Plastics recycling depends on everyday sorting practices and on how recycling services are communicated and experienced. Virtual reality (VR) can present these practices and services in situated, interactive form, yet its role in service design for plastics recycling is still emerging. This paper examines how VR tools can contribute to designing plastics recycling services through two application cases that address different stages of the recycling journey. The first case, Clean Cabin Escape, is a household scale VR escape room where players collect and sort waste items into locally relevant categories, with immediate feedback that supports practice with plastics recycling decisions. The second case is a VR simulation of a plastics recycling center that represents a real planned site and is used in service design workshops where stakeholders explore layout, signage and customer paths for plastics fractions. Across the cases, we analyse how VR supported learning, engagement and shared sensemaking, and how it interacted with other service design methods such as workshops, customer path mapping and physical artefacts. The findings show that VR can make domestic sorting tasks and complex recycling centers more concrete for both citizens and professionals, but also highlight trade offs related to hardware access, onboarding effort, visual fidelity and localisation of recycling rules. The paper concludes by outlining opportunities for integrating VR into broader service design toolsets for plastics recycling and circular economy services, and by pointing to directions for future research on long term impact and inclusive design.
Scheduling services within the computing continuum is complex due to the dynamic interplay of the Edge, Fog, and Cloud resources, each offering distinct computational and networking advantages. This paper introduces SCAREY, a user location-aided service lifecycle management framework based on state machines. SCAREY addresses critical service discovery, provisioning, placement, and monitoring challenges by providing unified dynamic state machine-based lifecycle management, allowing instances to transition between discoverable and non-discoverable states based on demand. It incorporates a scalable service deployment algorithm to adjust the number of instances and employs network measurements to optimize service placement, ensuring minimal latency and enhancing sustainability. Real-world evaluations demonstrate a 73% improvement in service discovery and acquisition times, 45% cheaper operating costs and over 57% less power consumption and lower CO2 emissions compared to existing related methods.
Andreella Angela, Aliverti Emanuele, Caldura Federico
et al.
The availability of affordable and high-quality childcare services has become a significant concern in recent years. Such services can facilitate the balance between work and family life, increasing participation in the workforce and promoting gender equality. Furthermore, childcare can also help address the issue of decreasing fertility rates by making it more affordable for parents to have children while maintaining their careers. This is critical, especially for countries that are facing ultralow fertility rates like Italy. The Italian government has included within the recovery and resilience plan financed with Next Generations EU funds an unprecedented investment in order to increase the supply of children's education services and make it more equitably distributed across the country. In this article, we estimate groups of spatial areas with similar structures in terms of coverage (availability of childcare services at the municipality level), public expenditure rates in childcare, as well as other socio-demographic and economic factors, such as female employment, education, and grandparent rates. Our empirical findings confirm how Italy is characterized by a large number of "sub-regional models" and how some of these clusters are shared across multiple regions. We provide a preliminary attempt to explain how such patterns are driven by socio-demographic factors and argue that these very different conditions necessitate specific policy decisions. The work highlights the need for regional governance of the children's educational system.
Md Nurul Anwar, Roslyn I. Hickson, Somya Mehra
et al.
\textit{Plasmodium vivax} is the most geographically widespread malaria-causing parasite resulting in significant associated global morbidity and mortality. One of the factors driving this widespread phenomenon is the ability of the parasites to remain dormant in the liver. Known as hypnozoites, they reside in the liver following an initial exposure, before activating later to cause further infections, referred to as relapses. As around 79-96$\%$ of infections are attributed to relapses, we expect it will be highly impactful to apply treatment to target the hypnozoite reservoir to eliminate \textit{P. vivax}. Treatment with a radical cure to target the hypnozoite reservoir is a potential tool to control or eliminate \textit{P. vivax}. We have developed a multiscale mathematical model as a system of integro-differential equations that captures the complex dynamics of \textit{P. vivax} hypnozoites and the effect of hypnozoite relapse on disease transmission. Here, we use our model to study the anticipated effect of radical cure treatment administered via a mass drug administration (MDA) program. We implement multiple rounds of MDA with a fixed interval between rounds, starting from different steady-state disease prevalences. We then construct an optimisation model to obtain the optimal MDA interval. We also incorporate mosquito seasonality in our model to study its effect on the optimal treatment regime. We find that the effect of MDA interventions is temporary and depends on the pre-intervention disease prevalence (and choice of model parameters) as well as the number of MDA rounds under consideration. We find radical cure alone may not be enough to lead to \textit{P. vivax} elimination under our mathematical model (and choice of model parameters) since the prevalence of infection eventually returns to pre-MDA levels.
