The typical interaction between cloud provider and customer works as follows: the customer connects to a “cloud marketplace” through a Web interface, and selects the type and amount of the resources she needs (e.g., some virtual servers with given number of CPU cores, memory and disk space). The resources are allocated from a large pool that is physically hosted on some big datacenter managed b...

Efficient and competitive provision of service compositions depends both on the composition structure, and on planning and management of computational resources necessary for provision. Resource constraints on the service provider side have impact on the provision of composite services and can cause violations of predefined SLA criteria. We propose a methodology for modeling dynamic behavior of...

This paper describes the structure and implementation of the Intermodal Airport Ground Access Planning Tool (IAPT) that has been developed to provide an integrated analytical system to support airport ground access planning. The tool models the interaction between three components of the system: air passenger mode choice behavior, transportation provider competitive behavior (modeled as a gener...

The proliferation of the software as a service (SaaS) model challenges our understanding of trust formation in the external software acquisition. In the SaaS model vital software applications are often sourced over the internet with very limited personal interaction between representatives of user and provider. The present research seeks to explore how the subscribers of software services devel...

Most businesses these days use the web services technology as a medium to allow interaction between a service provider and a service requestor. However, both the service provider and the requestor would be unable to achieve their business goals when there are miscommunications between their processes. This research focuses on the process incompatibility between the web services and the way to a...

We present a web-based cross-platform adaptive music player that combines music information retrieval (MIR) and audio processing technologies with the interaction capabilities offered by GPS-equipped mobile devices. The application plays back a list of music tracks, which are linked to geographic paths in a map. The music player has two main enhanced features that adjust to the location of the ...

A good interpersonal relationship between a patient and provider, as characterized by mutual respect, openness, and a balance in their respective roles in decision-making, is an important marker of quality of care. This review is undertaken from a gender and health equity perspective and illustrates that gender biases and discrimination occur at many levels in the healthcare delivery environmen...

This article gives an overview of the most promising technologies for service providers to offer virtual private network services. The focus of this article is on the analysis of the scalability implications of these virtual private network mechanisms on existing service provider backbone networks. Very often, when deploying VPN services, service providers will be confronted with a trade-off be...

In this paper, we consider the problem of capacity provisioning for an online service supported by advertising. We analyse the strategic interaction between the service provider and the user base in this setting, modeling positive network effects, as well as congestion sensitivity in the user base. We focus specifically on the influence of positive network effects, as well as the impact of non-...

The advances in positioning technologies and the emergence of geolocation standards opens up to the development of innovative location-based services (LBS), e.g., web-based LBS. These services challenge existing privacy protection solutions. For example, the position information is provided by a third party, the location provider, and this party may be not fully trusted. In this paper, we analy...