Transmission losses cost allocation in restructed electricity market environment

During these recent decades, the restructuring system of electricity market has been taken places around the whole world. Due to the restructuring (deregulation), the electrical power system has been divided into three separates categories according to the function. First stage of power system is the generation companies (GENCOs), followed by transmission companies (TRANSCOs) and distribution companies (DISCOs). The competitive environment will be handling by a non-profit entity, independent system operator (ISO) that functioning as the system securities that have to make sure that the power system continues to operate in a stable and economical manner. However, restructuring system can give effect during the energy transmission. One of the transmission issues is regarding the power losses. To overcome the losses, generators must generate more power. The issue regarding the transmission losses in deregulated system is how to allocate it to the user and charge them in fair ways as in for instance the pool trading model, it is hard to trace the power contribution and losses of each user in transmission line. In addition, the users didn’t want to pay the losses, it means that the ISO have to responsible for the losses and it will be unfair to put the responsible to ISO alone. Therefore, in this project, the allocation of transmission losses and loss cost methods which are the pro-rata and proportional sharing method will be investigated. Comparison between those methods will be done in order to identify which types of method that reflect an efficient and fair way to distribute the cost of the transmission losses to the user. These chosen methods will be tested on IEEE bus system

The Context of Global Software Development: Challenges, Best Practices and Benefits

Global Software Development (GSD) environment is based on a contractual relationship between client and vendor organizations in which a client outsources all or some part of its software development activities to a vendor. The vendor in return provides the agreed services in lieu of certain amount of remuneration. The main reasons to select the GSD technique include reduced cost, faster development and access to skilled manpower available across the world. Though GSD is emerging as an effective technique, but it suffers from many challenges like poor communication, lack of trust and coordination. These challenges pose serious risk to the smooth execution of the GSD projects. In the past decade, GSD has become an area of active research and a number of the researchers have worked on different aspects of it. In this paper, we present a critical review of the research studies conducted on GSD to highlight the challenges, best practices and benefits of GSD. Our findings reveal that much of the research in this area has been focused on addressing issues faced by client organizations, however, vendor side in the GSD relationship is much ignored due to which this field of study is still immature; hence, further research work is required to be undertaken to address the issues faced by the vendor organizations

The Role of Corporate Cultural Similarity for Outsourcing Relationship Quality and Outsourcing Success

What is the impact of corporate cultural similarity (CCS) on outsourcing success? In this paper, we use data from a survey with the largest 1,000 banks in Germany to show that CCS has a substantial effect on outsourcing success which is mainly mediated by different dimensions of outsourcing relationship quality. The more comparable the corporate cultures of the vendor firm and the client firm, the higher is the outsourcing success from the client’s perspective. Finally, we highlight our future steps of research in investigating the impact of particular types of corporate culture in an IT outsourcing context

A Metadirectory of Web Components for Mashup Composition

Because of the growing availability of third-party APIs, services, widgets and any other reusable web component, mashup developers now face a vast amount of candidate components for their developments. Moreover, these components quite often are scattered in many different repositories and web sites, which makes difficult their selection or discovery. In this paper, we discuss the problem of component selection in Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Mashup-Driven Development, and introduce the Linked Mashups Ontology (LiMOn), a model that allows describing mashups and their components for integrating and sharing mashup information such as categorization or dependencies. The model has allowed the building of an integrated, centralized metadirectory of web components for query and selection, which has served to evaluate the model. The metadirectory allows accessing various heterogeneous repositories of mashups and web components while using external information from the Linked Data cloud, helping mashup development

Competencias para desempeñar la labor de captura de requisitos en un entorno de desarrollo global del software

La captura de requisitos de un software es un proceso eminentemente comunicativo, por consiguiente, una buena o mala comunicación influye en la calidad final del producto desarrollado. Los problemas típicos de esta etapa se ven incrementados cuando los participantes del proceso se encuentran distribuidos geográficamente bajo el paradigma del Desarrollo Global del Software (GSD en inglés). Cumplir el desafío de ejecutar dicha actividad de manera exitosa requiere de una adecuada preparación de los profesionales involucrados en la captura de requisitos. En este contexto hemos revisado la bibliografía en busca de las habilidades y conocimientos necesarios para desempeñar la labor de captura de requisitos. Luego de un proceso de análisis y síntesis, identificamos las competencias necesarias para la captura de requisitos presentando los resultados en tres grupos de interés: las competencias que son igualmente importantes en captura localizada y en GSD, las competencias que aumentan de importancia en entornos globales y las competencias que sólo son relevantes en escenarios GSD. Estas competencias pueden ser utilizadas tanto, para el desarrollo de curriculums adaptados a GSD, como en la industria, para el reclutamiento de personal.Este trabajo es parcialmente financiado por los proyectos: MELISA (PAC08-0142-3315), Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha, Consejería de Educación y Ciencia, en España; ESFINGE (TIN2006-15175-C05-05) Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Dirección General de Investigación)/Fondos Europeos de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) en España; CompetiSoft (506AC0287, programa CYTED)

