The Internet as a global networking infrastructure offers a wide range of possibilities to trade E-Commerce services, goods, and digital content. A new form of E-Commerce service is the transmission of video streams on demand with specifications for the Quality of Service (QoS). The service of providing streamed information contains the reliable transmission of data from sender to receiver via ...

This paper provides an overview of the UK market for energy service contracts in 2014 and highlights the growing role of intermediaries. Using information from secondary literature and interviews, it identifies the businesses offering energy service contracts, the sectors and organisations that are purchasing those contracts, the types of contract that are available, the areas of market growth ...

In this paper we discuss the different kinds of contract that are required for the delivery of multi-service networks based on ATM. A growth in the number and complexity of such contracts is predicted and a need is identified for consistent terminology and structured analysis. We establish a framework in this paper for discussing, distinguishing between, and relating different kinds of ATM cont...

Risk theoretic analysis of capitation contracts suggests that capitation contracts are closely aligned to reinsurance contracts between insurance companies. Similarities and differences between these two forms of contractual instruments are reviewed, and several implications are discussed. Viewing capitation contracts as reinsurance contracts has implications that are incompatible with the over...

We apply automata theory to analyze the schedulability of real-time component-based applications running on uniform multi-processor platforms. The resource requirements of each application or application component are specified in a service contract resulting a hierarchy of contracts. As we are interested in determining the schedulability of such applications, this hierarchy of contracts is map...

We survey our work on choreographies and behavioural contracts in multiparty interactions. In particular theories of behavioural contracts are presented which enable reasoning about correct service composition (contract compliance) and service substitutability (contract refinement preorder) under different assumptions concerning service communication: synchronous address or name based communica...

This position paper focuses on contract monitoring for component interfaces, considering the verification of functional and non-functional properties in the contracts. We investigate what properties are needed on behavioral and Quality of Service contracts. We also define what are the requirements on a monitoring environment to handle properly those contracts. We briefly transpose those require...

In this paper, we study the contracting issues in an outsourcing supply chain consisting of a user company and a call center that does outsourcing work for the user company. We model the call center as a G/G/s queue with customer abandonment. Each call has a revenue potential, and we model the call center’s service quality by the percentage of calls resolved (revenue realized). The call center ...

The Semantic Grid aims at enhancing Grid architectures by knowledge engineering techniques. The service notion is central in this approach. Service-level agreements, called contracts, are formed to define the service usage conditions. Ontology technology can form the framework to capture semantical conditions for contracts. Often, applications of Grid services involve a combination of several s...