The QoS attributes of Grid services play important roles in several tasks in Grid computing such as QoS-aware service composition, service negotiation, resource management, service discovery and scheduling. By considering the dynamic aspects of the Grid environments and also the uncertainty related to Grid services, in this paper, we present BNQM, a Bayesian network based probabilistic QoS Mode...

Introduction: Medical tourism is a main source of national income. Thus, evaluating the viewpoints of medical tourists about the quality of service provided by healthcare centers may be useful in planning to develop this industry. The present study aimed to measure the gap between medical tourists' expectations and perceptions of the quality of service offered by the hospitals ...

In this paper we introduce a method that combines principal component analysis, correlation analysis, K-means clustering and self organizing maps for the quantitative semantic analysis of textual data focusing on the relationship between firms’ co-creation activities, the perception of their innovation and the articulation of the attributes of their product-enabled services. Principal component...

We discuss the specification of signatures, protocols (behaviour) and quality of service within software component specification frameworks. In particular we focus on (a) contractually used components, (b) the specification of components with variable contracts and interfaces, and (c) of quality of service. Interface descriptions including these aspects allow powerful static interoperability ch...

With the shift to a service-oriented architecture, goals concerning the IT of an organization, such as an increased flexibility and maintainability, are expected to be attained. For this purpose, the building blocks of the serviceoriented architecture, the services, have to be designed that certain quality attributes, such as loose coupling or autonomy, are fulfilled. Existing design processes ...

Modern software operates in highly dynamic and often unpredictable environments that can degrade its quality of service. Therefore, it is increasingly important having systems able to adapt their behavior. However, the achievement of software adaptability can influence other software quality attributes, such as availability, performance or cost. This paper proposes an approach for analyzing tra...

The performance of a composite service is determined by the performance of involved component services. When multiple non-functional criteria are considered, users are required to express their preferences over different quality attributes as numeric weights in existing methods. However, this imprecise method may not reflect the natural ordering of services and thus could miss some user-desired...

There are several situations where applications in the cloud need to self-manage their quality attributes (QA). We posit that selfadaptation can be achieved through a market-based approach and describe a marketplace for web-services. We simulate agents trading webservices on behalf of self-managing applications and demonstrate that such a mechanism leads to a good allocation of web-services to ...

John Morley [email protected] A system designer faces several challenges when specifying security for distributed computing environments or migrating systems to a new execution platform. Business stakeholders impose constraints due to cost, timeto-market requirements, productivity impact, customer satisfaction concerns, and the like. And users exercise power at the desktop over computing reso...