The cloud services market exhibits unique characteristics such as instant accessibility, fluctuating demand and supply, and interruptible service provision. Various pricing mechanisms exist in current industry practice, however, none is comprehensive enough to capture all these features. In my work, I identify key factors related to cloud computing pricing. My dissertation includes three essays...

This paper presents the survey of the smart grid technologies, including the background, motivation and practical applications. The driving forces for the smart grid technologies are presented, including the blackout, global energy crisis and environmental protection requirement. The key technology issues for building the smart grid are discussed. The crucial elements of the smart grid and thei...

In 1992, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission created a secondary market for natural gas transportation whereby shippers holding firm transportation capacity on interstate natural gas pipelines can compete with the pipeline in the provision of transportation services. However, if a shipper does not use some of its contracted firm transportation capacity, the pipeline can resell that ca...

—The rising share of energy generation of renewable energies leads to a more volatile energy generation. Large conventional generation capacities have to be kept in the system in order to smooth out the generation patterns of distributed generators. The controllability of electricity generation is on decrease. To improve adaptability of power systems due to these new challenges, the concept of ...

The visual occlusion technique has received considerable attention in recent years as a method for measuring the interruptible aspects of in-vehicle information system (IVIS) task performance. Because the visual occlusion technique lacks a loading task during “occluded” periods, an alternate method was adopted to provide increased sensitivity to the attentional costs of interruptions on IVIS-st...

We present an approach for approximate collision handling which uses probabilistic information for improving the calculated collision response between objects in real-time physically based animation. The system uses an interruptible collision detection mechanism, which checks for intersections between successive levels of a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH). Traditionally, when the collision dete...

In many applications of heuristic search, insufficient time is available to find provably optimal solutions. We consider the contract search problem: finding the best solution possible within a given time limit. The conventional approach to this problem is to use an interruptible anytime algorithm. Such algorithms return a sequence of improving solutions until interuppted and do not consider th...

In this study, we present Swift Linked Data Miner, an interruptible algorithm that can directly mine an online Linked Data source (e.g., a SPARQL endpoint) for OWL 2 EL class expressions to extend an ontology with new SubClassOf: axioms. The algorithm works by downloading only a small part of the Linked Data source at a time, building a smart index in the memory and swiftly iterating over the i...

Static analyzers have the invaluable advantage to produce analysis results fully automatically. However, when based on abstract interpretation, they often require fine parameters tuning to succeed on local technical parts in large programs. In such cases, an interactive mode could be appreciable to define some analysis parameters on-the-fly e.g. loop unrolling, partitioning -, but also to ident...

This paper deals with integrated employee timetabling and production scheduling problem. At the first level, we have to manage a classical employee timetabling problem. At the second level, we aim at supplying a feasible production schedule for a set of interruptible tasks with qualification requirements and time-windows. Instead of using a hierarchical approach, we try here to integrate the tw...