12,416 research outputs found
Scenarios for the development of smart grids in the UK: literature review
Smart grids are expected to play a central role in any transition to a low-carbon energy future, and much research is currently underway on practically every area of smart grids. However, it is evident that even basic aspects such as theoretical and operational definitions, are yet to be agreed upon and be clearly defined. Some aspects (efficient management of supply, including intermittent supply, two-way communication between the producer and user of electricity, use of IT technology to respond to and manage demand, and ensuring safe and secure electricity distribution) are more commonly accepted than others (such as smart meters) in defining what comprises a smart grid.
It is clear that smart grid developments enjoy political and financial support both at UK and EU levels, and from the majority of related industries. The reasons for this vary and include the hope that smart grids will facilitate the achievement of carbon reduction targets, create new employment opportunities, and reduce costs relevant to energy generation (fewer power stations) and distribution (fewer losses and better stability). However, smart grid development depends on additional factors, beyond the energy industry. These relate to issues of public acceptability of relevant technologies and associated risks (e.g. data safety, privacy, cyber security), pricing, competition, and regulation; implying the involvement of a wide range of players such as the industry, regulators and consumers.
The above constitute a complex set of variables and actors, and interactions between them. In order to best explore ways of possible deployment of smart grids, the use of scenarios is most adequate, as they can incorporate several parameters and variables into a coherent storyline. Scenarios have been previously used in the context of smart grids, but have traditionally focused on factors such as economic growth or policy evolution. Important additional socio-technical aspects of smart grids emerge from the literature review in this report and therefore need to be incorporated in our scenarios. These can be grouped into four (interlinked) main categories: supply side aspects, demand side aspects, policy and regulation, and technical aspects.
Pricing of digital goods and services
An appropriate pricing strategy is inevitable in achieving competitive advantage; however, firms have to be aware of the key resources needed for successful pricing and invest in developing the firmâs pricing ability. Pricing of digital goods and services is especially challenging due to the high-volatility environments and the special characteristics that these offerings have as compared to other economic goods. Despite of its importance, the literature, to date, did not investigate the pricing of digital goods and services from the resource-based perspective (RBW) and the capability-based view (CBV). After conducting a multi-case study of five firms, this research provides an in-depth view on the pricing practices of digital goods and services through the theoretical lenses of RBV and CBV and proposes a model that captures the key activities and the key resources needed for pricing of digital goods and services
SLA-Oriented Resource Provisioning for Cloud Computing: Challenges, Architecture, and Solutions
Cloud computing systems promise to offer subscription-oriented,
enterprise-quality computing services to users worldwide. With the increased
demand for delivering services to a large number of users, they need to offer
differentiated services to users and meet their quality expectations. Existing
resource management systems in data centers are yet to support Service Level
Agreement (SLA)-oriented resource allocation, and thus need to be enhanced to
realize cloud computing and utility computing. In addition, no work has been
done to collectively incorporate customer-driven service management,
computational risk management, and autonomic resource management into a
market-based resource management system to target the rapidly changing
enterprise requirements of Cloud computing. This paper presents vision,
challenges, and architectural elements of SLA-oriented resource management. The
proposed architecture supports integration of marketbased provisioning policies
and virtualisation technologies for flexible allocation of resources to
applications. The performance results obtained from our working prototype
system shows the feasibility and effectiveness of SLA-based resource
