BACKGROUND The UK has traditionally had strong proxy demand-side measures favouring generic drug use, including prescribing guidance, financial incentives and encouraging generic prescribing. At distribution level, pharmacies are paid a salary for their dispensing work, based on volume dispensed, and procure generic products on the basis of discounts given to them by manufacturers or wholesaler...

Brokers are widely used in distributed information systems such as Multi-agent systems and distributed databases. Yet, there has not been a detailed analysis of Brokers’ architecture and no general solution has been proposed on how the Brokers’ tasks have to be accomplished. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of these tasks, and an implementation based on OWL-S. We show that while OW...

A key issue when designing and implementing largescale publish/subscribe systems is how to efficiently propagate subscriptions among the brokers of the system. Brokers require this information in order to forward incoming events only to interested users, filtering out unrelated events, which can save significant overheads (particularly network bandwidth and processing time at the brokers). In t...

We contribute a new paradigm for publish/subscribe systems. It is centered on the novel notion of subscription summarization. We first present the summarization structures for a broker’s subscriptions and accompanying algorithms, which operate on the summary structures to match incoming events to the brokers with relevant subscriptions and for the maintenance of subscriptions in the face of upd...

Grid Resource Management tools evolved from manual discovery and task submission to sophisticated brokering solutions. User requirements created certain properties that resource managers have learned to support. This development is still continuing, and users already need to stress themselves to distinguish brokers and migrate their applications when they move to a different grid. Moreover, gri...

The Power Trading Agent Competition (Power TAC) is a feature-rich simulation that simulates an energy market in a smart grid, where software brokers can buy energy in wholesale markets and sell energy in tariff markets to consumers. Successful brokers can maximize their profits by buying energy at low prices in the wholesale market and selling them at high prices to the consumers. However, this...

However, technological advances have recently altered the way foreign exchange dealer conduct their business. Bilateral deals still happen, although email conversations are now the norm (typically using the Reuters D2000-1 dealing system). The brokers market has also been revolutionized by the introduction of two electronic broking systems (Reuters D2000-2 and Electronic Broking Services [EBS])...

The Strength of Weak Ties and Brokerage Theory rely on the argument that weak bridging ties deliver novel information to brokers. Yet, very little empirical evidence exists to validate this claim. Analyzing an evolving corporate email network, we investigate the dynamic mechanisms that enable the “vision advantage”. Three results emerge. First, we confirm the Diversity-Bandwidth Tradeoff at the...