SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Business process management to date has not explicitly focused on sustainability as a change objective or driver. Although, approaches relating BPM and Sustainability already exist, e.g. Green BPM is the sum of all management activities that help to monitor and reduce the environmental impact of business processes in their design, improvement, implementation, or operation stages, as well as lead to cultural change within the process lifecycle. The intention behind Green BPM is the incorporation of environmental objectives into the management of business processes. To achieve this objective, BPM has to be extended by ecologically oriented complements, as are the consideration of environmental strategy as a part of the process strategy, or the awareness for energy consumption and pollution. Together with an earlier article consolidates several contributions of the BPM foundations in three underlying process change traditions: (1) the Quality Control tradition, (2) the Business Management tradition, and (3) the Information Systems (IS) tradition. These three traditions propose different approaches to business process change and each emphasizes some practices over others. Currently, there is a tendency of combining the various traditions in a comprehensive BPM approach

The Pricing Model of Cloud Computing Services

Best Ph.D. Student Paper Award</p

An adaptive and distributed intrusion detection scheme for cloud computing

Cloud computing has enormous potentials but still suffers from numerous security issues. Hence, there is a need to safeguard the cloud resources to ensure the security of clients’ data in the cloud. Existing cloud Intrusion Detection System (IDS) suffers from poor detection accuracy due to the dynamic nature of cloud as well as frequent Virtual Machine (VM) migration causing network traffic pattern to undergo changes. This necessitates an adaptive IDS capable of coping with the dynamic network traffic pattern. Therefore, the research developed an adaptive cloud intrusion detection scheme that uses Binary Segmentation change point detection algorithm to track the changes in the normal profile of cloud network traffic and updates the IDS Reference Model when change is detected. Besides, the research addressed the issue of poor detection accuracy due to insignificant features and coordinated attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The insignificant feature was addressed using feature selection while coordinated attack was addressed using distributed IDS. Ant Colony Optimization and correlation based feature selection were used for feature selection. Meanwhile, distributed Stochastic Gradient Decent and Support Vector Machine (SGD-SVM) were used for the distributed IDS. The distributed IDS comprised detection units and aggregation unit. The detection units detected the attacks using distributed SGD-SVM to create Local Reference Model (LRM) on various computer nodes. Then, the LRM was sent to aggregation units to create a Global Reference Model. This Adaptive and Distributed scheme was evaluated using two datasets: a simulated datasets collected using Virtual Machine Ware (VMWare) hypervisor and Network Security Laboratory-Knowledge Discovery Database (NSLKDD) benchmark intrusion detection datasets. To ensure that the scheme can cope with the dynamic nature of VM migration in cloud, performance evaluation was performed before and during the VM migration scenario. The evaluation results of the adaptive and distributed scheme on simulated datasets showed that before VM migration, an overall classification accuracy of 99.4% was achieved by the scheme while a related scheme achieved an accuracy of 83.4%. During VM migration scenario, classification accuracy of 99.1% was achieved by the scheme while the related scheme achieved an accuracy of 85%. The scheme achieved an accuracy of 99.6% when it was applied to NSL-KDD dataset while the related scheme achieved an accuracy of 83%. The performance comparisons with a related scheme showed that the developed adaptive and distributed scheme achieved superior performance

Achieving reliable and enhanced communication in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs)

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyWith the envisioned age of Internet of Things (IoTs), different aspects of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) will be linked so as to advance road transportation safety, ease congestion of road traffic, lessen air pollution, improve passenger transportation comfort and significantly reduce road accidents. In vehicular networks, regular exchange of current position, direction, speed, etc., enable mobile vehicle to foresee an imminent vehicle accident and notify the driver early enough in order to take appropriate action(s) or the vehicle on its own may take adequate preventive measures to avert the looming accident. Actualizing this concept requires use of shared media access protocol that is capable of guaranteeing reliable and timely broadcast of safety messages. This dissertation investigates the use of Network Coding (NC) techniques to enrich the content of each transmission and ensure improved high reliability of the broadcasted safety messages with less number of retransmissions. A Code Aided Retransmission-based Error Recovery (CARER) protocol is proposed. In order to avoid broadcast storm problem, a rebroadcasting vehicle selection metric η, is developed, which is used to select a vehicle that will rebroadcast the received encoded message. Although the proposed CARER protocol demonstrates an impressive performance, the level of incurred overhead is fairly high due to the use of complex rebroadcasting vehicle selection metric. To resolve this issue, a Random Network Coding (RNC) and vehicle clustering based vehicular communication scheme with low algorithmic complexity, named Reliable and Enhanced Cooperative Cross-layer MAC (RECMAC) scheme, is proposed. The use of this clustering technique enables RECMAC to subdivide the vehicular network into small manageable, coordinated clusters which further improve transmission reliability and minimise negative impact of network overhead. Similarly, a Cluster Head (CH) selection metric ℱ(\u1d457) is designed, which is used to determine and select the most suitably qualified candidate to become the CH of a particular cluster. Finally, in order to investigate the impact of available radio spectral resource, an in-depth study of the required amount of spectrum sufficient to support high transmission reliability and minimum latency requirements of critical road safety messages in vehicular networks was carried out. The performance of the proposed schemes was clearly shown with detailed theoretical analysis and was further validated with simulation experiments