provisioning in Clouds.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Conference Keynote Paper: 2011 IEEE
International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC 2011, IEEE
Press, USA), Hong Kong, China, December 12-14, 201
Cloud Migration: A Case Study of Migrating an Enterprise IT System to IaaS
This case study illustrates the potential benefits and risks associated with
the migration of an IT system in the oil & gas industry from an in-house data
center to Amazon EC2 from a broad variety of stakeholder perspectives across
the enterprise, thus transcending the typical, yet narrow, financial and
technical analysis offered by providers. Our results show that the system
infrastructure in the case study would have cost 37% less over 5 years on EC2,
and using cloud computing could have potentially eliminated 21% of the support
calls for this system. These findings seem significant enough to call for a
migration of the system to the cloud but our stakeholder impact analysis
revealed that there are significant risks associated with this. Whilst the
benefits of using the cloud are attractive, we argue that it is important that
enterprise decision-makers consider the overall organizational implications of
the changes brought about with cloud computing to avoid implementing local
optimizations at the cost of organization-wide performance.Comment: Submitted to IEEE CLOUD 201
UNDERSTANDING USER PERCEPTIONS AND PREFERENCES FOR MASS-MARKET INFORMATION SYSTEMS â LEVERAGING MARKET RESEARCH TECHNIQUES AND EXAMPLES IN PRIVACY-AWARE DESIGN
With cloud and mobile computing, a new category of software products emerges as mass-market information systems (IS) that addresses distributed and heterogeneous end-users. Understanding user requirements and the factors that drive user adoption are crucial for successful design of such systems. IS research has suggested several theories and models to explain user adoption and intentions to use, among them the IS Success Model and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Although these approaches contribute to theoretical understanding of the adoption and use of IS in mass-markets, they are criticized for not being able to drive actionable insights on IS design as they consider the IT artifact as a black-box (i.e., they do not sufficiently address the system internal characteristics). We argue that IS needs to embrace market research techniques to understand and empirically assess user preferences and perceptions in order to integrate the "voice of the customer" in a mass-market scenario. More specifically, conjoint analysis (CA), from market research, can add user preference measurements for designing high-utility IS. CA has gained popularity in IS research, however little guidance is provided for its application in the domain. We aim at supporting the design of mass-market IS by establishing a reliable understanding of consumerâs preferences for multiple factors combing functional, non-functional and economic aspects. The results include a âFramework for Conjoint Analysis Studies in ISâ and methodological guidance for applying CA. We apply our findings to the privacy-aware design of mass-market IS and evaluate their implications on user adoption. We contribute to both academia and practice. For academia, we contribute to a more nuanced conceptualization of the IT artifact (i.e., system) through a feature-oriented lens and a preference-based approach. We provide methodological guidelines that support researchers in studying user perceptions and preferences for design variations and extending that to adoption. Moreover, the empirical studies for privacy- aware design contribute to a better understanding of the domain specific applications of CA for IS design and evaluation with a nuanced assessment of user preferences for privacy-preserving features. For practice, we propose guidelines for integrating the voice of the customer for successful IS design.
