Towards an electric scooter level of service: A review and framework

Although electric scooters (e-scooters) are gaining ground rapidly, research on analysing their users\u27 experience lags far behind practice. Level of Service (LOS) is a promising approach to bridge the gap between research and practice via quantifying e-scooter riders\u27 experience. We reviewed the state-of-the-art literature of e-scooters concerning their users\u27 experience and proposed a preliminary framework for developing e-scooter LOS (SLOS). The findings suggest a lack of studies to evaluate SLOS, and e-scooters are rarely considered in the LOS estimation of other transport modes. Considering the impact of e-scooters in both modal substitute and supplement calls for unique SLOS indices in each scenario to reflect their user\u27s experience realistically. Future studies should analyse the interaction of e-scooters with other road users, particularly pedestrians. This study highlights the importance of treating e-scooter as a distinct transport mode and contributes to matching policy and practice to integrate e-scooters into transport planning

An intelligent framework for dynamic web services composition in the semantic web

As Web services are being increasingly adopted as the distributed computing technology of choice to securely publish application services beyond the firewall, the importance of composing them to create new, value-added service, is increasing. Thus far, the most successful practical approach to Web services composition, largely endorsed by the industry falls under the static composition category where the service selection and flow management are done a priori and manually. The second approach to web-services composition aspires to achieve more dynamic composition by semantically describing the process model of Web services and thus making it comprehensible to reasoning engines or software agents. The practical implementation of the dynamic composition approach is still in its infancy and many complex problems need to be resolved before it can be adopted outside the research communities. The investigation of automatic discovery and composition of Web services in this thesis resulted in the development of the eXtended Semantic Case Based Reasoner (XSCBR), which utilizes semantic web and AI methodology of Case Based Reasoning (CBR). Our framework uses OWL semantic descriptions extensively for implementing both the matchmaking profiles of the Web services and the components of the CBR engine. In this research, we have introduced the concept of runtime behaviour of services and consideration of that in Web services selection. The runtime behaviour of a service is a result of service execution and how the service will behave under different circumstances, which is difficult to presume prior to service execution. Moreover, we demonstrate that the accuracy of automatic matchmaking of Web services can be further improved by taking into account the adequacy of past matchmaking experiences for the requested task. Our XSCBR framework allows annotating such runtime experiences in terms of storing execution values of non-functional Web services parameters such as availability and response time into a case library. The XSCBR algorithm for matchmaking and discovery considers such stored Web services execution experiences to determine the adequacy of services for a particular task. We further extended our fundamental discovery and matchmaking algorithm to cater for web services composition. An intensive knowledge-based substitution approach was proposed to adapt the candidate service experiences to the requested solution before suggesting more complex and computationally taxing AI-based planning-based transformations. The inconsistency problem that occurs while adapting existing service composition solutions is addressed with a novel methodology based on Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). From the outset, we adopted a pragmatic approach that focused on delivering an automated Web services discovery and composition solution with the minimum possible involvement of all composition participants: the service provider, the requestor and the service composer. The qualitative evaluation of the framework and the composition tools, together with the performance study of the XSCBR framework has verified that we were successful in achieving our goal

The handbook of engineering self-aware and self-expressive systems

When faced with the task of designing and implementing a new self-aware and self-expressive computing system, researchers and practitioners need a set of guidelines on how to use the concepts and foundations developed in the Engineering Proprioception in Computing Systems (EPiCS) project. This report provides such guidelines on how to design self-aware and self-expressive computing systems in a principled way. We have documented different categories of self-awareness and self-expression level using architectural patterns. We have also documented common architectural primitives, their possible candidate techniques and attributes for architecting self-aware and self-expressive systems. Drawing on the knowledge obtained from the previous investigations, we proposed a pattern driven methodology for engineering self-aware and self-expressive systems to assist in utilising the patterns and primitives during design. The methodology contains detailed guidance to make decisions with respect to the possible design alternatives, providing a systematic way to build self-aware and self-expressive systems. Then, we qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated the methodology using two case studies. The results reveal that our pattern driven methodology covers the main aspects of engineering self-aware and self-expressive systems, and that the resulted systems perform significantly better than the non-self-aware systems

The value of rude health.

