Self-Organized Disjoint Service Placement in Future Mobile Communication Networks

Future mobile communication networks will offer many ubiquitous services to its clients such as voice and video communication, access to data and files, use of virtual resources in cloud, etc. The provision of these services will have to face the different challenges posed by future wireless networks such as changing network topology, variable load conditions, clients’ distribution, QoS requirements etc. is a very difficult task and requires a high degree of self-organization in network operations. One important problem in this context is the self-organized service placement which refers to the problem of finding optimal nodes in the network that are most suitable for hosting a particular service type. An optimal placement of a service and its instances (replicas) not only minimizes the service costs but also reduces the overall network traffic and improves connectivity between clients and servers. This paper proposes a novel network service called Self-Organized Disjoint Service Placement (SO-DSP) service which manages other network services and their instances in order to achieve overall network optimization while keeping the individual service’s quality at the same level for its clients. The clients of SO-DSP are not the end-users of the network but the offered network service

The Internet-of-Things Meets Business Process Management: Mutual Benefits and Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss the emerging challenges

Past, present, and future research on self-service merchandising: A co-word and text mining approach

Purpose This study aims to discern emerging trends and provide a longitudinal perspective on merchandising research by identifying relationships between merchandising-related subdomains/themes. Design/methodology/approach This study sourced 657 merchandising-related articles published since 1960, from the Scopus database and 425 from Web of Science. After processing and normalizing the data, this study performed co-word and thematic network analyses. Taking a text mining approach, this study used topic modeling to identify a set of coherent topics characterized by the keywords of the articles. Findings This study identified the following merchandising-related themes: branding, retail, consumer, behavior, modeling, textile and clothing industry and visual merchandising. Although visual merchandising was the first type of merchandising to be used in-store, only recently has it become an emerging topic in the academic literature. There has been a further trend over the past decade to understand the adoption of simulation technology, such as computer-aided design, particularly in supply chain management in the clothing industry. These and other findings contribute to the discussion of the merchandising concept, approached from an evolutionary perspective. Research limitations/implications The conclusions of this study hold implications at the intersection of merchandising, sectors, new technologies, research methodologies and merchandising-practitioner education. Research trends suggest that, in the future, virtual reality and augmented reality using neuroscientific methods will be applied to the e-merchandising context. Practical implications The different dimensions of merchandising can be used to leverage store managers’ decision-making process toward an integrated store-management strategy. In particular, by adopting loyalty merchandising tactics, the store can generate emotional attachment among consumers, who will perceive its value and services as unique, thanks to merchandising items designed specifically with that aim in mind. The stimulation of unplanned purchases, the strategic location of products and duration of each merchandising activity in the store, the digitalization of merchandising and the application of findings from neuroscience studies are some of the most relevant practical applications. Originality/value This study provides the first-ever longitudinal review of the state of the art in merchandising research, taking a holistic perspective of this field of knowledge spanning a 60-year period. The work makes a valuable contribution to the development of the marketing discipline.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Past, present, and future research on self-service merchandising: A co-word and text mining approach

Purpose: This study aims to discern emerging trends and provide a longitudinal perspective on merchandising research by identifying relationships between merchandising-related subdomains/themes. Design/methodology/approach: We sourced 657 merchandising-related articles published since 1960, from the Scopus database and 425 from Web of Science. After processing and normalizing the data, we performed co-word and thematic network analyses. Taking a text mining approach, we used topic modeling to identify a set of coherent topics characterized by the keywords of the articles. Findings: We identified the following merchandising-related themes: branding, retail, consumer, behavior, modeling, textile and clothing industry, and visual merchandising. Although visual merchandising was the first type of merchandising to be used in-store, only recently has it become an emerging topic in the academic literature. There has been a further trend over the last decade to understand the adoption of simulation technology, such as computer-aided design, particularly in supply chain management in the clothing industry. These and other findings contribute to our discussion of the merchandising concept, approached from an evolutionary perspective. Research limitations/implications: The conclusions of the study hold implications at the intersection of merchandising, sectors, new technologies, research methodologies, and merchandising-practitioner education. Research trends suggest that, in the future, virtual reality and augmented reality using neuroscientific methods will be applied to the emerchandising context. Practical implications: The different dimensions of merchandising can be used to leverage store managers’ decision-making process toward an integrated store-management strategy. In particular, by adopting loyalty merchandising tactics, the store can generate emotional attachment among consumers, who will perceive its value and services as unique, thanks to merchandising items designed specifically with that aim in mind. The stimulation of unplanned purchases, the strategic location of products and duration of each merchandising activity in the store, the digitalization of merchandising, and the application of findings from neuroscience studies are some of the most relevant practical applications. Originality/value: The study provides the first-ever longitudinal review of the state of the art in merchandising research, taking a holistic perspective of this field of knowledge spanning a 60-year period. The work makes a valuable contribution to the development of the marketing discipline

