OBJECTIVE The contribution of unhealthy dietary patterns to the epidemic of obesity has been well recognized. Differences in availability of foods may have an important influence on individual eating behaviors and health disparities. This study examined the availability of food stores and food service places by city characteristics on city level of income and urbanization. METHODS The cross-s...

Service selection and binding for building composite services is a critical but difficult to resolve issue in the domain of service-oriented computing. This paper proposes an innovative approach to address this issue, in which every abstract component service in the composition is assigned a weight value to represent its importance according to designer scoring and basis path analysis, thereby ...

In this paper, we consider field service in which service providers are responsible for maintaining equipment performance. To do so, preventive maintenance work is usually required in addition to repairs. Field service managers are often faced with the conflicting objectives of maintaining a high level of equipment availability and keeping a low service cost. A condition-based maintenance (CBM)...

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) describe the desired behavior of a service. They present agreed-upon target behaviors (e.g. capacity, performance, availability, cost) that the clients of a service can expect, and that the service provider can manage against. Both clients and service providers need a way to monitor how a service is doing against its SLOs, and display the result of that monitorin...

When IT service providers adapt their IT system landscapes because of new technologies or changing business requirements, the effects of changes to the quality of service must be considered to fulfill service level agreements. Analytical prediction models can support this process in the service design stages, but dependencies between quality aspects are not taken into account. In this paper, a ...