(0 .3989)

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Withdraw 0.2796

Deposit 0.3765

Fund Transfer 0.1789

Balance Enquiry 0.1670

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

Search Services

AHP Hierarchy for custom search service selection

Priorities are assigned to the four criteria and also to eight the sub-criteria Priorities shown in blue indicates local priorities The organization can evaluate alternatives against their covering criteria in any order. Consider that the alternatives are chosen in the decreasing order of the priority of the covering criteria. So based on the sample values assigned to the sub-criteria, all the custom search services are pair wise compared on the basis of response time. Based on the intensity values local and global priorities are calculated for the different services. Alternative Core Banking Service Online Banking Service Banking Service Local Priority 0.2645 0.2658 0.2790 Global Priority 0.0625 0.0567 0.0620

Regular Transaction Service TOTAL

0.2120 1.0000

0.1240 0.2793

Similarly the various custom search services are compared pair wise under the other seven other covering criteria and the local and global priorities are calculated. V..Conclusion Thus web services are essential for business to business communication and it resolves all the problems of service consumers through interoperability. Web service discovery mechanism used to be optimized and upgraded consistently to cope up with the rising demands of the user. So in our work we analyzed and found the pitfalls existences service discovery and the new mechanism of effective web service selection and ranking through Interactive voice response system with the decision making component (AHP) has been introduced . We developed a layered architecture for requirements driven web service discovery using AHP and evaluated all possible customer requirements through IVR. We are also ranked the web services based on the evaluation of the service requirements criteria by classifying them into various service driven functionality with the goal of request satisfaction. For an experiment we applied the methodology for requesting banking service for the service consumer to select their the suitable service based on the banking functional requirements and we observe that the result generated by AHP satisfies the need of the service consumer through optimized IVR dialogs and also it reduces the time of service discovery through powerful decision making system with interactive voice response system . REFERENCES [1] U. Thaden, W. Siberski, and W. Nejdl, A Semantic Web Based Peer-to-Peer Service Registry Network, Technical Report, Learning Lab Lower Saxony, 2003. [2] M. Paolucci, T. Kawamura, T. Payne, and K. Sycara, Semantic Matching of Web Services Capabilities, 1st ISWC, pp. 333-347, 2002. [3] M. Paolucci, T. Kawamura, T. Payne, and K. Sycara, Importing the Semantic Web in UDDI, Web Services, E-Business and the Semantic Web Workshop (WES), pp. 225-236, May 2002. [4] T. witkowski , P. antczak, and A. antczak, Multi-objective decision making and search space for the evaluation of production process scheduling [5] Z. Chen, C. Liang-Tien, B. Silverajan, L. Bu-Sung, UX - An Architecture Providing QoS-Aware and Federated Support for UDDI, ICWS 2003, pp.171- 176, 2003. [6] Paul Davidsson, Stefan Johansson, and Mikael Svah, Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process for Evaluating Multi-Agent System Architecture Candidates [7] L. Larkey, Automatic Essay Grading Using Text Classification Techniques, 21st ACM SIGIR, pp.90-95, 1998. [8] Y. Yang and J. Pedersen, A Comparative Study on Feature Selection in Text Categorization, 14 th International Conference on Machine Learning, pp.412-420, 1997. [9] Goreti Marreiros, Paulo Novais, Jose Machado, Carlos Ramos, Jos Neves, An Agent based Approach to Group Decision Simulation using Argumentation [10] S. Melnik, H. Garcia-Molina, and E. Rahm,Similarity Flooding: A Versatile Graph Matching Algorithm, 18th ICDE Conference, pp. 117-128,2002. [11] E. Rahm and P. A. Bernstein, A Survey on Approaches to Automatic Schema Matching, VLDB Journal, 10(4), pp. 334-350, 2001. [12] A. Hess and N. Kushmerick, Learning to Attach Semantic Metadata to Web Services, ISWC 2003,pp. 258273, 2003. [13] E. Al-Masri, and Q.H. Mahmoud, A Context-Aware Mobile Service Discovery and Selection Mechanism using Artificial Neural Networks,IEEE ICEC 2006, pp. 594-598, 2006. [14] X. Dong, A. Halevy, J. Madhavan, E. Nemes, J.Zhang, Similarity Search for Web Services, 30 th VLDB Conference, pp. 372-383, 2004. [15] F. Emekci, O. D. Sahin, D. Agrawal, and A. El Abbadi, A Peer-to-Peer Framework for Web Service Discovery with Ranking, ICWS 2004,pp.192-199, 2004.