15,089 research outputs found
HOMEBOTS: Intelligent Decentralized Services for Energy Management
The deregulation of the European energy market, combined with emerging advanced capabilities of information technology, provides strategic opportunities for new knowledge-oriented services on the power grid. HOMEBOTS is the namewe have coined for one of these innovative services: decentralized power load management at the customer side, automatically carried out by a `society' of interactive household, industrial and utility equipment. They act as independent intelligent agents that communicate and negotiate in a computational market economy. The knowledge and competence aspects of this application are discussed, using an improved \ud
version of task analysis according to the COMMONKADS knowledge methodology. Illustrated by simulation results, we indicate how customer knowledge can be mobilized to achieve joint goals of cost and energy savings. General implications for knowledge creation and its management are discussed
InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services
Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different
geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of
their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support
mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among
different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for
hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the
Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of
users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen
automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes
in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud
computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time,
opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently
achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions.
The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic
expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database)
for handling sudden variations in service demands.
This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of
InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The
proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across
multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of
rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results
demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it
offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost
saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape
National culture and multinational performance
The question of why some multinational corporations perform better than others is in the centre of the analysis of many international business disciplines and the subject of a never-ending debate. In that respect this paper provides empirical evidence by combining strategic management theories and performance measurement techniques. Specifically, it illustrates a way of strategic performance measurement by emphasising the impact of home country’s national culture on MNCs’ performance. Our empirical evidences suggest that home country’s national culture has a direct impact on MNCs’ performance. Additionally, the results clearly indicate that MNCs with higher performance have clear and distinct characteristics.Multinational Performance, National Culture, Cultural Distance Index, Data Envelopment Analysis.
A Minimum-Cost Flow Model for Workload Optimization on Cloud Infrastructure
Recent technology advancements in the areas of compute, storage and
networking, along with the increased demand for organizations to cut costs
while remaining responsive to increasing service demands have led to the growth
in the adoption of cloud computing services. Cloud services provide the promise
of improved agility, resiliency, scalability and a lowered Total Cost of
Ownership (TCO). This research introduces a framework for minimizing cost and
maximizing resource utilization by using an Integer Linear Programming (ILP)
approach to optimize the assignment of workloads to servers on Amazon Web
Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. The model is based on the classical
minimum-cost flow model, known as the assignment model.Comment: 2017 IEEE 10th International Conference on Cloud Computin
Perspectives of Integrated “Next Industrial Revolution” Clusters in Poland and Siberia
Rozdział z: Functioning of the Local Production Systems in Central and Eastern European Countries and Siberia. Case Studies and Comparative Studies, ed. Mariusz E. Sokołowicz.The paper presents the mapping of potential next industrial revolution clusters in Poland and Siberia. Deindustrialization of the cities and struggles with its consequences are one of the fundamental economic problems in current global economy. Some hope to find an answer to that problem is associated with the idea of next industrial revolution and reindustrialization initiatives. In the paper, projects aimed at developing next industrial revolution clusters are analyzed. The objective of the research was to examine new industrial revolution paradigm as a platform for establishing university-based trans-border industry clusters in Poland and Siberia47 and to raise awareness of next industry revolution initiatives.Monograph financed under a contract of execution of the international scientific project within 7th Framework Programme of the European Union, co-financed by Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (title: “Functioning of the Local Production Systems in the Conditions of Economic Crisis (Comparative Analysis and Benchmarking for the EU and Beyond”)). Monografia sfinansowana w oparciu o umowę o wykonanie projektu między narodowego w ramach 7. Programu Ramowego UE, współfinansowanego ze środków Ministerstwa Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego (tytuł projektu: „Funkcjonowanie lokalnych systemów produkcyjnych w warunkach kryzysu gospodarczego (analiza porównawcza i benchmarking w wybranych krajach UE oraz krajach trzecich”))
- …