Coordination in Service Value Networks - A Mechanism Design Approach

The fundamental paradigm shift from traditional value chains to agile service value networks (SVN) implies new economic and organizational challenges. This work provides an auction-based coordination mechanism that enables the allocation and pricing of service compositions in SVNs. The mechanism is multidimensional incentive compatible and implements an ex-post service level enforcement. Further extensions of the mechanism are evaluated following analytical and numerical research methods

Innovative business plan: a crowdsourcing medical data annotation platform company

In this business plan, a new crowdsourcing medical data annotation platform company is proposed. It is to help companies and research institutions which are developing medical artificial intelligence outsource medical data annotation work to professional workers. Crowdsourcing platform, as one of the intermediary platform, is a new Internet business model to provide service for large-scale enterprises. There is great demand for crowdsourcing service in medical AI field in China. However, there is no company in China could offer professional medical data annotation services. Since the development of medical artificial intelligence in China, most of the companies engaged in research and development of medical artificial intelligence can only rely on recruitment or give up research and development. The cost of the workforce and material resources is very high. The proposed company's services can better address these issues. On the one hand, the proposed company can provide more cost-effective and accurate annotation data quickly through outsourcing. On the other hand, the proposed company can provide medical professionals with part-time opportunities to increase their income and reduce unemployment. Through the analysis in the paper, we can predict that the proposed company can stabilise the profit by collecting commissions and advertising. It will enable medical AI companies, the proposed companies and medical professionals to achieve a win-win situation. Therefore, it is attractive for Chinese start-ups to develop and fill this niche market.Neste plano de negócios, uma nova empresa de plataforma de anotação de dados médicos de crowdsourcing é proposta. É para ajudar empresas e instituições de pesquisa que estão desenvolvendo inteligência artificial médica a terceirizar facilmente o trabalho de anotação de dados médicos para trabalhadores profissionais. A plataforma de crowdsourcing, como uma das plataformas intermediárias, é um novo modelo de negócios na Internet para fornecer serviços para empresas de grande escala. Existe uma grande demanda por serviços de crowdsourcing no campo da IA médica na China. No entanto, nenhuma empresa na China poderia oferecer serviços profissionais de anotação de dados médicos. Desde o desenvolvimento da inteligência artificial médica na China, a maioria das empresas envolvidas em pesquisa e desenvolvimento de inteligência artificial médica só pode contar com seu próprio recrutamento ou desistir de pesquisa e desenvolvimento. O custo de mão de obra e recursos materiais é muito alto. Os serviços da empresa proposta podem resolver melhor esses problemas. Por um lado, a empresa proposta pode fornecer dados de anotação mais econômicos e precisos rapidamente através da terceirização. Por outro lado, a empresa proposta pode oferecer aos profissionais médicos oportunidades de meio período para aumentar sua renda e reduzir o desemprego. Através da análise do artigo, podemos prever que a empresa proposta pode estabilizar o lucro coletando comissões e publicidade. Isso permitirá que as empresas de IA médica, as empresas propostas e os profissionais médicos alcancem uma situação em que todos saem ganhando. Portanto, é atraente para as empresas chinesas desenvolver e preencher esse nicho de mercado

Performance evaluation of cooperation strategies for m-health services and applications

Health telematics are becoming a major improvement for patients’ lives, especially for disabled, elderly, and chronically ill people. Information and communication technologies have rapidly grown along with the mobile Internet concept of anywhere and anytime connection. In this context, Mobile Health (m-Health) proposes healthcare services delivering, overcoming geographical, temporal and even organizational barriers. Pervasive and m-Health services aim to respond several emerging problems in health services, including the increasing number of chronic diseases related to lifestyle, high costs in existing national health services, the need to empower patients and families to self-care and manage their own healthcare, and the need to provide direct access to health services, regardless the time and place. Mobile Health (m- Health) systems include the use of mobile devices and applications that interact with patients and caretakers. However, mobile devices have several constraints (such as, processor, energy, and storage resource limitations), affecting the quality of service and user experience. Architectures based on mobile devices and wireless communications presents several challenged issues and constraints, such as, battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections, noises, limited bandwidths, and network delays. In this sense, cooperation-based approaches are presented as a solution to solve such limitations, focusing on increasing network connectivity, communication rates, and reliability. Cooperation is an important research topic that has been growing in recent years. With the advent of wireless networks, several recent studies present cooperation mechanisms and algorithms as a solution to improve wireless networks performance. In the absence of a stable network infrastructure, mobile nodes cooperate with each other performing all networking functionalities. For example, it can support intermediate nodes forwarding packets between two distant nodes. This Thesis proposes a novel cooperation strategy for m-Health services and applications. This reputation-based scheme uses a Web-service to handle all the nodes reputation and networking permissions. Its main goal is to provide Internet services to mobile devices without network connectivity through cooperation with neighbor devices. Therefore resolving the above mentioned network problems and resulting in a major improvement for m-Health network architectures performances. A performance evaluation of this proposal through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating this cooperative scheme using a real m-Health application is presented. A cryptography solution for m-Health applications under cooperative environments, called DE4MHA, is also proposed and evaluated using the same real network scenario and the same m-Health application. Finally, this work proposes, a generalized cooperative application framework, called MobiCoop, that extends the incentive-based cooperative scheme for m-Health applications for all mobile applications. Its performance evaluation is also presented through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating MobiCoop using different mobile applications

Feasibility investigation of crowdsourcing-based product design and development for manufacturing

