Financial institutions cannot isolate themselves from the trend toward globalization. Willingly or unwillingly, banks are being forced to move toward worldwide operation. One of the most compelling reasons for this change is the enormous potential of global transactions, whereby banks can offer services and credit facilities worldwide, tailored to customers regardless of where they are based. G...

Maintenance scheduling for high value assets has been studied for decades and is still a crucial area of research with new technological advancements. The main dilemma of maintenance scheduling is to avoid failures while preventing unnecessary maintenance. The technological advancements in real time monitoring and computational science make tracking asset health and forecasting asset failures p...

Current knowledge of the microbial communities within biological wastewater treatment reactors is incomplete due to limitations of traditional culture-based techniques and despite the emergence of recently applied molecular techniques. Here we demonstrate the application of high-density microarrays targeting universal 16S rRNA genes to evaluate microbial community composition in five biological...

Recent technology advances in sensors and sensor networks have enabled large swarms of geographically distributed sensors and sensor networks to monitor various environmental attributes and allowed real-time sensor data sharing. However, these technological advances have also posed new challenges for managing distributed sensors, for processing large-amount of heterogeneous sensor data, and for...

Requirements specification is an important phase of the requirements engineering area in the software development process. In geographically distributed environments, this phase becomes critical due to the characteristics of the distributed development (physical and temporal distance, cultural differences, trust, communication, etc). The objective of this paper is to analyze the requirements sp...

The last decade has witnessed substantial growth in the adoption of both Agile and distributed software development. However, combining Agile practices, which emphasize regular informal communication, with geographically and temporally distributed sites, which hinder regular informal communication, presents numerous challenges. Proponents of Agile, especially the Scrum project management framew...

44 Computer H igh-speed, wide-area networks have made it both possible and desirable to interconnect geographically distributed applications that control distributed collections of scientific data, remote scientific instruments, and highperformance computer systems. Such an application might, for example, control a remote radio telescope, transmit raw data from the telescope site to a distribut...

Containers such as Docker provide a lightweight virtualization technology. They have gained popularity in developing, deploying and managing applications across Cloud platforms. Container management orchestration platforms Kubernetes run application containers virtual clusters that abstract the overheads underlying infrastructures to simplify deployment of container solutions. These are well su...