We present MOB, a service-oriented scripting language, for programming mobile agents. We argue that combining the service-oriented and mobile agent paradigms provides a very natural model for programming a large class of distributed applications. In MOB, mobile agents in a network simultaneously provide and use services. The service interfaces constitute contracts that bind agents among themsel...

By QoS (Quality of Service), we often refer to a set of quality requirements on the collective behavior of one or more objects. These requirements enable the provision of better service to certain data flows. The developer can either increase the priority of a data flow or limit the priority of another data flow, in order to tune the proper “parameters” that support quality requirements. Nowada...

To the Editor: There has been concern about the loss of health care professionals from South Africa, and while there are multiple factors contributing to this, one of them, in my opinion, is that health care professionals work under poor employment terms and conditions. My brief experience with South African employment after a period of time in the UK led to an unfair dismissal (Commission for ...

The evaluation of the two principal styles of web services architecture: Representational State Transfer (REST) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has conventionally focused on the extent to which each architectural style induces desirable architectural properties. The increasing prevalence of enterprise web services and the commercialization of publicly available web services has driven i...

Section 3: The Service Revolution 10 3.1 Service visions and ambitions 10 3.2 Service developments 11 3.3 Transition to total service providers 14 3.4 Factors affecting transition 17 3.4.1 Communicating the through-life service vision 18 3.4.2 The level of business conducted under through-life-type contracts 18 3.4.3 Maturity of lean implementation 19 3.5 The increased strategic importance of C...

We consider interruptible electricity contracts issued by an electricity retailer that allow for interruptions to electric service in exchange for either an overall reduction in the price of electricity delivered or for financial compensation at the time of interruption. We provide an equilibrium model to determine electricity prices based on stochastic models of supply and demand. In the conte...

The extant literature on after-sales service support suggests an implicit consensus around the (Pareto) superiority of performance-based contracts (PBC) over traditional time-and-material contracts. However, when product technology is new, a setting in which the vendor possesses superior information on product reliability, there is compelling evidence to suggest that buyers prefer the tradition...

Modeling the dependencies between provided and required services within a software component is necessary for several reasons, such as automated component adaptation and architectural dependency analysis. Parametric contracts for software components specify such dependencies and were successfully used for automated protocol adaptation and quality of service prediction. In this paper, a novel mo...

In a web service composition, an electronic contract (e-contract) regulates how the services participating in the composition should behave, including the restrictions that these services must fulfill, such as real-time constraints. In this work we present a visual model that allows us to specify e-contracts in a user friendly way, including conditional behavior and realtime constraints. A case...