Resource allocation in decentralised computational systems:an evolutionary market-based approach

We present a novel market-based method, inspired by retail markets, for resource allocation in fully decentralised systems where agents are self-interested. Our market mechanism requires no coordinating node or complex negotiation. The stability of outcome allocations, those at equilibrium, is analysed and compared for three buyer behaviour models. In order to capture the interaction between self-interested agents, we propose the use of competitive coevolution. Our approach is both highly scalable and may be tuned to achieve specified outcome resource allocations. We demonstrate the behaviour of our approach in simulation, where evolutionary market agents act on behalf of service providing nodes to adaptively price their resources over time, in response to market conditions. We show that this leads the system to the predicted outcome resource allocation. Furthermore, the system remains stable in the presence of small changes in price, when buyers' decision functions degrade gracefully. © 2009 The Author(s).

Evaluating the impact of a web-based resource on student learning

This paper reports on an experiment of using a publisher provided web-based resource to make available a series of optional practice quizzes and other supplementary material to all students taking a first year introductory microeconomics module. The empirical analysis evaluates the impact these supplementary resources had on student learning. First, we investigate which students decided to make use of the resources. Then, we analyse the impact this decision has on their subsequent performance in the examination at the end of the module. The results show that, even after taking into account the possibility of self-selection bias, using the web-based resource had a significant positive effect on student learning.

A framework for automated construction of resource space based on background knowledge

Resource Space Model is a kind of data model which can effectively and flexibly manage the digital resources in cyber-physical system from multidimensional and hierarchical perspectives. This paper focuses on constructing resource space automatically. We propose a framework that organizes a set of digital resources according to different semantic dimensions combining human background knowledge in WordNet and Wikipedia. The construction process includes four steps: extracting candidate keywords, building semantic graphs, detecting semantic communities and generating resource space. An unsupervised statistical language topic model (i.e., Latent Dirichlet Allocation) is applied to extract candidate keywords of the facets. To better interpret meanings of the facets found by LDA, we map the keywords to Wikipedia concepts, calculate word relatedness using WordNet's noun synsets and construct corresponding semantic graphs. Moreover, semantic communities are identified by GN algorithm. After extracting candidate axes based on Wikipedia concept hierarchy, the final axes of resource space are sorted and picked out through three different ranking strategies. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can organize resources automatically and effectively.©2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Optimal Resource Deployment in an Infostation-Based Network

This paper considers the problem of finding an optimal deployment of information resources on an InfoStation network in order to minimize the overhead and reduce the time needed to satisfy user requests for resources. The RG-Optimization problem and an approach for its solving are presented as well.

Advanced predictive-analysis-based decision support for collaborative logistics networks

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine challenges and potential of big data in heterogeneous business networks and relate these to an implemented logistics solution. Design/methodology/approach – The paper establishes an overview of challenges and opportunities of current significance in the area of big data, specifically in the context of transparency and processes in heterogeneous enterprise networks. Within this context, the paper presents how existing components and purpose-driven research were combined for a solution implemented in a nationwide network for less-than-truckload consignments. Findings – Aside from providing an extended overview of today’s big data situation, the findings have shown that technical means and methods available today can comprise a feasible process transparency solution in a large heterogeneous network where legacy practices, reporting lags and incomplete data exist, yet processes are sensitive to inadequate policy changes. Practical implications – The means introduced in the paper were found to be of utility value in improving process efficiency, transparency and planning in logistics networks. The particular system design choices in the presented solution allow an incremental introduction or evolution of resource handling practices, incorporating existing fragmentary, unstructured or tacit knowledge of experienced personnel into the theoretically founded overall concept. Originality/value – The paper extends previous high-level view on the potential of big data, and presents new applied research and development results in a logistics application.

