Flexible provisioning of Web service workflows

Web services promise to revolutionise the way computational resources and business processes are offered and invoked in open, distributed systems, such as the Internet. These services are described using machine-readable meta-data, which enables consumer applications to automatically discover and provision suitable services for their workflows at run-time. However, current approaches have typically assumed service descriptions are accurate and deterministic, and so have neglected to account for the fact that services in these open systems are inherently unreliable and uncertain. Specifically, network failures, software bugs and competition for services may regularly lead to execution delays or even service failures. To address this problem, the process of provisioning services needs to be performed in a more flexible manner than has so far been considered, in order to proactively deal with failures and to recover workflows that have partially failed. To this end, we devise and present a heuristic strategy that varies the provisioning of services according to their predicted performance. Using simulation, we then benchmark our algorithm and show that it leads to a 700% improvement in average utility, while successfully completing up to eight times as many workflows as approaches that do not consider service failures

Consumer perceptions of co-branding alliances: Organizational dissimilarity signals and brand fit

This study explores how consumers evaluate co-branding alliances between dissimilar partner firms. Customers are well aware that different firms are behind a co-branded product and observe the partner firms’ characteristics. Drawing on signaling theory, we assert that consumers use organizational characteristics as signals in their assessment of brand fit and for their purchasing decisions. Some organizational signals are beyond the control of the co-branding partners or at least they cannot alter them on short notice. We use a quasi-experimental design and test how co-branding partner dissimilarity affects brand fit perception. The results show that co-branding partner dissimilarity in terms of firm size, industry scope, and country-of-origin image negatively affects brand fit perception. Firm age dissimilarity does not exert significant influence. Because brand fit generally fosters a benevolent consumer attitude towards a co-branding alliance, the findings suggest that high partner dissimilarity may reduce overall co-branding alliance performance

Combined artificial bee colony algorithm and machine learning techniques for prediction of online consumer repurchase intention

A novel paradigm in the service sector i.e. services through the web is a progressive mechanism for rendering offerings over diverse environments. Internet provides huge opportunities for companies to provide personalized online services to their customers. But prompt novel web services introduction may unfavorably affect the quality and user gratification. Subsequently, prediction of the consumer intention is of supreme importance in selecting the web services for an application. The aim of study is to predict online consumer repurchase intention and to achieve this objective a hybrid approach which a combination of machine learning techniques and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm has been used. The study is divided into three phases. Initially, shopping mall and consumer characteristic’s for repurchase intention has been identified through extensive literature review. Secondly, ABC has been used to determine the feature selection of consumers’ characteristics and shopping malls’ attributes (with > 0.1 threshold value) for the prediction model. Finally, validation using K-fold cross has been employed to measure the best classification model robustness. The classification models viz., Decision Trees (C5.0), AdaBoost, Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Neural Network (NN), are utilized for prediction of consumer purchase intention. Performance evaluation of identified models on training-testing partitions (70-30%) of the data set, shows that AdaBoost method outperforms other classification models with sensitivity and accuracy of 0.95 and 97.58% respectively, on testing data set. This study is a revolutionary attempt that considers both, shopping mall and consumer characteristics in examine the consumer purchase intention.N/

Frequency Of C3435 Mdr1 And A6896g Cyp3a5 Single Nucleotide Polymorphism in an Iranian Population and Comparison with Other Ethnic Groups

Background:It is well recognized that different patients respond in different ways to medications. The inter-individual variations are greater than the intera- individual variations,a finding consistent with the notion that inheritance is a determinant of drug responses. The recent identification of genetic polymorphisms in drug-metabolizing enzymes and drug transporters led to the hypothesis that genetic factors may be implicated in this interindividual variation. Single nucleotide polymorphism in common metabolic pathway,cytochrome P450 and common transporter,multidrug resistance-1 gene are two important sites that might involve clinically significant genetic variations. Ethnicity greatly influences these genetic polymorphism distributions. Methods: We studied the inheritance patterns of polymorphisms for MDR1 and CYP3A5 genes in the Iranian population and compared its genotype and allele frequencies with 3 different ethnic groups: Caucasian (United Kingdom), Chinese and Japanese. Results: We found striking differences in the distribution of MDR allelic variants between Iranian,Japanese and Chinese (p<0.02) and similar between the Iranian and Caucasian population.(p=0.06).Almost 50% of Iranian and Caucasian individuals were homozygous carriers of the variant T allele compared with 32% of the Japanese and 43% of the Chinese (p<0.02).More than half of Iranian subjects have at least one T allele,with lower P-gp level in small intestine.We also noted dramatic differences in the CYP3A5 alleles and genotypes distribution between Iranian subjects with other compared populations.99% of Iranian individuals were homozygous carriers of the variant G allele compared with about 70% of the Chinese and Japanese and 19% of the Caucasian population. The G/G genotype has a very low level of active cytochrome P450 enzyme.Conclusion:Our results emphasize the role of ethnicity in interindividual variability of the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic characteristics of drugs

Frequency Of C3435 Mdr1 And A6896G Cyp3A5 Single Nucleotide Polymorphism In An Iranian Population And Comparison With Other Ethnic Groups

Background: It is well recognized that different patients respond in different ways to medications. The inter-individual variations are greater than the intera-individual variations, a finding consistent with the notion that inheritance is a determinant of drug responses. The recent identification of genetic polymorphisms in drug-metabolizing enzymes and drug transporters led to the hypothesis that genetic factors may be implicated in this interindividual variation. Single nucleotide polymorphism in common metabolic pathway, cytochrome P450 and common transporter, multidrug resistance-1 gene are two important sites that might involve clinically significant genetic variations. Ethnicity greatly influences these genetic polymorphism distributions. Methods: We studied the inheritance patterns of polymorphisms for MDR1 and CYP3A5 genes in the Iranian population and compared its genotype and allele frequencies with 3 different ethnic groups: Caucasian (United Kingdom), Chinese and Japanese. Results: We found striking differences in the distribution of MDR allelic variants between Iranian, Japanese and Chinese (p<0.02) and similar between the Iranian and Caucasian population. (p=0.06). Almost 50% of Iranian and Caucasian individuals were homozygous carriers of the variant T allele compared with 32% of the Japanese and 43% of the Chinese (p<0.02). More than half of Iranian subjects have at least one T allele, with lower P-gp level in small intestine. We also noted dramatic differences in the CYP3A5 alleles and genotypes distribution between Iranian subjects with other compared populations. 99% of Iranian individuals were homozygous carriers of the variant G allele compared with about 70% of the Chinese and Japanese and 19% of the Caucasian population. The G/G genotype has a very low level of active cytochrome P450 enzyme. Conclusion: Our results emphasize the role of ethnicity in interindividual variability of the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic characteristics of drugs