Executive summary: The report demonstrates that health and wellbeing policies at Royal Mail Group have had a number of significant and material effects:  Royal Mail Group has successfully tackled the issue of absenteeism (CHAPTER ONE): Royal Mail achieved significant reductions in absence – from 7% to 5% – between January 2004 and May 2007, equivalent to an extra 3,600 employees in work Parcelforce Worldwide reduced absence from 7% to 4.5% between January 2004 and May 2007 equivalent to an extra 104 employees in work There is a strong link between both organisations’ range of health and wellbeing and absence policies and reductions in absence (based on available data and interviews) Reducing absence has enabled both Royal Mail Group and its Parcelforce Worldwide business unit to make significant cost savings (CHAPTER TWO): LSE estimates of the annual staff cost of 1% short-term absence across Royal Mail would be on an annual basis: £34.8 millioniv excluding the cost of replacement labour such as overtime and agency staff / £75.9 million including such costs LSE’s estimates suggest that reducing absence by 2% between 2004 and 2007 would have contributed to a total saving across Royal Mail Group over the three years of as much as £227 millionv in terms of direct costs These estimates are based on the accounting cost of a day’s absence in terms of pay and benefit costs, and use of replacement labour either through agency staff or overtime Reducing absence will have saved at least £1.79 millionvi in direct costs annually for each percentage point reduction in absence in Parcelforce Worldwide Since being introduced in 2004, it is estimated that the policies which led to this 2.5% reduction in absence could have contributed to a total saving over the three years of as much as £6.7vii million in direct costs for Parcelforce Worldwide Controlling absence specifically enables managers at Parcelforce Worldwide to hit their targets more easily (CHAPTER THREE): It removes unpredictability in meeting profitability targets that managers are set, enabling them to keep unit costs down as well as hit targets for items delivered per day and grow depot net income more easily Across, all depots, reducing absence by 1% is worth £1,317,000 to Parcelforce Worldwide annually in terms of meeting net income targetsviii Reducing absence by 1% takes an average depot £2,300 closer to its daily net income target Tackling absenteeism reduces dependency on replacement labour, including agency staff. The evidence from Parcelforce Worldwide suggests that doing so safeguards performance indicators such as Quality of Service (QoS) and improves net income through bringing costs down (CHAPTER FOUR): The experience across Parcelforce Worldwide shows that reducing dependence on replacement labour such as agency staff prevents key performance indicators from slipping and strengthens a depot’s bottom line. Reducing absence by 1% adds more than £319,000ix annually to net income through reduced dependence on replacement labour This is primarily as a result of: i. Cost savings (replacement labour is expensive) ii. Improved efficiency – analysis suggests agency staff are half as efficient. This is supported by evidence drawn from interviews with managers LSE estimates that that the 2.5% reduction in absence achieved by Parcelforce Worldwide between January 2004 and May 2007 would have contributed at least £1.2 millionx to improved net income across the group Reducing absence has a positive effect on Quality of Service (QoS) – a key performance indicator both for Parcelforce Worldwide and for Royal Mail – by around a factor of 12 to one. 7 Improvements in QoS enable Parcelforce Worldwide to capture additional business and improve net income (roughly equivalent to profitability) (CHAPTER FIVE):  Reducing absence by 2.5% between January 2004 and May 2007 would have contributed to a 0.2% point increase in QoS all things being equal. i. This figure is derived from estimates relating to the individual depots. It is difficult to draw concrete conclusions about the aggregate movement in QoS across all depots Improvements in QoS enable depots to bring in more business through building a reputation for reliability with customers A 2.5% reduction in absence contributes to an improvement in net income of £448,000 annually through improvements in QoS This improvement in net income reflects: i. Greater cost savings through reduced absence ii. Greater efficiency Analysis by LSE suggests that between Jan 2004 and May 2007, improvements in QoS would have contributed at least £672,000 to Parcelforce Worldwide’s annual net income LSE has extrapolated from the example of Royal Mail Group to illustrate the wider benefits to the economy of tackling the issue of health and wellbeing (CHAPTER SIX) Royal Mail’s success in addressing the health and wellbeing of its employees provides an effective blueprint on tackling absence for the 13 worst performing sectors in the UK in terms of absence rates By concentrating on raising attendance in the poorest performing sites and depots and moving them towards average rates of absence, Royal Mail Group has demonstrated a highly effective method for improving the group-wide average absence rate Following the example of Royal Mail Group in addressing the ‘long tail’ of absence and investing in such policies among the 13 sectors in the economy with the highest absence rates would be worth £1.45 billion to the UK economy.