Vállalati versenyképesség – a vevői érték és a képességalapú megközelítés összekapcsolása (Competitiveness of firms – combining the customer value and the capability based approach)

A cikk központi kérdése a vállalati versenyképesség. Két meghatározó menedzsmentmegközelítés – a vevői érték és az erőforrás-, képességalapú stratégiai menedzsment – fogalmi rendszerére, illetve koncepcióira alapozva a szerzők kialakítottak és a "Versenyben a világgal 2004–2006 – gazdasági versenyképességünk vállalati nézőpontból" című kutatás adatbázisát használva teszteltek egy a vállalati versenyképesség belső struktúrájára rávilágító elméleti modellt. A modell empirikus tesztelésének eredménye szerint a kialakított koncepció a vállalati versenyképesség elemzésének hasznos eszköze, mely alkalmas arra, hogy a vizsgált vállalatok esetében igazolja, vagy éppen megcáfolja a meghatározott, ún. összehangolt kompetenciák meglétét. ________The main issue of this article is the competitiveness of firms. Based on conceptual system and concepts of two determinant management approaches – the customer value and the resource and capability based strategic management – the authors have developed and tested a theoretical model of the inside structure of the competitiveness of firms using the database of Competing with the World 2004-2006 – the competitiveness of the Hungarian economy from enterprise point of view. According to the result of the empiric test of the model the developed concept has been a profitable tool of the analysis of the enterprise competitiveness and it has been suited for confirming or confuting determinated so called aligned competencies being in the case of examined firms.

An exergy based engineering and economic analysis of sustainable building

To achieve the goal of sustainable development, the building energy system was evaluated from both the first and second law of thermodynamics point of view. The relationship between exergy destruction and sustainable development were discussed at first, followed by the description of the resource abundance model, the life cycle analysis model and the economic investment effectiveness model. By combining the forgoing models, a new sustainable index was proposed. Several green building case studies in U.S. and China were presented. The influences of building function, geographic location, climate pattern, the regional energy structure, and the technology improvement potential of renewable energy in the future were discussed. The building’s envelope, HVAC system, on-site renewable energy system life cycle analysis from energy, exergy, environmental and economic perspective were compared. It was found that climate pattern had a dramatic influence on the life cycle investment effectiveness of the building envelope. The building HVAC system energy performance was much better than its exergy performance. To further increase the exergy efficiency, renewable energy rather than fossil fuel should be used as the primary energy. A building life cycle cost and exergy consumption regression model was set up. The optimal building insulation level could be affected by either cost minimization or exergy consumption minimization approach. The exergy approach would cause better insulation than cost approach. The influence of energy price on the system selection strategy was discussed. Two photovoltaics (PV) systems—stand alone and grid tied system were compared by the life cycle assessment method. The superiority of the latter one was quite obvious. The analysis also showed that during its life span PV technology was less attractive economically because the electricity price in U.S. and China did not fully reflect the environmental burden associated with it. However if future energy price surges and PV system cost reductions were considered, the technology could be very promising for sustainable buildings in the future.

Interoperable resource brokering with policy-based provisioning and job allocation

The increasing needs for computational power in areas such as weather simulation, genomics or Internet applications have led to sharing of geographically distributed and heterogeneous resources from commercial data centers and scientific institutions. Research in the areas of utility, grid and cloud computing, together with improvements in network and hardware virtualization has resulted in methods to locate and use resources to rapidly provision virtual environments in a flexible manner, while lowering costs for consumers and providers. ^ However, there is still a lack of methodologies to enable efficient and seamless sharing of resources among institutions. In this work, we concentrate in the problem of executing parallel scientific applications across distributed resources belonging to separate organizations. Our approach can be divided in three main points. First, we define and implement an interoperable grid protocol to distribute job workloads among partners with different middleware and execution resources. Second, we research and implement different policies for virtual resource provisioning and job-to-resource allocation, taking advantage of their cooperation to improve execution cost and performance. Third, we explore the consequences of on-demand provisioning and allocation in the problem of site-selection for the execution of parallel workloads, and propose new strategies to reduce job slowdown and overall cost.^