Amr S. Abdelfattah, Tamer Abdelkader, EI-Sayed M. EI-Horbaty
The intermittent wireless connectivity in Mobiles limits the spread of mobile applications usage over the web, such that the web services are the independent protocol that used to achieve the mobile connectivity with the cloud services. Achieving the web service reliability results in two aspects. The first is low communication overhead and retrieving the appropriate response to prevent the duplicate request execution. The second is overcoming the request time out problem that is one of the most effected issues in the mobile experience. This paper proposes Reliable Mobile Agent and Web Socket approach (RMAWS) that achieves the reliable web services consumption. The enhanced architecture is hybrid between the mobile agent approach and web socket open connection communication protocol. This approach recovers the data lose because of the intermittent connections, overcomes the Time-out problem, and enhances the mobile experience by achieving this service consumption reliability.
Wei-Kun Chen, Ya-Feng Liu, Antonio De Domenico
et al.
Network function virtualization is a promising technology to simultaneously support multiple services with diverse characteristics and requirements in the fifth generation and beyond networks. In practice, each service consists of a predetermined sequence of functions, called service function chain (SFC), running on a cloud environment. To make different service slices work properly in harmony, it is crucial to select the cloud nodes to deploy the functions in the SFC and flexibly route the flow of the services such that these functions are processed in sequence, the end-to-end (E2E) latency constraints of all services are guaranteed, and all resource constraints are respected. In this paper, we propose a new (mixed binary linear program) formulation of the above network slicing problem that optimizes the system energy efficiency while jointly considers the resource budget, functional instantiation, flow routing, and E2E latency requirement. Numerical results show the advantage of the proposed formulation compared to the existing ones.
Sebastiano Barbieri, Suneela Mehta, Billy Wu
et al.
AIMS. This study compared the performance of deep learning extensions of survival analysis models with traditional Cox proportional hazards (CPH) models for deriving cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk prediction equations in national health administrative datasets. METHODS. Using individual person linkage of multiple administrative datasets, we constructed a cohort of all New Zealand residents aged 30-74 years who interacted with publicly funded health services during 2012, and identified hospitalisations and deaths from CVD over five years of follow-up. After excluding people with prior CVD or heart failure, sex-specific deep learning and CPH models were developed to estimate the risk of fatal or non-fatal CVD events within five years. The proportion of explained time-to-event occurrence, calibration, and discrimination were compared between models across the whole study population and in specific risk groups. FINDINGS. First CVD events occurred in 61,927 of 2,164,872 people. Among diagnoses and procedures, the largest 'local' hazard ratios were associated by the deep learning models with tobacco use in women (2.04, 95%CI: 1.99-2.10) and with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with acute lower respiratory infection in men (1.56, 95%CI: 1.50-1.62). Other identified predictors (e.g. hypertension, chest pain, diabetes) aligned with current knowledge about CVD risk predictors. The deep learning models significantly outperformed the CPH models on the basis of proportion of explained time-to-event occurrence (Royston and Sauerbrei's R-squared: 0.468 vs. 0.425 in women and 0.383 vs. 0.348 in men), calibration, and discrimination (all p<0.0001). INTERPRETATION. Deep learning extensions of survival analysis models can be applied to large health administrative databases to derive interpretable CVD risk prediction equations that are more accurate than traditional CPH models.
Web Service Composition deals with the (re)use of Web Services to provide complex functionality, inexistent in any single service. Over the state-of-the-art, we introduce a new type of modeling, based on ontologies and relations between objects, which allows us to extend the expressiveness of problems that can be solved automatically.
Khadija Bouraqia, Essaid Sabir, Mohamed Sadik
et al.
