Before us stands a great challenge and a great opportunity. Our nation has invested billions of dollars to develop, field, and maintain an array of optical and radar-based wide area surveillance (WAS) systems. The demand for such systems lies in their potential to persistently monitor significant portions of a threat’s operating environment. This ability greatly contributes to learning and unde...

The tourism industry is one of the largest industries in the world, and despite recent events that have made its operating environment more complex, the industry continues to grow (Theobald, 2005). Commensurate to the size of the industry is a growth in the number of students pursuing degree courses in tourism around the world. Despite an increasingly sophisticated literature, the relative rece...

Mobile agents can optimize their communication patterns to reduce bandwidth and latency and can adapt to changes in network service. We report on use of the Knowbot Operating Environment to support mobile agents in a wide-area network. Experiments with an application that monitors Web pages for changes show that a mobile program can outperform its stationary counterpart. The performance benefit...

There are two difficulties in doing an objective evaluation of the performance of decision-making units (DMUs). The first one is how to treat undesirable outputs jointly produced with the desirable outputs, and the second one is how to treat uncontrollable variables, which often capture the impact of the operating environment. Given difficulties in both model construction and data availability,...

Resource sharing is an important but complex problem to be solved. The problem is exacerbated in a coalition context due to policy constraints placed on the resources. Thus, to effectively share resources, members of a coalition need to negotiate on policies and at times refine them to meet the needs of the operating environment. Towards achieving this goal, in this work we propose a novel poli...

The standardization of network configuration interfaces for use with the Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) requires a structured and secure operating environment that promotes human usability and multi-vendor interoperability. There is a need for standard mechanisms to restrict NETCONF protocol access for particular users to a pre-configured subset of all available NETCONF protocol opera...

Resources sharing is an important but complex problem to be solved. The problem is exacerbated in a coalition context due to policy constraints, that reflect concerns regarding security, privacy and performance to name a few, placed on the resources. Thus, to effectively share resources, members of a coalition need to negotiate on policies and at times refine them to meet the needs of the opera...

This article focuses on the overall system engineering aspects of low voltage DC (LVDC) electricity distribution.. The interdependencies between different parts of an LVDC distribution system are discussed emphasising the issues related with the interconnection of user-end LVDC installations and public LVDC systems. The main objective is to illustrate the importance of the total system engineer...

In today’s economy and society, performance analyses in the services industries attract more and more attention. The traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach requires a consistent operating environment. However, in reality, there is a need to evaluate the units belonging to different environment. This reality challenges the traditional methods of applying DEA theory to real-world ca...