Fuzzy Modeling and Control Based Virtual Machine Resource Management

Virtual machines (VMs) are powerful platforms for building agile datacenters and emerging cloud systems. However, resource management for a VM-based system is still a challenging task. First, the complexity of application workloads as well as the interference among competing workloads makes it difficult to understand their VMs’ resource demands for meeting their Quality of Service (QoS) targets; Second, the dynamics in the applications and system makes it also difficult to maintain the desired QoS target while the environment changes; Third, the transparency of virtualization presents a hurdle for guest-layer application and host-layer VM scheduler to cooperate and improve application QoS and system efficiency. This dissertation proposes to address the above challenges through fuzzy modeling and control theory based VM resource management. First, a fuzzy-logic-based nonlinear modeling approach is proposed to accurately capture a VM’s complex demands of multiple types of resources automatically online based on the observed workload and resource usages. Second, to enable fast adaption for resource management, the fuzzy modeling approach is integrated with a predictive-control-based controller to form a new Fuzzy Modeling Predictive Control (FMPC) approach which can quickly track the applications’ QoS targets and optimize the resource allocations under dynamic changes in the system. Finally, to address the limitations of black-box-based resource management solutions, a cross-layer optimization approach is proposed to enable cooperation between a VM’s host and guest layers and further improve the application QoS and resource usage efficiency. The above proposed approaches are prototyped and evaluated on a Xen-based virtualized system and evaluated with representative benchmarks including TPC-H, RUBiS, and TerraFly. The results demonstrate that the fuzzy-modeling-based approach improves the accuracy in resource prediction by up to 31.4% compared to conventional regression approaches. The FMPC approach substantially outperforms the traditional linear-model-based predictive control approach in meeting application QoS targets for an oversubscribed system. It is able to manage dynamic VM resource allocations and migrations for over 100 concurrent VMs across multiple hosts with good efficiency. Finally, the cross-layer optimization approach further improves the performance of a virtualized application by up to 40% when the resources are contended by dynamic workloads.

An Exergy Based Engineering and Economic Analysis of Sustainable Building

To achieve the goal of sustainable development, the building energy system was evaluated from both the first and second law of thermodynamics point of view. The relationship between exergy destruction and sustainable development were discussed at first, followed by the description of the resource abundance model, the life cycle analysis model and the economic investment effectiveness model. By combining the forgoing models, a new sustainable index was proposed. Several green building case studies in U.S. and China were presented. The influences of building function, geographic location, climate pattern, the regional energy structure, and the technology improvement potential of renewable energy in the future were discussed. The building’s envelope, HVAC system, on-site renewable energy system life cycle analysis from energy, exergy, environmental and economic perspective were compared. It was found that climate pattern had a dramatic influence on the life cycle investment effectiveness of the building envelope. The building HVAC system energy performance was much better than its exergy performance. To further increase the exergy efficiency, renewable energy rather than fossil fuel should be used as the primary energy. A building life cycle cost and exergy consumption regression model was set up. The optimal building insulation level could be affected by either cost minimization or exergy consumption minimization approach. The exergy approach would cause better insulation than cost approach. The influence of energy price on the system selection strategy was discussed. Two photovoltaics (PV) systems – stand alone and grid tied system were compared by the life cycle assessment method. The superiority of the latter one was quite obvious. The analysis also showed that during its life span PV technology was less attractive economically because the electricity price in U.S. and China did not fully reflect the environmental burden associated with it. However if future energy price surges and PV system cost reductions were considered, the technology could be very promising for sustainable buildings in the future.

Development of a learning resource manual for nurses new to thoracic surgery

Background: Patients with lung and esophageal cancer often have surgery as a means of treatment. In Newfoundland and Labrador, patients with lung and esophageal issues are cared for on Six East, the General/Thoracic Surgery unit at St. Clare’s Mercy Hospital. These patients frequently require chest tubes, which are managed and assessed by Registered Nurses (RNs) on the unit. For nurses new to thoracic surgery, fulfilling their new role and caring for chest tube systems can be daunting. Purpose: The purpose of this practicum project was to develop a learning resource manual for nurses who are new to thoracic surgery. Via self-directed learning, the manual can increase the knowledge and self-efficacy of nurses who are caring for thoracic surgery clients and assessing chest tube systems. Methods: An informal needs assessment, integrated literature review, and several consultations via in-person interviews were conducted. Results: Based on the findings from these methodologies, Knowles’ Adult Learning Theory, and Benner’s Novice to Expert Model, a learning resource manual was created. The manual was divided into chapters covering various aspects of patient and chest tube system care and assessment. Conclusion: For the purpose of this practicum project, no evaluation was conducted. However, a plan for future evaluation of the learning resource manual has been developed to determine if the manual assisted with increasing the knowledge and self-efficacy of nurses new to thoracic surgery. “Test Your Knowledge” questions were included at the end of each chapter in the manual as well as case study scenarios to allow for participant self-evaluation.