In the era of Industry 4.0, to help manufacturers make quick response to rapidly changing market and customer needs, this research explores the feasibility of realizing benefits of crowdsourcing in product design and development from a lifecycle point of view through investigations on product design quality control and crowdsourcing technology theories, product design lifecycle information modelling, and simulation platform prototyping. It intends to help manufacturers create a product-service ecosystem to deliver values to all involved stakeholders of a PDD process. This study started with building up the theoretical foundation of product design quality control in crowdsourcing design environment. Then, key crowdsourcing technologies for realizing a lifecycle PDD process on a crowdsourcing platform while enabling the design quality were explored. Thirdly, a multi-layer product design lifecycle information model was developed to accommodate all design related information in a PDD process and the identified information at each design phase and the relationships and interactions among information entities were evaluated by case studies and ORM modelling method, respectively. Finally, two crowdsourcing platform prototypes based on the PDLIM were developed to test their effectiveness in communicating design information among stakeholders and delivering value to them. The proposed research made contributions to knowledge through the following improvements/advancements: (1) understanding of key factors affecting product design quality in crowdsourcing design environments, (2) a technical foundation of crowdsourcing technologies for PDD process, (3) a novel product design lifecycle information model accommodating design information in crowdsourcing environments, and (4) guidelines on developing intermediary and integrated crowdsourcing platforms for PDD

Extending Web Service Architecture with a Quality Component: Web Service Architecture and Quality Component

The Web service technology provides standard mechanisms for describing the interface of the services available on the Web, as well as protocols for locating such services and invoking them. Each Web service has an associated Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document which describes how it works and how to invoke it. Such document is registered at a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry that provides a discovery service for the WSDL descriptions. The Web services architecture consists of three components: Service Provider, Service Requester and UDDI Registry, and the interactions between them through publish, find, and bind operations. Between finding and binding steps there is another crucial step, which is not fully considered by current approaches. This is the step of selection. The UDDI service registry hosts hundreds of similar Web services, which makes it difficult for the service requesters to choose from them, as the selection is based on the functional properties only. However, many similar services are differentiated by their quality criteria. Therefore, quality criteria are important to be considered in the web service selection. This thesis proposes a quality-based Web service architecture (QWSA) that extends the current Web service architecture with a quality server. The quality server consists of four main components: quality manager, quality matchmaker, quality report analyzer, and quality database. The main purpose of quality server is to assist service requester to select the best available service that fulfils his/her preference by matching between a service requester’s quality requirement and the service providers’ quality specifications. In addition, this thesis reports the development of a quality matchmaking process (QMP) based on the proposed architecture by building a quality service selection system (QSSS). This QSSS has been verified and validated using a case study of Amazon E-commerce service (ECS)

Extending an open source enterprise service bus for dynamic discovery and selection of cloud data hosting solutions based on WS-policy

As part of Cloud computing, the service model Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has emerged, where customers can develop and host internet-scale applications on Cloud infrastructure. The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is one possible building block of a PaaS offering, providing integration capabilities for Service-Oriented architectures. Dynamic service discovery and selection support for an ESB increases flexibility of the application composed of reusable services in the Cloud and gives providers the possibility react faster on changes in the market. In this master's thesis we specify, design and implement Dynamic Discovery and Selection of Cloud Data Hosting Solutions for an open-source ESB. Provided dynamic service discovery and selection endpoint/service allows users of tenants to send requests with attached policies, while tenants register Cloud Data Hosting Solutions with the policies that describe their capabilities. To provide uniform policy language a new WS-Policy Assertion Language is created and specified that is used to express functional and non-functional properties of Cloud Data Hosting Solutions. By matching a policy in a request and policies of Cloud Data Hosting Solutions, a suitable Cloud data store service is discovered. Moreover, we ensure data isolation between tenants while providing dynamic service discovery and selection

Rethinking Routing and Peering in the era of Vertical Integration of Network Functions

Content providers typically control the digital content consumption services and are getting the most revenue by implementing an all-you-can-eat model via subscription or hyper-targeted advertisements. Revamping the existing Internet architecture and design, a vertical integration where a content provider and access ISP will act as unibody in a sugarcane form seems to be the recent trend. As this vertical integration trend is emerging in the ISP market, it is questionable if existing routing architecture will suffice in terms of sustainable economics, peering, and scalability. It is expected that the current routing will need careful modifications and smart innovations to ensure effective and reliable end-to-end packet delivery. This involves new feature developments for handling traffic with reduced latency to tackle routing scalability issues in a more secure way and to offer new services at cheaper costs. Considering the fact that prices of DRAM or TCAM in legacy routers are not necessarily decreasing at the desired pace, cloud computing can be a great solution to manage the increasing computation and memory complexity of routing functions in a centralized manner with optimized expenses. Focusing on the attributes associated with existing routing cost models and by exploring a hybrid approach to SDN, we also compare recent trends in cloud pricing (for both storage and service) to evaluate whether it would be economically beneficial to integrate cloud services with legacy routing for improved cost-efficiency. In terms of peering, using the US as a case study, we show the overlaps between access ISPs and content providers to explore the viability of a future in terms of peering between the new emerging content-dominated sugarcane ISPs and the healthiness of Internet economics. To this end, we introduce meta-peering, a term that encompasses automation efforts related to peering – from identifying a list of ISPs likely to peer, to injecting control-plane rules, to continuous monitoring and notifying any violation – one of the many outcroppings of vertical integration procedure which could be offered to the ISPs as a standalone service