Periodic Patterns in Dynamic Network

The periodic interactions represented as a dynamic network possess two aspects: structure and weight. This chapter introduces and explores the use of a third aspect that is associated with the periodic interactions, namely the directional aspect. Moreover, the authors have showcased how some applications require mining of patterns on both aspects—1) on direction and 2) on weight of directed interactions—for a better understanding of their behavior. With the aim of overcoming the limitation of existing frameworks, which only mine periodic patterns individually, a framework is proposed to mine periodic patterns on both the aspects together. Further, the patterns are analyzed to develop a better understanding of the dynamic network. A set of six parameters, defined later in the chapter, are used to conduct a microscopic study on the behavior of interactions. The framework is tested on real world and synthetic datasets. The results highlight its practical scalability and prove its efficiency.

Intelligent Semantics Approaches for Adaptive Web

Intelligent semantic approaches (i.e., semantic web and software agents) are very useful technologies for adding meaning to the web. Adaptive web is a new era of web targeting to provide customized and personalized view of contents and services to its users. Integration of these two technologies can further add to reasoning and intelligence in recommendation process. This chapter explores the existing work done in the area of applying intelligent approaches to web personalization and highlighting ample scope for application of intelligent agents in this domain for solving many existing issues like personalized content management, user profile learning, modelling, and adaptive interactions with users.

The Role of Value Facilitation Regarding Cloud Service Provider Profitability in the Cloud Ecosystem

With the increasing maturity of cloud technologies and the growing demand from customers, the cloud computing ecosystem has been expanding continuously with both incumbents and new entrants, whereby it has become more distributed and less transparent. For cloud service providers previously focusing on growth strategies, it is now necessary to shift the attention to providing service efficiently, as well as profitably. Based on 14 explorative interviews with cloud service experts, the relationship between cloud service provider profitability and value facilitation, which stands for the capability to build up resources in advance of future customer engagements, is investigated. The results indicate a positive relationship between cloud service profitability and value facilitation and deliver valuable insights for both researchers and practitioners. In particular, guidelines on how to design profitable cloud service offerings are discussed.

A Cloud Broker for Service Adaptation Based on Interface Localization

The aim of the Cloud “as-a-service” concept is provisioning of software services to facilitate access to resources to a range of different users in different locations. Service adaptation through localization in this context can facilitate the internationalization and localization of services by allowing their adaption to different locales. Three localization dimensions are investigated: (1) lingual localization by providing service-level language translation techniques to adopt services to different languages; (2) regulatory localization by providing standards-based mappings to achieve regulatory compliance with regionally varying laws, standards, and regulations; and (3) social localization by taking into account preferences and customs for individuals and the groups or communities in which they participate. The objective is to support and implement an explicit modelling of aspects that are relevant to localization and runtime support consisting of tools and middleware services to automating the deployment based on models of locales, driven by the two localization dimensions.

A Hybrid Approach of Regression-Testing-Based Requirement Prioritization of Web Applications

The chapter gives a hybrid approach for prioritization of software requirements by considering regression testing efforts as one of the criteria. The prioritization is performed against the prioritized decision aspects. The chapter gives software engineers a technique for prioritizing both requirements and aspects. This technique considers regression testing effort as one of important parameters during requirement prioritization thereby reducing the regression testing effort. This technique is applied on live web application of “virtual classroom” and the results were promising. The technique resulted in decision aspect prioritization thereby leading to effective requirement prioritization and lower regression testing efforts.

An Optimal Hybrid Regression Testing Approach Based on Code Path Pruning

Hybrid regression testing approaches involve the combinations of test suite selections, prioritizations, and minimizations. The hybrid approaches must reduce size of test suite to minimal level and enhance fault detection rate. The chapter proposes a new hybrid regression testing approach that reduces the number of test cases by reducing the paths of source code on the basis of the dependency between the statements and the changes. The proposed technique is evaluated to be better than the existing hybrid approach in terms of percentage savings in test cases and fault detection rate.

Exploring the Franchisor-Franchisee Relationship

In the past 40 years, the franchising system has undergone a remarkable expansion, increasingly retaining the attention of economy and service management researchers. A recurring question relates to the sources of competitive advantage that a franchise network may have. This chapter intends to contribute to the debate based on the fundamentals of the resource/competence-based view, and applying the reflection to the case of the logistical service. The aim is to identify how and why supply chain resources and skills are deployed by franchisors to retain their franchisees thanks to a high level of service quality and therefore avoid the termination of contractual relationships. Based on a case study driven within a European franchise network, it is possible to conclude that the supply chain resources and competences of a franchisor play an important role in the duration of the franchisor-franchisee relationship when customized solutions are proposed thanks to information technologies.

Impact Analysis of Intelligent Agents in Automatic Fault-Prone Components Prediction and Testing

Software quality is imperative for industrial strength software. This quality will be often determined by a few components present in the software which decides the entire functionality. If any of these components are not rigorously tested, the quality will be highly affected. Without knowing which of these components are really critical, it will not be possible to perform high level testing. Hence, to predict such fault-prone or critical components from the software prior to testing and prioritizing them during the testing process, an agent-based approach is proposed in this chapter. The framework developed as part of this work will certainly reduce the field failures and thus will improve the software quality. Further, this approach has also utilized important metrics to predict such components and also prioritized the components based on their critical value. Also, the work proposed in this research has also been compared with some of the existing approaches and the results reveal that, this work is a novel one and can both predict and test the components from the software.

Migration of Diabetes Diagnosis System to Service-Oriented Architectures

Studies in diabetic systems are vital for both diabetes patients and the medical industry because it is possible to use these systems to improve healthcare quality in several ways. These systems can help doctors to treat patients with all types of conditions. This research selected service oriented architecture with a decision aspect (SOAda) as the core architecture for the reason that it functions well when the domain decision is not adequately clear. This chapter demonstrates the study of the diabetes systems within service-oriented architecture and provides clinical management and advices for patients. Its aim is to (1) identify the current research state in the area, (2) assist in deriving the key problems and features with the SOAda, and (3) use these key features so that they could serve as a guide in the development of a new tool to address the decision problems in SOAda.

Applying Formal Methods to Verify Web Services Orchestration and Choreography

The contribution presented in this chapter is to provide a formal framework ensuring the model checking based verification of the Composition of Web Services (WSC). For this, the authors propose first to model the web services composition by an interaction of open workflow nets: a special class of Petri nets. Then, they detail how to check behavioral properties specified in temporal logic using the model checker NuSMV. A WSC is with added value only if the involved services are compatible. So, in this context, across the translation proposed, the authors develop a verification layer of the WSC compatibility. This work is developed in a framework named D&A4WSC which allows to model the WSC by oWF-nets and to check their compatibility by invoking the model checker NuSMV. Furthermore, the authors extended D&A4WSC so that it permits a web services choreography described in a WS-CDL specification. For this they developed a translation from WS-CDL to a composition of oWF-nets, so that one can verify this choreography by the aforementioned approach.