108,830 research outputs found
Strategic considerations for construction in the People’s Republic of China: the case of German contractors in the 1990s
The construction industry has been struggling to integrate business strategies that are anticipating the internationalisation and infiltration of international markets. This article attempts to evaluate the China operations of German contractors from a strategic management decision perspective in the period between 1990 and 2000. Existing internationalisation theories have appeared to be inappropriate to explain international construction due to the unique project nature of construction business. The Ownership, Location and Internationalisation (OLI)-paradigm was initially developed to explain international production pattern was revised to form the basis for the evaluation of the Construction contractors’ market activities. The interviews indicate an industry-specific culture that affects how companies approach foreign markets. Some exceptional companies illustrated a higher degree of openness towards a more strategic and consistent approach in terms of the development of overseas markets
A Factor Framework for Experimental Design for Performance Evaluation of Commercial Cloud Services
Given the diversity of commercial Cloud services, performance evaluations of
candidate services would be crucial and beneficial for both service customers
(e.g. cost-benefit analysis) and providers (e.g. direction of service
improvement). Before an evaluation implementation, the selection of suitable
factors (also called parameters or variables) plays a prerequisite role in
designing evaluation experiments. However, there seems a lack of systematic
approaches to factor selection for Cloud services performance evaluation. In
other words, evaluators randomly and intuitively concerned experimental factors
in most of the existing evaluation studies. Based on our previous taxonomy and
modeling work, this paper proposes a factor framework for experimental design
for performance evaluation of commercial Cloud services. This framework
capsules the state-of-the-practice of performance evaluation factors that
people currently take into account in the Cloud Computing domain, and in turn
can help facilitate designing new experiments for evaluating Cloud services.Comment: 8 pages, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cloud
Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom 2012), pp. 169-176, Taipei,
Taiwan, December 03-06, 201
A taxonomy for emergency service station location problem
The emergency service station (ESS) location problem has been widely
studied in the literature since 1970s. There has been a growing interest in the subject especially after 1990s. Various models with different objective functions and constraints have been proposed in the academic literature and efficient solution techniques have been developed to provide good solutions in reasonable times. However, there is not any study that systematically classifies different problem types and methodologies to address them. This paper presents a taxonomic framework for the ESS location problem using an operations research perspective. In this framework, we basically
consider the type of the emergency, the objective function, constraints, model
assumptions, modeling, and solution techniques. We also analyze a variety of papers related to the literature in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the taxonomy and to get insights for possible research directions
Fog Computing: A Taxonomy, Survey and Future Directions
In recent years, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices/sensors has
increased to a great extent. To support the computational demand of real-time
latency-sensitive applications of largely geo-distributed IoT devices/sensors,
a new computing paradigm named "Fog computing" has been introduced. Generally,
Fog computing resides closer to the IoT devices/sensors and extends the
Cloud-based computing, storage and networking facilities. In this chapter, we
comprehensively analyse the challenges in Fogs acting as an intermediate layer
between IoT devices/ sensors and Cloud datacentres and review the current
developments in this field. We present a taxonomy of Fog computing according to
the identified challenges and its key features.We also map the existing works
to the taxonomy in order to identify current research gaps in the area of Fog
computing. Moreover, based on the observations, we propose future directions
for research
A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing
Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that
need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections
distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with
high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In
this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with
other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery
networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide
comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data
transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling.
Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to
validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration.
Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better
understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their
applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap
analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new
issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and
mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand
this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor
A Taxonomy for Management and Optimization of Multiple Resources in Edge Computing
Edge computing is promoted to meet increasing performance needs of
data-driven services using computational and storage resources close to the end
devices, at the edge of the current network. To achieve higher performance in
this new paradigm one has to consider how to combine the efficiency of resource
usage at all three layers of architecture: end devices, edge devices, and the
cloud. While cloud capacity is elastically extendable, end devices and edge
devices are to various degrees resource-constrained. Hence, an efficient
resource management is essential to make edge computing a reality. In this
work, we first present terminology and architectures to characterize current
works within the field of edge computing. Then, we review a wide range of
recent articles and categorize relevant aspects in terms of 4 perspectives:
resource type, resource management objective, resource location, and resource
use. This taxonomy and the ensuing analysis is used to identify some gaps in
the existing research. Among several research gaps, we found that research is
less prevalent on data, storage, and energy as a resource, and less extensive
towards the estimation, discovery and sharing objectives. As for resource
types, the most well-studied resources are computation and communication
resources. Our analysis shows that resource management at the edge requires a
deeper understanding of how methods applied at different levels and geared
towards different resource types interact. Specifically, the impact of mobility
and collaboration schemes requiring incentives are expected to be different in
edge architectures compared to the classic cloud solutions. Finally, we find
that fewer works are dedicated to the study of non-functional properties or to
quantifying the footprint of resource management techniques, including
edge-specific means of migrating data and services.Comment: Accepted in the Special Issue Mobile Edge Computing of the Wireless
Communications and Mobile Computing journa
A Taxonomy of Self-configuring Service Discovery Systems
We analyze the fundamental concepts and issues in service
discovery. This analysis places service discovery in the context of distributed
systems by describing service discovery as a third generation
naming system. We also describe the essential architectures and the
functionalities in service discovery. We then proceed to show how service
discovery fits into a system, by characterizing operational aspects.
Subsequently, we describe how existing state of the art performs service
discovery, in relation to the operational aspects and functionalities, and
identify areas for improvement
Taxonomy of P2P Applications
Peer-to-peer (p2p) networks have gained immense popularity in recent years and the number of services they provide continuously rises. Where p2p-networks were formerly known as file-sharing networks, p2p is now also used for services like VoIP and IPTV. With so many different p2p applications and services the need for a taxonomy framework rises. This paper describes the available p2p applications grouped by the services they provide. A taxonomy framework is proposed to classify old and recent p2p applications based on their characteristics
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