Cloud computing is increasingly becoming a viable alternative for businesses large and small to outsource their service needs. Aspects of major importance in the business context are contracts between service providers and service consumers. Existing e-Contracting solutions mainly from the Grid domain can be partially re-used, but do not work well with the heterogeneity prevalent in the cloud. ...

Companies experience an increasing importance for implementing sustainability concerns into their processes and product offerings. In the consumer electronics industry, traditional manufacturing-focused initiatives to minimize the environmental impacts of products are currently still far from satisfactory. The European research project SMC-Excel aims at enhancing the ecological sustainability i...

Upon the technological advancement of production flexibility, supply chain agility, and customer behavioral tracking, many online businesses now develop their customization strategies. In this regard, this study proposes an integrative framework for customization of product information, transaction handling, product attribute, and sales’ service. We are interested in how these customizations af...

In service-oriented environments, components are discovered and integrated at runtime. The type of the client entities that expose potentially interesting contexts can therefore not be anticipated, and can not be subject to type-based pointcut expressions. This paper proposes a contextual pointcut construct that attempts to address context passing mechanisms needed for concurrent customization ...

Mass customization enhances profitability through a synergy of increasing customer-perceived value and reducing the costs of production and logistics. It inherently makes high value-added products and services possible through premium profits derived from customized products. This strength is particularly attractive to OEM-based industries. This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges ...

An important problem with cell-switched technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is the provision of customized multiplexing behavior to applications. This customization takes the form of setting up processes in the network and end-points to meet application "Quality of Service" (QoS) requirements. The proposed thesis work examines the necessary components of a software architectur...

In service-oriented systems services can be easily reused and shared without modification. However, there are business situations where a variation of services is needed to meet the requirements of a specific customer or context. Variation of software systems has been well researched in product line engineering in terms of Variability Implementation Techniques (VITs). While most VITs focus on t...