We present a methodology for the automated selection and aggregation of (Web) services with the purpose of satisfying client queries. A key ingredient of our approach is the notion of service contract, which consists of signature (WSDL), ontology information (OWL), and behaviour specification (YAWL). The methodology inputs a registry of service contracts and a client service contract, and it au...

In the context of Service Oriented Computing, contracts are descriptions of the observable message-passing behavior of services. Contracts have been already successfully exploited to solve the problem of client/service composition. Inspired by current orchestration languages, we consider services where the choice to perform an output may not depend on the environment. Under this assumption, we ...

The University of Pennsylvania Health System laid off 450 employees and eliminated a total of 1,100 positions on Tuesday, marking the most aggressive effort to date made by Chief Executive Officer William Kelley to balance the troubled system's budget. The cuts — which come almost entirely from the system's managerial infrastructure — represent a nine percent reduction in the total health servi...

The 2008-09 crisis has shown that some euro area member countries were unable to sufficiently stabilize their economies which has given rise to a debate about deeper fiscal integration in Europe. In this paper, we analyze the redistributive and stabilizing effects of two scenarios of fiscal integration in the Eurozone, namely the introduction of i) a joint tax and transfer system that replaces ...

In this paper a simulation technique borrowed from civil engineering is applied to American presidential elections to explore the key relationship between federal spending and incumbent reelection, represented by the fiscal model. On the one hand, as Machiavelli would have understood, an expansionary fiscal policy militates against incumbent reelection but a cutback policy facilitates it. That ...