Feasibility of MR-Based Body Composition Analysis in Large Scale Population Studies

Introduction Quantitative and accurate measurements of fat and muscle in the body are important for prevention and diagnosis of diseases related to obesity and muscle degeneration. Manually segmenting muscle and fat compartments in MR body-images is laborious and time-consuming, hindering implementation in large cohorts. In the present study, the feasibility and success-rate of a Dixon-based MR scan followed by an intensity-normalised, non-rigid, multi-atlas based segmentation was investigated in a cohort of 3,000 subjects. Materials and Methods 3,000 participants in the in-depth phenotyping arm of the UK Biobank imaging study underwent a comprehensive MR examination. All subjects were scanned using a 1.5 T MR-scanner with the dual-echo Dixon Vibe protocol, covering neck to knees. Subjects were scanned with six slabs in supine position, without localizer. Automated body composition analysis was performed using the AMRA Profiler™ system, to segment and quantify visceral adipose tissue (VAT), abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue (ASAT) and thigh muscles. Technical quality assurance was performed and a standard set of acceptance/rejection criteria was established. Descriptive statistics were calculated for all volume measurements and quality assurance metrics. Results Of the 3,000 subjects, 2,995 (99.83%) were analysable for body fat, 2,828 (94.27%) were analysable when body fat and one thigh was included, and 2,775 (92.50%) were fully analysable for body fat and both thigh muscles. Reasons for not being able to analyse datasets were mainly due to missing slabs in the acquisition, or patient positioned so that large parts of the volume was outside of the field-of-view. Discussion and Conclusions In conclusion, this study showed that the rapid UK Biobank MR-protocol was well tolerated by most subjects and sufficiently robust to achieve very high success-rate for body composition analysis. This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank Resource.

Effects of a positive emotion-based adjuvant psychological therapy in colorectal cancer patients: a pilot study

Objective: To examine the effectiveness of an “Enhancing Positive Emotions Procedure” (EPEP) based on positive psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy in relieving distress at the time of adjuvant chemotherapy treatment in colorectal cancer patients (CRC). It is expected that EPEP will increase quality of life and positive affect in CRC patients during chemotherapy treatment intervention and at 1 month follow-up.Method: A group of 24 CRC patients received the EPEP procedure (intervention group), whereas another group of 20 CRC patients did not receive the EPEP (control group). Quality of life (EORTC-QLQC30), and mood (PANAS) were assessed in three moments: prior to enter the study (T1), at the end of the time required to apply the EPEP (T2, 6 weeks after T1), and, at follow-up (T3, one-month after T2). Patient’s assessments of the EPEP (improving in mood states, and significance of the attention received) were assessed with Lickert scales.Results: Insomnia was reduced in the intervention group. Treatment group had better scores on positive affect although there were no significantly differences between groups and over time. There was a trend to better scores at T2 and T3 for the intervention group on global health status, physical, role, and social functioning scales. Patients stated that positive mood was enhanced and that EPEP was an important resource.Conclusions: CRC patients receiving EPEP during chemotherapy believed that this intervention was important. Furthermore, EPEP seems to improve positive affect and quality of life. EPEP has potential benefits, and its implementation to CRC patients should be considered.

The pervasiveness and trajectory of methodological choices: A 20 year review of human resource management research

This paper examines the methodological choices of researchers studying the HR practices–outcome relationship via a content analysis of 281 studies published across the last twenty years. The prevalence and trajectory of change over time are reported for a wide range of methodological choices relevant to internal, external, construct, and statistical conclusion validity. While the results indicate a high incidence of potentially problematic cross-sectional, single informant, and single level designs, they also reveal significant improvements over time across many validity relevant methodological choices. This broad based improvement in the methodological underpinnings of HR research suggests that researchers and practitioners can view the findings reported in the HR literature with increasing confidence. Directions for future research are provided.