Elasticity is a cloud property that enables applications and their execution systems to dynamically acquire and release shared computational resources on demand. Moreover, it unfolds the advantage of economies of scale in the cloud through a drop in the average costs of these shared resources. However, it is still an open challenge to achieve a perfect match between resource demand and provisio...

In the last few years, adoption of cloud computing has shown a marked increase across the world. Moreover, the smaller markets, viz., Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle-East, etc., are expected to grow at more than the average rate for the next few years. While this is good news for cloud service providers, significant obstacles to cloud adoption still remain a major cause of concern, for exam...

In the past, electrical transmission systems were continuously adding more facilities to their subsystems in order to satisfy the growing customer energy requirements. A utility industry traditionally has relied on a set of deterministic criteria to guide transmission planning. The traditional planning guidelines were based on planner's experience and intuition without a formal and consistent f...

This paper presents a case study of implementing a user-centred approach in four software companies that, by supporting the development process, provide the municipalities with various self-service solutions for their citizens. This study outlines the process of how four companies develop their solution, including their customer involvement, end-user involvement, and product. The findings are c...

Learning customer preferences from an observed behaviour is an important topic in the marketing literature. Structural models typically model forward-looking customers or firms as utility-maximizing agents whose utility is estimated using methods of Stochastic Optimal Control. We suggest an alternative approach to study dynamic consumer demand, based on Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). We ...

Emerging technologies allowing two-way communication between utility companies and their customers, as well as with smart equipment, are changing the rules of the energy market. Deregulation makes it even more demanding for utility companies to create new business processes for mutual benefit. Dynamic load management of the power grid is essential to make better and more cost-effective use of e...

We study incentive problems in electricity distribution when customer energy usage is imperfectly observable by the utility. Thus, we assume that each customer has private information about the amount of his consumed energy. Imperfect observability of individual user demand results is non-technical energy losses. In developing countries, these losses amount to 20− 30% per year, and are largely ...