Strategic and Blockchain-based Market Decisions for Cloud Computing

The cloud computing market has been in the center of attention for years where cloud providers strive to survive by either competition or cooperation. Some cloud providers choose to compete in the market that is dominated by few large providers and try to maximize their profit without sacrificing the service quality which leads to higher user ratings. Many research proposals tried to contribute to the cloud market competition. However, the majority of these proposals focus only on pricing mechanisms, neglecting thus the cloud service quality and users satisfaction. Meanwhile, cloud providers intend to form cloud federations to enhance their services quality and revenues. Nevertheless, traditional centralized cloud federations have strict challenges that might hinder the members' motivation to participate in, such as formation of stable coalitions with long-term commitments, participants' trustworthiness, shared revenue, and security of the managed data and services. For a stable and trustworthy federation, it is vital to avoid blind-trust on the claimed SLA guarantees from the members and monitor the quality of service considering the various characteristics of cloud services. This thesis aims to tackle the issues of cloud computing market from the two perspectives of competition and cooperation by: 1) modeling and solving the conflicting situation of revenue, user ratings and service quality, to improve the providers position in the market and increase the future users' demand; 2) proposing a user-centric game theoretical framework to allow the new and smaller cloud providers to have a share in the market and increase users satisfaction through providing high quality and added-value services; 3) motivating the cloud providers to adopt a coopetition behavior through a novel, fully distributed blockchain-based federation's structure that enables them to trade their computing resources through smart contracts; 4) introducing a new role of oracle as a verifier agent to monitor the quality of service and report to the smart contract agents deployed on the blockchain while optimizing the cost of using oracles; and 5) developing a Bayesian bandit learning oracles reliability mechanism to select the oracles smartly and optimize the cost and reliability of utilized oracles. All of the contributions are validated by simulations and implementations using real-world data

Three Essays on Dynamic Production and Pricing Decisions for New Products.

This dissertation focuses on dynamic production and pricing issues related to new products. The first essay is focused on the dynamic pricing issue for new product diffusion process when capacity is limited, the second essay is focused on the production lot sizing decisions for a pharmaceutical firm that manufactures new medicines for clinical trial, and the third essay deals with outsourcing decisions when firms manufacture a new product and production costs can be reduced through "learning-by-doing" effect. The first essay studies the dynamic production, pricing and sales decisions for new products with capacity constraint using control-theory framework. I show that in most of the cases, the optimal trajectory of demand is unimodal, as in the Bass model, but the optimal price trajectory can have multiple local maxima when capacity is limited. I also explore when pricing flexibility is most valuable using a numerical study. I find that benefits are highest when capacity is not unlimited nor very little, and when imitation effect dominates innovation effect. I also find that the capability to adjust prices is significantly more effective than the option of producing in advance and holding inventory. The second essay is focused on the lot sizing decisions with random yield, rigid demand and significant delay costs in pharmaceutical industry. I model this problem as a lot sizing decision with random yield and rigid demand in an M/G/1 queue environment. I show that the optimal production quantities are increasing in the number of waiting orders and the remaining quantity to be produced for the current lot. The third essay deals with an outsourcing problem where both Manufacturer and his Supplier may improve their operations and decrease production costs. Such cost reductions, however, require costly effort and are only possible when experimenting with actual production methods. While various reasons have been provided for dual sourcing, I provide a new explanation, which is driven by the fact that in-house production may facilitate learning about potential process improvements leading to eventual cost reductions.Ph.D.Business AdministrationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61744/1/wenjings_1.pd

Game Theory

The Special Issue “Game Theory” of the journal Mathematics provides a collection of papers that represent modern trends in mathematical game theory and its applications. The works address the problem of constructing and implementation of solution concepts based on classical optimality principles in different classes of games. In the case of non-cooperative behavior of players, the Nash equilibrium as a basic optimality principle is considered in both static and dynamic game settings. In the case of cooperative behavior of players, the situation is more complicated. As is seen from presented papers, the direct use of cooperative optimality principles in dynamic and differential games may bring time or subgame inconsistency of a solution which makes the cooperative schemes unsustainable. The notion of time or subgame consistency is crucial to the success of cooperation in a dynamic framework. In the works devoted to dynamic or differential games, this problem is analyzed and the special regularization procedures proposed to achieve time or subgame consistency of cooperative solutions. Among others, special attention in the presented book is paid to the construction of characteristic functions which determine the power of coalitions in games. The book contains many multi-disciplinary works applied to economic and environmental applications in a coherent manner

Operational Research IO2017, Valença, Portugal, June 28-30

This proceedings book presents selected contributions from the XVIII Congress of APDIO (the Portuguese Association of Operational Research) held in Valença on June 28–30, 2017. Prepared by leading Portuguese and international researchers in the field of operations research, it covers a wide range of complex real-world applications of operations research methods using recent theoretical techniques, in order to narrow the gap between academic research and practical applications. Of particular interest are the applications of, nonlinear and mixed-integer programming, data envelopment analysis, clustering techniques, hybrid heuristics, supply chain management, and lot sizing and job scheduling problems. In most chapters, the problems, methods and methodologies described are complemented by supporting figures, tables and algorithms. The XVIII Congress of APDIO marked the 18th installment of the regular biannual meetings of APDIO – the Portuguese Association of Operational Research. The meetings bring together researchers, scholars and practitioners, as well as MSc and PhD students, working in the field of operations research to present and discuss their latest works. The main theme of the latest meeting was Operational Research Pro Bono. Given the breadth of topics covered, the book offers a valuable resource for all researchers, students and practitioners interested in the latest trends in this field.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Assessing the suitability of ship design for human factors issues associated with evacuation and normal operations

Evaluating ship layout for human factors (HF) issues using simulation software such as maritimeEXODUS can be a long and complex process. The analysis requires the identification of relevant evaluation scenarios; encompassing evacuation and normal operations; the development of appropriate measures which can be used to gauge the performance of crew and vessel and finally; the interpretation of considerable simulation data. In this paper we present a systematic and transparent methodology for assessing the HF performance of ship design which is both discriminating and diagnostic. The methodology is demonstrated using two variants of a hypothetical naval ship

2020-2021, University of Memphis bulletin

University of Memphis bulletin containing the graduate catalog for 2020-2021.https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/speccoll-ua-pub-bulletins/1440/thumbnail.jp