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Les technologies cloud et mobiles ont fait Ă©merger une nouvelle catĂ©gorie de produits informatiques qui sâadressent Ă des utilisateurs hĂ©tĂ©rogĂšnes par le biais de systĂšmes d'information (SI) distribuĂ©s. Les termes âSI de masseâ sont employĂ©s pour dĂ©signer ces nouveaux systĂšmes. Une conception rĂ©ussie de ceux-ci passe par une phase essentielle de comprĂ©hension des besoins et des facteurs d'adoption des utilisateurs. Pour ce faire, la recherche en SI suggĂšre plusieurs thĂ©ories et modĂšles tels que le âIS Success Modelâ et le âTechnology Acceptance Modelâ. Bien que ces approches contribuent Ă la comprĂ©hension thĂ©orique de l'adoption et de l'utilisation des SI de masse, elles sont critiquĂ©es pour ne pas ĂȘtre en mesure de fournir des informations exploitables sur la conception de SI car elles considĂšrent l'artefact informatique comme une boĂźte noire. En dâautres termes, ces approches ne traitent pas suffisamment des caractĂ©ristiques internes du systĂšme. Nous soutenons que la recherche en SI doit adopter des techniques d'Ă©tude de marchĂ© afin de mieux intĂ©grer les exigences du client (âVoice of Customerâ) dans un scĂ©nario de marchĂ© de masse. Plus prĂ©cisĂ©ment, l'analyse conjointe (AC), issue de la recherche sur les consommateurs, peut contribuer au dĂ©veloppement de systĂšme SI Ă forte valeur d'usage. Si lâAC a gagnĂ© en popularitĂ© au sein de la recherche en SI, des recommandations quant Ă son utilisation dans ce domaine restent rares. Nous entendons soutenir la conception de SI de masse en facilitant une identification fiable des prĂ©fĂ©rences des consommateurs sur de multiples facteurs combinant des aspects fonctionnels, non-fonctionnels et Ă©conomiques. Les rĂ©sultats comprennent un âCadre de rĂ©fĂ©rence pour les Ă©tudes d'analyse conjointe en SIâ et des recommandations mĂ©thodologiques pour l'application de lâAC. Nous avons utilisĂ© ces contributions pour concevoir un SI de masse particuliĂšrement sensible au respect de la vie privĂ©e des utilisateurs et nous avons Ă©valuĂ© lâimpact de nos recherches sur l'adoption de ce systĂšme par ses utilisateurs. Ainsi, notre travail contribue tant Ă la thĂ©orie quâĂ la pratique des SI. Pour le monde universitaire, nous contribuons en proposant une conceptualisation plus nuancĂ©e de l'artefact informatique (c'est-Ă -dire du systĂšme) Ă travers le prisme des fonctionnalitĂ©s et par une approche basĂ©e sur les prĂ©fĂ©rences utilisateurs. Par ailleurs, les chercheurs peuvent Ă©galement s'appuyer sur nos directives mĂ©thodologiques pour Ă©tudier les perceptions et les prĂ©fĂ©rences des utilisateurs pour diffĂ©rentes variations de conception et Ă©tendre cela Ă l'adoption. De plus, nos Ă©tudes empiriques sur la conception dâun SI de masse sensible au respect de la vie privĂ©e des utilisateurs contribuent Ă une meilleure comprĂ©hension de lâapplication des techniques CA dans ce domaine spĂ©cifique. Nos Ă©tudes incluent notamment une Ă©valuation nuancĂ©e des prĂ©fĂ©rences des utilisateurs sur des fonctionnalitĂ©s de protection de la vie privĂ©e. Pour les praticiens, nous proposons des lignes directrices qui permettent dâintĂ©grer les exigences des clients afin de concevoir un SI rĂ©ussi
Prospects of Mobile Search
Search faces (at least) two major challenges. One is to improve efficiency of retrieving relevant content for all digital formats (images, audio, video, 3D shapes, etc). The second is making relevant information retrievable in a range of platforms, particularly in high diffusion ones as mobiles. The two challenges are interrelated but distinct. This report aims at assessing the potential of future Mobile Search. Two broad groups of search-based applications can be identified. The first one is the adaptation and emulation of web search processes and services to the mobile environment. The second one is services exploiting the unique features of the mobile devices and the mobile environments. Examples of these context-aware services include location-based services or interfacing to the internet of things (RFID networks).
The report starts by providing an introduction to mobile search. It highlights differences and commonalities with search technologies on other platforms (Chapter 1). Chapter 2 is devoted to the supply side of mobile search markets. It describes mobile markets, presents key figures and gives an outline of main business models and players. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the demand side of the market. It studies usersÂż acceptance and demand using the results on a case study in Sweden. Chapter 4 presents emerging trends in technology and markets that could shape mobile search. It is the author's view after discussing with many experts. One input to this discussion was the analysis of on forward-looking scenarios for mobile developed by the authors (Chapter 5). Experts were asked to evaluate these scenarios. Another input was a questionnaire to which 61 experts responded. Drivers, barriers and enablers for mobile search have been synthesised into SWOT analysis. The report concludes with some policy recommendations in view of the likely socio-economic implications of mobile search in Europe.JRC.DG.J.4-Information Societ
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