DIY networking as a facilitator for interdisciplinary research on the hybrid city

DIY networking is a technology with special characteristics compared to the public Internet, which holds a unique potential for empowering citizens to shape their hybrid urban space toward conviviality and collective awareness. It can also play the role of a “boundary object” for facilitating interdisciplinary interactions and participatory processes between different actors: researchers, engineers, practitioners, artists, designers, local authorities, and activists. This position paper presents a social learning framework, the DIY networking paradigm, that we aim to put in the centre of the hybrid space design process. We first introduce our individual views on the role of design as discussed in the fields of engineering, urban planning, urban interaction design, design research, and community informatics. We then introduce a simple methodology for combining these diverse perspectives into a meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration, through a series of related events with different structure and framing. We conclude with a short summary of a selection of these events, which serves also as an introduction to the CONTACT workshop on facilitating information sharing between strangers, in the context of the Hybrid City III conference

Investigation on Design and Development Methods for Internet of Things

The thesis work majorly focuses on the development methodologies of the Internet of Things (IoT). A detailed literature survey is presented for the discussion of various challenges in the development of software and design and deployment of hardware. The thesis work deals with the efficient development methodologies for the deployment of IoT system. Efficient hardware and software development reduces the risk of the system bugs and faults. The optimal placement of the IoT devices is the major challenge for the monitoring application. A Qualitative Spatial Reasoning (QSR) and Qualitative Temporal Reasoning (QTR) methodologies are proposed to build software systems. The proposed hybrid methodology includes the features of QSR, QTR, and traditional databased methodologies. The hybrid methodology is proposed to build the software systems and direct them to the specific goal of obtaining outputs inherent to the process. The hybrid methodology includes the support of tools and is detailed, integrated, and fits the general proposal. This methodology repeats the structure of Spatio-temporal reasoning goals. The object-oriented IoT device placement is the major goal of the proposed work. Segmentation and object detection is used for the division of the region into sub-regions. The coverage and connectivity are maintained by the optimal placement of the IoT devices using RCC8 and TPCC algorithms. Over the years, IoT has offered different solutions in all kinds of areas and contexts. The diversity of these challenges makes it hard to grasp the underlying principles of the different solutions and to design an appropriate custom implementation on the IoT space. One of the major objective of the proposed thesis work is to study numerous production-ready IoT offerings, extract recurring proven solution principles, and classify them into spatial patterns. The method of refinement of the goals is employed so that complex challenges are solved by breaking them down into simple and achievable sub-goals. The work deals with the major sub-goals e.g. efficient coverage of the field, connectivity of the IoT devices, Spatio-temporal aggregation of the data, and estimation of spatially connected regions of event detection. We have proposed methods to achieve each sub-goal for all different types of spatial patterns. The spatial patterns developed can be used in ongoing and future research on the IoT to understand the principles of the IoT, which will, in turn, promote the better development of existing and new IoT devices. The next objective is to utilize the IoT network for enterprise architecture (EA) based IoT application. EA defines the structure and operation of an organization to determine the most effective way for it to achieve its objectives. Digital transformation of EA is achieved through analysis, planning, design, and implementation, which interprets enterprise goals into an IoT-enabled enterprise design. A blueprint is necessary for the readying of IT resources that support business services and processes. A systematic approach is proposed for the planning and development of EA for IoT-Applications. The Enterprise Interface (EI) layer is proposed to efficiently categorize the data. The data is categorized based on local and global factors. The clustered data is then utilized by the end-users. A novel four-tier structure is proposed for Enterprise Applications. We analyzed the challenges, contextualized them, and offered solutions and recommendations. The last objective of the thesis work is to develop energy-efficient data consistency method. The data consistency is a challenge for designing energy-efficient medium access control protocol used in IoT. The energy-efficient data consistency method makes the protocol suitable for low, medium, and high data rate applications. The idea of energyefficient data consistency protocol is proposed with data aggregation. The proposed protocol efficiently utilizes the data rate as well as saves energy. The optimal sampling rate selection method is introduced for maintaining the data consistency of continuous and periodic monitoring node in an energy-efficient manner. In the starting phase, the nodes will be classified into event and continuous monitoring nodes. The machine learning based logistic classification method is used for the classification of nodes. The sampling rate of continuous monitoring nodes is optimized during the setup phase by using optimized sampling rate data aggregation algorithm. Furthermore, an energy-efficient time division multiple access (EETDMA) protocol is used for the continuous monitoring on IoT devices, and an energy-efficient bit map assisted (EEBMA) protocol is proposed for the event driven nodes