One of the major challenges of cloud computing is the management of request-response coupling and optimal allocation strategies of computational resources for the various types of service requests. In the normal situations the intelligence required to classify the nature and order of the request using standard methods is insufficient because the arrival of request is at a random fashion and it ...

In the highly competitive shipping and transportation industry companies need to achieve a maximum level of efficiency in order to stay in business. To reach this goal they can, for instance, participate in collaborative networks and trade their transportation requests among each other. This is commonly done by using auction-based exchange systems. A critical part here is the formation of the r...

In this paper we deal with the efficiency of token-based strategies for the basic problem of controlling the allocation of a shared resource in a ring of n processing entities. We propose new protocols that allow a bounded number of exchanged messages per access request to the resource, while this amount is unbounded for classical solutions. We also guarantee all the requests to be served withi...

A student, supported by his classmates, throws a piece of chalk at the teacher who is writing on the blackboard. The teacher rapidly turns back and promptly catches him in the act. The student blushes and suddenly realizes how bad it was what he did. What happened to the guy? Why did he decide to throw the piece of chalk? And why, after a few seconds, he would have liked that what he did had ne...

The rapid advances and popularity of the Internet encourages the wide dissemination of electronic commerce. Various applications of electronic commerce, e.g., querying supermarket catalogs, purchasing products, booking a hotel room of a trip, etc., are rapidly increasing. Moreover, the emergence of mobile computing makes it possible for users to access information anywhere and at anytime. With ...