From Traditional Adaptive Data Caching to Adaptive Context Caching: A Survey

Context data is in demand more than ever with the rapid increase in the development of many context-aware Internet of Things applications. Research in context and context-awareness is being conducted to broaden its applicability in light of many practical and technical challenges. One of the challenges is improving performance when responding to large number of context queries. Context Management Platforms that infer and deliver context to applications measure this problem using Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. Although caching is a proven way to improve QoS, transiency of context and features such as variability, heterogeneity of context queries pose an additional real-time cost management problem. This paper presents a critical survey of state-of-the-art in adaptive data caching with the objective of developing a body of knowledge in cost- and performance-efficient adaptive caching strategies. We comprehensively survey a large number of research publications and evaluate, compare, and contrast different techniques, policies, approaches, and schemes in adaptive caching. Our critical analysis is motivated by the focus on adaptively caching context as a core research problem. A formal definition for adaptive context caching is then proposed, followed by identified features and requirements of a well-designed, objective optimal adaptive context caching strategy.Comment: This paper is currently under review with ACM Computing Surveys Journal at this time of publishing in arxiv.or

A systematic review on cloud storage mechanisms concerning e-healthcare systems

As the expenses of medical care administrations rise and medical services experts are becoming rare, it is up to medical services organizations and institutes to consider the implementation of medical Health Information Technology (HIT) innovation frameworks. HIT permits health associations to smooth out their considerable cycles and offer types of assistance in a more productive and financially savvy way. With the rise of Cloud Storage Computing (CSC), an enormous number of associations and undertakings have moved their healthcare data sources to distributed storage. As the information can be mentioned whenever universally, the accessibility of information becomes an urgent need. Nonetheless, outages in cloud storage essentially influence the accessibility level. Like the other basic variables of cloud storage (e.g., reliability quality, performance, security, and protection), availability also directly impacts the data in cloud storage for e-Healthcare systems. In this paper, we systematically review cloud storage mechanisms concerning the healthcare environment. Additionally, in this paper, the state-of-the-art cloud storage mechanisms are critically reviewed for e-Healthcare systems based on their characteristics. In short, this paper summarizes existing literature based on cloud storage and its impact on healthcare, and it likewise helps researchers, medical specialists, and organizations with a solid foundation for future studies in the healthcare environment.Qatar University [IRCC-2020-009]

QoE management of multimedia streaming services in future networks : a tutorial and survey

No embargo require

THE IMPACT OF CREDIBLE AND NON-CREDIBLE TREATMENT INFORMATION ON DEPRESSION TREATMENT PREFERENCES IN COLLEGE STUDENTS

Previous research has demonstrated the importance of considering client treatment preference when providing treatment for depression. However, little research has focused on the impact of treatment information on client preference. This study investigated differences in treatment preference between potential clients that read credible treatment information and those that read non-credible treatment information. The study was conducted via an online survey that was administered to undergraduate students. Eighty participants were randomly assigned to either read credible treatment information or non-credible treatment information and treatment preferences was assessed via a free response item before and after information regarding treatments was given. Overall, participants listed mostly credible treatments (49.9%) and viewed the credible reading as significantly more credible than the non-credible reading. However, regardless of exposure to credible and non-credible information, a relatively equal and small percentage of both groups changed their preference to include the treatment in the reading. These findings could lead to a better understanding of the influence of information on preference and have implications for allowing clinicians to better inform clients of possible treatments to help align treatment preference with the best evidence-based treatment

A framework for active software engineering ontology

The passive structure of ontologies results in the ineffectiveness to access and manage the knowledge captured in them. This research has developed a framework for active Software Engineering Ontology based on a multi-agent system. It assists software development teams to effectively access, manage and share software engineering knowledge as well as project information to enable effective and efficient communication and coordination among teams. The framework has been evaluated through the prototype system as proof-of-concept experiments