Over the last few years, the evolution of network and user handsets' technologies, have challenged the telecom industry and the Internet ecosystem. Especially, the unprecedented progress of multimedia streaming services like YouTube, Vimeo and DailyMotion resulted in an impressive demand growth and a significant need of Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g., high data rate, low latency/jitter, etc.). Mainly, numerous difficulties are to be considered while delivering a specific service, such as a strict QoS, human-centric features, massive number of devices, heterogeneous devices and networks, and uncontrollable environments. Thenceforth, the concept of Quality of Experience (QoE) is gaining visibility, and tremendous research efforts have been spent on improving and/or delivering reliable and addedvalue services, at a high user experience. In this paper, we present the importance of QoE in wireless and mobile networks (4G, 5G, and beyond), by providing standard definitions and the most important measurement methods developed. Moreover, we exhibit notable enhancements and controlling approaches proposed by researchers to meet the user expectation in terms of service experience.
Cloud Computing is expected to become the driving force of information technology to revolutionize the future. Presently number of companies is trying to adopt this new technology either as service providers, enablers or vendors. In this way the cloud market is estimated be likely to emerge at a remarkable rate. Under the whole cloud umbrella, PaaS seems to have a relatively small market share. However, it is expected to offer much more as it is compared with its counterparts SaaS and IaaS. This paper is aimed to assess and analyze the future of PaaS technology. Year 2018 named as 'the year of PaaS'. It means that PaaS technology has established strong roots and ready to hit the market with better technology services. This research will discuss future PaaS market trends, growth and business competitors. In the current dynamic era, several companies in the market are offering PaaS services. This research will also outline some of the top service providers (proprietary & open source) to discuss their current technology status and present a futuristic look into their services and business strategies. Analysis of the present and future PaaS technology infrastructure will also be a major discussion in this paper.
Numerical QCD is often extremely resource demanding and it is not rare to run hundreds of simulations at the same time. Each of these can last for days or even months and it typically requires a job-script file as well as an input file with the physical parameters for the application to be run. Moreover, some monitoring operations (i.e. copying, moving, deleting or modifying files, resume crashed jobs, etc.) are often required to guarantee that the final statistics is correctly accumulated. Proceeding manually in handling simulations is probably the most error-prone way and it is deadly uncomfortable and inefficient! BaHaMAS was developed and successfully used in the last years as a tool to automatically monitor and administrate simulations.
Service requesters with limited technical knowledge should be able to compare services based on their quality of service (QoS) requirements in cloud service marketplaces. Existing service matching approaches focus on QoS requirements as discrete numeric values and intervals. The analysis of existing research on non-functional properties reveals two improvement opportunities: list-typed QoS properties as well as explicit handling of preferences for lower or higher property values. We develop a concept and constraint models for a service matcher which contributes to existing approaches by addressing these issues using constraint solvers. The prototype uses an API at the standardisation stage and discovers implementation challenges. This paper concludes that constraint solvers provide a valuable tool to solve the service matching problem with soft constraints and are capable of covering all QoS property types in our analysis. Our approach is to be further investigated in the application context of cloud federations.
Steve Versteeg, Miao Du, Jean-Guy Schneider
et al.
Large enterprise software systems make many complex interactions with other services in their environment. Developing and testing for production-like conditions is therefore a very challenging task. Current approaches include emulation of dependent services using either explicit modelling or record-and-replay approaches. Models require deep knowledge of the target services while record-and-replay is limited in accuracy. Both face developmental and scaling issues. We present a new technique that improves the accuracy of record-and-replay approaches, without requiring prior knowledge of the service protocols. The approach uses Multiple Sequence Alignment to derive message prototypes from recorded system interactions and a scheme to match incoming request messages against prototypes to generate response messages. We use a modified Needleman-Wunsch algorithm for distance calculation during message matching. Our approach has shown greater than 99% accuracy for four evaluated enterprise system messaging protocols. The approach has been successfully integrated into the CA Service Virtualization commercial product to complement its existing techniques.
Elder people are becoming a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and cost-effective need to be sought. This paper proposes a service-oriented infrastructure approach to this problem. We propose an open and integrated service infrastructure to orchestrate the available resources (smart devices, professional carers, informal carers) to help elder or disabled people. Main characteristic of our design is the explicitly support of dynamically available service providers such as informal carers. By modeling the service description as Semantic Web Services, the service request can automatically be discovered, reasoned about and mapped onto the pool of heterogeneous service providers. We expect our approach to be able to efficiently utilize the available service resources, enrich the service options, and best match the requirements of the requesters.
