Identifying Services in Procedural Programs for Migrating Legacy System to Service Oriented Architecture

In order to support legacy migration to the service-oriented architecture (SOA), this paper presents a pragmatic method that derives candidates of services from procedural programs. In the SOA, every service is supposed to be a process (procedure) with (1) open interface, (2) self-containedness, and (3) coarse granularity for business. Such services are identified from the source code and its data flow diagram (DFD), by analyzing data and control dependencies among processes. Specifically, first the DFD must be obtained with reverse-engineering techniques. For each layer of the DFD, every data flow is classified into three categories. Using the data category and control among procedures, four types of dependency are categorized. Finally, six rules are applied that aggregate mutually dependent processes and extract them as a service. A case study with a liquor shop inventory control system extracts service candidates with various granularities.

A Study of the Cascading Effects of Ambulance Diversion among Hospitals

This research effort is undertaken to determine the impact that one hospital’s diversion status has on other hospitals in a region and the strength of these interactions. The conditional probability of one hospital going on diversion given that another is already on diversion is evaluated. Based on this analysis, the strength of interactions among the hospitals is established. Through statistical analyses of historical data, the strength of the mutual effects of diversion among a collection of hospitals is determined. These effects are mutual if one hospital’s diversion status affected another’s, then the reverse was also true. The intensity of these interactions between hospitals is varied, some being stronger than others. The model illustrates an approach to studying the cascading effects of diversion among hospitals in a region. This is important, because the status of any hospital in a region can signal the likelihood of impending diversion in every other hospital in the region. This allows actions that might prevent the occurrence of diversion or mitigate the cascading effects of Emergency Medical Systems diversion.

Service Platform Development

Platform concepts have been around for about a decade now. While their focus was on the manufacturing industry in the beginnings, interest has shifted to services – and Internet-based services in particular. This paper provides an overview of popular product platform concepts, a new view upon services in the light of the Internet, and links platforms to Internet-based services. Two companies with a tremendous platform potential, Google and EBay, are introduced and analyzed with respect to their usage of the product platform concept. After a brief discussion of the results, two product offerings of both Google and EBay are compared to give a practical example.

Towards High Maturity in SaaS Applications Based on Virtualization

This paper proposes a high level maturity in SaaS applications based on virtualization technologies, in which the hardware virtualization focuses on providing the flexible on-demand hosting environment, the application virtualization used to meet the scalable application deployment requirements and data virtualization solves data integration and unified data access problems to ensure multi-tenant efficiency. In order to realize the configurability, a method based on metadata and JMX is used to manage the metadata so that changed metadata can be hot deployed immediately during runtime. A case study of a SaaS application for supply business in automobile industry is introduced with the discussion of approaches to higher level maturity model.

A Simulation Study to Derive the Optimal Cycle Length for Feeder Transit Services

This paper presents a simulation study to evaluate the capacity and the optimum service cycle time of a demand responsive transit “feeder” service within the colonia of El Cenizo, TX. Demand data are taken from a survey questionnaire conducted to evaluate the existing travel patterns and the potential demand for a feeder service. Results showed that a single shuttle would be able to comfortably serve 150 passengers per day and that a fleet of 7-8 vehicles would be needed to serve the residential area. The optimal cycle length between consecutive departures from the terminal should be between 11-13 minutes for best service quality. This exploratory study can serve as a first step towards improving transportation services within these growing underprivileged communities, but also other residential areas, especially those with demographics and geometry similar to our target area of El Cenizo.

A Strategic Benchmarking Process for Identifying the Best Practice Collaborative Electronic Government Architecture

The rapid growth of the Internet has given rise to electronic government (e-government) which enhances communication, coordination, and collaboration between government, business partners, and citizens. An increasing number of national, state, and local government agencies are realizing the benefits of e-government. The transformation of policies, procedures, and people, which is the essence of e-government, cannot happen by accident. An e-government architecture is needed to structure the system, its functions, its processes, and the environment within which it will live. When confronted by the range of e-government architectures, government agencies struggle to identify the one most appropriate to their needs. This paper proposes a novel strategic benchmarking process utilizing the simple additive weighting method (SAW), real options analysis (ROA), and fuzzy sets to benchmark the best practice collaborative e-government architectures based on three perspectives: Government-to-Citizen (G2C), Government-to-Business (G2B), and Government-to-Government (G2G). The contribution of the proposed method is fourfold: (1) it addresses the gaps in the e-government literature on the effective and efficient assessment of the e-government architectures; (2) it provides a comprehensive and systematic framework that combines ROA with SAW; (3) it considers fuzzy logic and fuzzy sets to represent ambiguous, uncertain or imprecise information; and (4) it is applicable to international, national, Regional, state/provincial, and local e-government levels.

A Review of Service Frameworks Analyzing Strategic Repositioning

In manufacturing operations it is important to recognise the capabilities of the firm and established ways to position the current and expected manufacturing capabilities. The most recognised tool is the Product-Process matrix of Hayes and Wheelwright. Similarly, in service business there is a growing need to position the capabilities of firms. Many tools analysing services have also been proposed, but no generally accepted framework has so far emerged as a basis for service classification and strategic service positioning. This paper focuses on strategic positioning of services with special focus on analyzing and measuring the repositioning of services. Banking services are used as the main example, which have been analyzed in several studies of service repositioning. The author reviews the service classifications proposed and the dimensions used. Strategic repositioning and its dimensions are illustrated in banking services, and some trends in services are recognized and discussed. Some elements of a more generic service positioning framework are presented for the purpose of summarizing and consolidating the findings of reviewed frameworks.

Modeling Control Flow in WS-BPEL with Chu Spaces

This paper presents a Chu spaces semantics of typical control flow of WS-BPEL including fault handling and link semantics. BPEL-CF is proposed as a simplification of this subset of WS-BPEL. For the compositional modeling of BPEL, the authors present a Chu spaces process algebra. This algebra allows faults to be thrown at any point of execution and take link-based synchronization into consideration. The paper gives the abstract syntax of BPEL-CF, the semantic algebra, and the valuation functions for computing the Chu spaces denotations of BPEL-CF programs.

Effects of Adaptivity and Other External Variables on Mobile Service Adoption

User Interfaces act as the interaction layer between human and computer and have an important role in system adoption. According to technology acceptance model, acceptance of a system is explained as a function of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Since there are several external variables that have an impact on those variables, the content and interface design of every single application should be addressed specifically to enhance users’ intention to use the system. Adding adaptive features into systems may be one of the approaches to address this phenomenon. This paper identifies external variables including adaptive behavior impacting acceptance of a mobile reservation system through implementation of two prototypes.

A Consumer Perception Research on the Subject of a New Technology in a Developing Dynamic Market

The amount of demand for new products like 3G is related to adoption and spread of innovations. Research suggests that innovativeness is related to consumer behavior and characteristics. Research shows that new technologies like 3G are not evaluated by only its functional sides in the consumer perception. Consumers also perceive symbolic sides to this type of technology. This study measures the interests of the population that live in the urban area of Turkey and economically active and working for the 3G technology, their product purchasing criteria, product using habits, brand recognition levels, brand preferences, and tendencies for purchasing products and services in the near future. The research is performed with the participation of 612 persons in 12 provinces. The demographic characteristics belonging to the consumers who participate in the survey study, the reliability analysis results concerning the scale, t test, factor analysis, frequency analysis, correlation analysis, and variance analyses are performed in this chapter of the research. Findings show that the dynamic Turkish consumer gives significant importance to this new technology as functional and symbolic.