User-Centric Quality of Service Provisioning in IP Networks

The Internet has become the preferred transport medium for almost every type of communication, continuing to grow, both in terms of the number of users and delivered services. Efforts have been made to ensure that time sensitive applications receive sufficient resources and subsequently receive an acceptable Quality of Service (QoS). However, typical Internet users no longer use a single service at a given point in time, as they are instead engaged in a multimedia-rich experience, comprising of many different concurrent services. Given the scalability problems raised by the diversity of the users and traffic, in conjunction with their increasing expectations, the task of QoS provisioning can no longer be approached from the perspective of providing priority to specific traffic types over coexisting services; either through explicit resource reservation, or traffic classification using static policies, as is the case with the current approach to QoS provisioning, Differentiated Services (Diffserv). This current use of static resource allocation and traffic shaping methods reveals a distinct lack of synergy between current QoS practices and user activities, thus highlighting a need for a QoS solution reflecting the user services. The aim of this thesis is to investigate and propose a novel QoS architecture, which considers the activities of the user and manages resources from a user-centric perspective. The research begins with a comprehensive examination of existing QoS technologies and mechanisms, arguing that current QoS practises are too static in their configuration and typically give priority to specific individual services rather than considering the user experience. The analysis also reveals the potential threat that unresponsive application traffic presents to coexisting Internet services and QoS efforts, and introduces the requirement for a balance between application QoS and fairness. This thesis proposes a novel architecture, the Congestion Aware Packet Scheduler (CAPS), which manages and controls traffic at the point of service aggregation, in order to optimise the overall QoS of the user experience. The CAPS architecture, in contrast to traditional QoS alternatives, places no predetermined precedence on a specific traffic; instead, it adapts QoS policies to each individual’s Internet traffic profile and dynamically controls the ratio of user services to maintain an optimised QoS experience. The rationale behind this approach was to enable a QoS optimised experience to each Internet user and not just those using preferred services. Furthermore, unresponsive bandwidth intensive applications, such as Peer-to-Peer, are managed fairly while minimising their impact on coexisting services. The CAPS architecture has been validated through extensive simulations with the topologies used replicating the complexity and scale of real-network ISP infrastructures. The results show that for a number of different user-traffic profiles, the proposed approach achieves an improved aggregate QoS for each user when compared with Best effort Internet, Traditional Diffserv and Weighted-RED configurations. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that the proposed architecture not only provides an optimised QoS to the user, irrespective of their traffic profile, but through the avoidance of static resource allocation, can adapt with the Internet user as their use of services change.France Teleco

Assessing the quality of audio and video components in desktop multimedia conferencing

This thesis seeks to address the HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) research problem of how to establish the level of audio and video quality that end users require to successfully perform tasks via networked desktop videoconferencing. There are currently no established HCI methods of assessing the perceived quality of audio and video delivered in desktop videoconferencing. The transport of real-time speech and video information across new digital networks causes novel and different degradations, problems and issues to those common in the traditional telecommunications areas (telephone and television). Traditional assessment methods involve the use of very short test samples, are traditionally conducted outside a task-based environment, and focus on whether a degradation is noticed or not. But these methods cannot help establish what audio-visual quality is required by users to perform tasks successfully with the minimum of user cost, in interactive conferencing environments. This thesis addresses this research gap by investigating and developing a battery of assessment methods for networked videoconferencing, suitable for use in both field trials and laboratory-based studies. The development and use of these new methods helps identify the most critical variables (and levels of these variables) that affect perceived quality, and means by which network designers and HCI practitioners can address these problems are suggested. The output of the thesis therefore contributes both methodological (i.e. new rating scales and data-gathering methods) and substantive (i.e. explicit knowledge about quality requirements for certain tasks) knowledge to the HCI and networking research communities on the subjective quality requirements of real-time interaction in networked videoconferencing environments. Exploratory research is carried out through an interleaved series of field trials and controlled studies, advancing substantive and methodological knowledge in an incremental fashion. Initial studies use the ITU-recommended assessment methods, but these are found to be unsuitable for assessing networked speech and video quality for a number of reasons. Therefore later studies investigate and establish a novel polar rating scale, which can be used both as a static rating scale and as a dynamic continuous slider. These and further developments of the methods in future lab- based and real conferencing environments will enable subjective quality requirements and guidelines for different videoconferencing tasks to be established

A stochastic Reputation System Architecture to support the Partner Selection in Virtual Organisations

In recent business environments, collaborations among organisations raise an increased demand for swift establishment. Such collaborations are increasingly formed without prior experience of the other partner\u27s previous performance. The STochastic REputation system (STORE) is designed to provide swift, automated decision support for selecting partner organisations. STORE is based on a stochastic trust model and evaluated by means of multi agent simulations in Virtual Organisation scenarios