Mobile devices are becoming the primary platforms for many users who always roam around when accessing the cloud computing services. From this, the cloud computing is integrated into the mobile environment by introducing a new paradigm, mobile cloud computing. In the context of mobile computing, the battery life of mobile device is limited, and it is important to balance the mobility performance and energy consumption. Fortunately, cloud services provide both opportunities and challenges for mobility management. Taking the activities of cloud services accessing into consideration, we propose a service-aware location update mechanism, which can detect the presence and location of the mobile device without traditional periodic registration update. Analytic model and simulation are developed to investigate the new mechanism. The results demonstrate that the service-aware location update management can reduce the location update times and handoff signaling, which can efficiently save power consumption for mobile devices.
Web Services provide interoperable mechanisms for describing, locating and invoking services over the Internet; composition further enables to build complex services out of simpler ones for complex B2B applications. While current studies on these topics are mostly focused - from the technical viewpoint - on standards and protocols, this paper investigates the adoption of formal methods, especially for composition. We logically classify and analyze three different (but interconnected) kinds of important issues towards this goal, namely foundations, verification and extensions. The aim of this work is to individuate the proper questions on the adoption of formal methods for dependable composition of Web Services, not necessarily to find the optimal answers. Nevertheless, we still try to propose some tentative answers based on our proposal for a composition calculus, which we hope can animate a proper discussion.
Ibrahim El Bitar, Fatima Zahra Belouadha, Ounsa Roudies
Most works on Web services has focused on discovery, composition and selection processes of these kinds of services. Other few works were interested in how to represent Web services search queries. However, these queries cannot be processed by ensuring a high level of performance without being adequately represented first. To this end, different query languages were designed. Even so, in the absence of a standard, these languages are quite various. Their diversity makes it difficult choosing the most suitable language. In fact, this language should be able to cover all types of preferences or requirements of clients such as their functional, nonfunctional,temporal or even specific constraints as is the case of geographical or spatial constraints and meet their needs and preferences helping to provide them the best answer. It must also be mutually simple and imposes no restrictions or at least not too many constraints in terms of prior knowledge to use and also provide a formal or semi-formal queries presentation to support their automatic post-processing. A comparative study is eventually established to allow to reveal the advantages and limitations of various existing languages in this context. It is a synthesis of this category of languages discussing their performance level and their capability to respond to various needs related to the Web services research and discovery case. The criterions identified at this stage may, in our opinion, constitute then the main pre-requisite that a language should satisfy to be called perfect or to be a future standard.
In a global business context with continuous changes, the enterprises have to enhance their operational efficiency, to react more quickly, to ensure the flexibility of their business processes, and to build new collaboration pathways with external partners. To achieve this goal, they must use e-business methods, mechanisms and techniques while capitalizing on the potential of new information and communication technologies. In this context, we propose a standards, model and Web services-based approach for modeling and integrating agile enterprise business processes. The purpose is to benefit from Web services characteristics to enhance the processes design and realize their dynamic integration. The choice of focusing on Web services is essentially justified by their broad adoption by enterprises as well as their capability to warranty interoperability between both intra and inter-enterprises systems. Thereby, we propose in this chapter a metamodel for describing business processes, and discuss their dynamic integration by addressing the Web services discovery issue. On the one hand, the proposed metamodel is in line with the W3C Web services standards, namely, WSDL, SAWSDL and WS-Policy. It considers the use of BPMN standard to describe the behavioral aspect of business processes and completes their design using UML diagrams describing their functional, non-functional and semantic aspects. On other hand, our approach for integrating processes is in line with BPEL standard recommended to orchestrate Web services. To realize executable business processes, this approach recommends the use of semantic matching and selection mechanisms in order to produce agile systems.
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems, which are considered to be robust, self-organising and scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic problems. Digital Ecosystems are a novel optimisation technique where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of agents (representing services) which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. We created an Ecosystem-Oriented Architecture of Digital Ecosystems by extending Service-Oriented Architectures with distributed evolutionary computing, allowing services to recombine and evolve over time, constantly seeking to improve their effectiveness for the user base. Individuals within our Digital Ecosystem will be applications (groups of services), created in response to user requests by using evolutionary optimisation to aggregate the services. These individuals will migrate through the Digital Ecosystem and adapt to find niches where they are useful in fulfilling other user requests for applications. Simulation results imply that the Digital Ecosystem performs better at large scales than a comparable Service-Oriented Architecture, suggesting that incorporating ideas from theoretical ecology can contribute to useful self-organising properties in digital ecosystems.