A Framework for Managing Software Testing Outsourcing Projects

Software testing aims to ensure that the software produced is reliable and able to function correctly. In order to do so, the testing execution requires experts and technology that might not be available within an organisation. Therefore, shifting to outsourcing for testing is one preferred option. This alternative provides benefits such as testing expertise, costs and time reduction, better testing technology and high-quality software products. Translating these benefits into practice has, however, proved challenging. Some testing outsourcing projects have failed outright. These projects either exceed the specified time or the allocated budget or failed to deliver the anticipated quality. This paper therefore intends to address this concern by providing guidance in managing software testing outsourcing projects in the form of a framework based on identified success factors. Previous studies have collected the success factors from theoretical and empirical perspectives. The investigation continues by ratifying the factors via software testing and project management experts from both the client and vendor sides. In order to develop the framework, this study adopted a qualitative approach, in which semi-structured interviews were employed to confirm the factors. The data were then analysed using content analysis. The framework consists of two aspects, namely People and Process. Four factors make up the People aspect, while another ten constitute the Process aspect. Each factor contains elements, which represent either the roles that should be played or activities that should be conducted. This framework contributes to the understanding of conducting successful software testing outsourcing projects. It could also act as a reference for future research in the software testing domain

An Integrative Conceptual Model of Vietnam as an Emerging Destination for Offshore Outsourcing of Software Development for Finnish Companies

Companies are constantly under pressure to develop software within tight budgets and more efficiently. Offshore outsourcing has been seen as one solution to the dilemma, and lucrative outsourcing businesses have evolved in many countries. Vietnam is now emerging within this global outsourcing sector. This study conducts an in-depth literature review and analyzes a number of important issues related to developing countries in general and Vietnam in particular, as an offshore outsourcing destination for Finnish companies for developing their software. From the analysis, an integrative conceptual model of software development through offshore outsourcing was developed. The study found challenges as well as potential in Vietnam’s software outsourcing industry. In addition, it provides valuable information for practitioners interested in outsourcing to Vietnam and for further research within the area

Overview of Global Software Development

Este artículo presenta una panorámica general del estado del arte y de la práctica del Desarrollo Global de Software (DGS), analizando las principales revisiones sistemáticas de la litera- tura e identificando un conjunto de áreas de gran interés en la actualidad. El cual muestra que el DGS es un campo que empieza a alcanzar cierta madurez: cuya evolución ya no se encuentra limitada por factores críticos como las diferencias lingüísticas y culturales, sino que ésta depende más de factores como la motivación personal y las habilidades de los recursos huma- nos, y de la disponibilidad de funciones y responsabilidades bien definidas; y, al mismo tiempo, pre- senta nuevos desafíos centrados en importantes líneas de interés como: los Procesos para desarrollo y gestión, la Gestión de Proyectos DGS y los Equipos de TrabajoThis paper presents an overview of the state of the art and the practical of Global Software Development (DGS), analyzing the main systematic reviews of the literature and identifying a set of areas of great interest today. Which shows that the DGS is a field that begins to reach a certain maturity: whose evolution is no longer limited by critical factors such as language and cultural differences, but it depends more on factors such as personal motivation and skills of resources human, and the availability of clearly defi- ned roles and responsibilities; and at the same time, presents new challenges focused on important areas of interest include: Processes for development and management, DGS Project Management and Task Force

Information systems security outsourcing key issues: a service providers’ perspective

Mestrado em Gestão de Sistemas de InformaçãoThere is a perception that information systems security outsourcing, in spite entailing a relationship between a client and one or more providers, tends to be studied and analysed from the perspective of the client. A gap is then believed to exist in the study of the information systems security outsourcing relationship from the point of view of the service provider. This research aims to identify the key issues of such a relationship from the perspective of the service provider and rank them according to their importance. The Delphi method was used to support the communication with the group of experts contributing to this research as well as to boost consensus within the group. Final interviews with participants were also conducted with the aim of reaching deeper into their opinions and to shed a brighter light over the results of the Delphi. A ranked list of the 13 most important key issues found is presented and discussed and propositions for further work are put forward in the wake of the study