Today we see more and more services being brought to connected homes, such as entertainment or home automation. These services are published and operated by a variety of service providers. Currently, each provider sells his own box, providing both connectivity and a closed service environment. The open service paradigm aims at mixing all services within the same box, thus opening the service de...

In the past twenty years, the multi-agent technology has been widely employed for developing agent-based systems. Currently, agent-based service-oriented applications have been widely applied in many complex domains such as e-markets, grid computing, e-governments and service-oriented software systems, across Internet and organizations. In this kind of service-oriented multi-agent systems, serv...

Many service providers offer different service classes (e.g., first class, second class). Because the capacity of each class is set in advance, providers may end up with unfilled first-class capacity at the time of service delivery. When this happens, providers often upgrade some of their customers from a lower service class to a higher one. One way in which service providers manage upgrades is...

Background The main purpose of this study was to identify factors that influence healthcare quality in the Iranian context.   Methods Exploratory in-depth individual and focus group interviews were conducted with 222 healthcare stakeholders including healthcare providers, managers, policy-makers, and payers to identify factors affecting the quality of healthcare services provided in Iranian hea...

As communication networks have evolved towards IP (Internet Protocol) networks, telecommunication operators has expanded its reach to internet multimedia web content services while operating circuit-switch networks in parallel. With the adoption of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) that enables service capability interfaces to be published and integrated with other service capabilities into n...

Open service platforms like the OSGi-platform offer a standard, scalable way for service providers to remotely deploy their services inside many residential networks. However, the lack of control by WAN service providers on the home environment together with too complex end-user policy configuration hinder widespread e-deployment of services into the home. Several architectures have been presen...

Service e-Commerce (SeC) is emerging as a booming form of e-commerce where various services are contracted, managed, sold, and even delivered via the Internet. However, the uncertainty of service quality due to information asymmetry has been a major challenge to the development of SeC. Some SeC platforms tried to promote service business by lowering buyer’s perceived risk through the service gu...