Teaching about the Impact of Transaction Volume on System Performance and Capacity Planning

Courses in information resource management often include discussion and practice in capacity planning. This requires students to understand a variety of topics related to business transaction processing, workload characteristics, system demand, forecasting methods, and system performance measurement. This article presents a student project that combines these topics in a spreadsheet application. The spreadsheet is designed to take transaction history as input, use this history to make forecasts of future workload demand, and then predict future system performance based on these forecasts. The paper discusses forecasting methods, system performance metrics, and presents a comprehensive description of the spreadsheet assignment

COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF THE DUTCH NATURE CONSERVATION POLICY: DIRECT, INDIRECT EFFECTS AND TRANSACTION COSTS OF THE ECOLOGICAL MAIN STRUCTURE IN THE NETHERLANDS

The scattering of nature areas in the Netherlands and the increased demand for nature lead to a governmental project in 1990 to complete a network of nature favouring areas, the ecological main structure, in 2018. The financial and economic costs and benefits of this project were analysed. Targets for purchasing of agricultural land and conversion into nature were adjusted several times as the land price doubled between 1995 and 2000. The purchasing rate still has to double, which will probably drive up the land price even further. The alternative is long-term contracts with farmers or private landowners for nature conservation.cost-benefit analysis, transaction costs, land market, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

When Mobile Blockchain Meets Edge Computing

Blockchain, as the backbone technology of the current popular Bitcoin digital currency, has become a promising decentralized data management framework. Although blockchain has been widely adopted in many applications, e.g., finance, healthcare, and logistics, its application in mobile services is still limited. This is due to the fact that blockchain users need to solve preset proof-of-work puzzles to add new data, i.e., a block, to the blockchain. Solving the proof-of-work, however, consumes substantial resources in terms of CPU time and energy, which is not suitable for resource-limited mobile devices. To facilitate blockchain applications in future mobile Internet of Things systems, multiple access mobile edge computing appears to be an auspicious solution to solve the proof-of-work puzzles for mobile users. We first introduce a novel concept of edge computing for mobile blockchain. Then, we introduce an economic approach for edge computing resource management. Moreover, a prototype of mobile edge computing enabled blockchain systems is presented with experimental results to justify the proposed concept.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Communications Magazin