Modeling Information System Availability by using Bayesian Belief Network Approach

Modern information systems are expected to be always-on by providing services to end-users, regardless of time and location. This is particularly important for organizations and industries where information systems support real-time operations and mission-critical applications that need to be available on 24 x 7 x 365 basis. Examples of such entities include process industries, telecommunications, healthcare, energy, banking, electronic commerce and a variety of cloud services. This article presents a modified Bayesian Belief Network model for predicting information system availability, introduced initially by Franke, U. and Johnson, P. (in article “Availability of enterprise IT systems – an expert based Bayesian model”. Software Quality Journal 20(2), 369-394, 2012) based on a thorough review of several dimensions of the information system availability, we proposed a modified set of determinants. The model is parameterized by using probability elicitation process with the participation of experts from the financial sector of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The model validation was performed using Monte Carlo simulation

Integrated Optimization of IT Service Performance and Availability Using Performability Prediction Models

Optimizing the performance and availability of an IT service in the design stage are typically considered as independent tasks. However, since both aspects are related to one another, these activities could be combined by applying performability models, in which both the performance and the availability of a service can be more accurately predicted. In this paper, a design optimization problem for IT services is defined and applied in two scenarios, one of which considers a mechanism in which redundant components can be used both for failover as well as handling overload situations. Results show that including such aspects affecting both availability and performance in prediction models can lead to more cost-effective service designs. Thus, performability prediction models are one opportunity to combine performance and availability management for IT services

On federated single sign-on in e-government interoperability frameworks

We consider the problem of handling digital identities within serviceoriented architecture (SOA) architectures. We explore federated, single signon (SSO) solutions based on identity managers and service providers. After an overview of the different standards and protocols, we introduce a middlewarebased architecture to simplify the integration of legacy systems within such platforms. Our solution is based on a middleware module that decouples the legacy system from the identity-management modules.We consider both standard point-to-point service architectures, and complex government interoperability frameworks, and report experiments to show that our solution provides clear advantages both in terms of effectiveness and performance

DOC 2016-03 Master of Professional Accountancy (MPAcc), Full Proposal

Legislative Authorit

Large-scale parallelism for constraint-based local search: the costas array case study

International audienceWe present the parallel implementation of a constraint-based Local Search algorithm and investigate its performance on several hardware plat-forms with several hundreds or thousands of cores. We chose as the basis for these experiments the Adaptive Search method, an efficient sequential Local Search method for Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). After preliminary experiments on some CSPLib benchmarks, we detail the modeling and solving of a hard combinatorial problem related to radar and sonar applications: the Costas Array Problem. Performance evaluation on some classical CSP bench-marks shows that speedups are very good for a few tens of cores, and good up to a few hundreds of cores. However for a hard combinatorial search problem such as the Costas Array Problem, performance evaluation of the sequential version shows results outperforming previous Local Search implementations, while the parallel version shows nearly linear speedups up to 8,192 cores. The proposed parallel scheme is simple and based on independent multi-walks with no communication between processes during search. We also investigated a cooperative multi-walk scheme where processes share simple information, but this scheme does not seem to improve performance

Mining a Small Medical Data Set by Integrating the Decision Tree and t-test

[[abstract]]Although several researchers have used statistical methods to prove that aspiration followed by the injection of 95% ethanol left in situ (retention) is an effective treatment for ovarian endometriomas, very few discuss the different conditions that could generate different recovery rates for the patients. Therefore, this study adopts the statistical method and decision tree techniques together to analyze the postoperative status of ovarian endometriosis patients under different conditions. Since our collected data set is small, containing only 212 records, we use all of these data as the training data. Therefore, instead of using a resultant tree to generate rules directly, we use the value of each node as a cut point to generate all possible rules from the tree first. Then, using t-test, we verify the rules to discover some useful description rules after all possible rules from the tree have been generated. Experimental results show that our approach can find some new interesting knowledge about recurrent ovarian endometriomas under different conditions.[[journaltype]]國外[[incitationindex]]EI[[booktype]]紙本[[countrycodes]]FI

Soft Power Architecture: Mechanisms, Manifestations and Spatial Consequences of Embassy Buildings and Exported Ideologies

Architecture can be viewed as a system of circumstance structuring that does not exist independently from the contextual occurrences. It captures, constructs and legitimizes oftentimes conflicting societal realities and ideologies. One of these aspects is observable within the concept of soft power, defined as the capability to attract and persuade without coercion and payments. Additionally, soft power resources are the assets that produce such attraction but cannot always be measured or have tangible physical manifestations. What happens when soft power does have spatial manifestations? Soft power architecture is viewed an amalgamation of processes and outcomes that must be examined and explained as an indissoluble structure, throughout its lifespan. This research focuses on understanding, mapping and classifying the state-sponsored (re)production processes for spaces aimed at the communication of the officially sanctioned images/messages of national identity. Placement of embassy buildings is observed as the representative model for this research. Six exploratory case studies of embassy buildings in Tokyo, Japan and Belgrade, Serbia confirm the necessity for the re-examination of the politics of space-making for diplomatic-consular headquarters. The findings dispute the initially presumed discrepancies between the proclaimed values, implementation strategies and examined spatial manifestations. Embassy architecture, with its privileges and realization process, vary significantly depending on the interpretation of ideological narrative-building. The relevancy of architectural design is of secondary importance, while the examined conceptualization and management processes are more indicative of spatial (re)production and freedom and control in urban spaces. Apart from providing an applicable methodology and method for examining soft power architecture, this research offers relevant data primarily for architects and urban planners, putting forward strategies for communication of identity for exported architectural typologies. Furthermore, the universality of these typologies allows their spatial consequences to be examined in various urban matrices and cross-referenced with points of interest for individual case studies