Event-Condition-Action languages are the commonly accepted paradigm to express and model the behavior of reactive systems. While numerous Event-Condition-Action languages have been proposed in the literature, differing e.g. on the expressivity of the language and on its operational behavior, existing Event-Condition-Action languages do not generally support the action component to be formulated...

In a software transactional memory (STM) system, conflict detection is the problem of determining when two transactions cannot both safely commit. Validation is the related problem of ensuring that a transaction never views inconsistent data, which might potentially cause a doomed transaction to exhibit irreversible, externally visible side effects. Existing mechanisms for conflict detection va...

Transaction cost and agency theorists have frequently cited trucks as prototypical userowned assets, and have consequently predicted a predominance of self-employed drivers who contract with motor carriers. In fact, owner-operators accounted for less than one-third of trucking activity conducted by large interstate trucking firms in 1991, a proportion that has changed little since deregulation....

Process Modelling (PM) is a software engineering discipline that aims at supporting the development of large and complex software systems. Therefore, PM focusses on study, de nition, enaction, and possibly improvement of software process models. Traditional transaction management (TM) protects data against unexpected system failures, con icts or inconsistencies. TM is also used in other areas, ...

A warehouse is a data repository containing integrated information for eecient querying and analysis. Maintaining the consistency of warehouse data is challenging, especially if the data sources are autonomous and views of the data at the warehouse span multiple sources. Transactions containing multiple updates at one or more sources, e.g., batch updates, complicate the consistency problem. In ...

This report discusses two design choices which arose in our recent work on introducing a new atomic keyword as an extension to the Java programming language. We discuss the extent to which programs using atomic blocks should be provided with an explicit ‘abort’ operation to roll-back the effects of the current block. We also discuss mechanisms for supporting blocks that perform I/O operations o...

This paper studies the effect of home-host country distance on the choice of governance mode in the offshoring of services. Using a Transaction Cost Economics approach, we look at the comparative costs of the hierarchical and contractual models to show that different dimensions of distance (geographic, cultural and institutional), because they generate different types of uncertainties, impact o...

The Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) is a Pay-for-Performance scheme introduced in England in 2004 to reward primary care providers. This incentive scheme provides financial incentives that reward the overall performance of a practice, not individual effort. Consequently, an important question is how the QOF may affect contractual choices, quality provision and doctor mobility in the primar...