There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Praise for the Third Edition: "This is one of the best books available. Its excellent organizational structure allows quick reference to specific models and its clear presentation . . . solidifies the understanding of the concepts being presented."IIE Transactions on Operations EngineeringThoroughly revised and expanded to reflect the latest developments in the field, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition continues to present the basic statistical principles that are necessary to analyze the probabilistic nature of queues. Rather than presenting a narrow focus on the subject, this update illustrates the wide-reaching, fundamental concepts in queueing theory and its applications to diverse areas such as computer science, engineering, business, and operations research.This update takes a numerical approach to understanding and making probable estimations relating to queues, with a comprehensive outline of simple and more advanced queueing models. Newly featured topics of the Fourth Edition include:Retrial queuesApproximations for queueing networksNumerical inversion of transformsDetermining the appropriate number of servers to balance quality and cost of serviceEach chapter provides a self-contained presentation of key concepts and formulae, allowing readers to work with each section independently, while a summary table at the end of the book outlines the types of queues that have been discussed and their results. In addition, two new appendices have been added, discussing transforms and generating functions as well as the fundamentals of differential and difference equations. New examples are now included along with problems that incorporate QtsPlus software, which is freely available via the book's related Web site.With its accessible style and wealth of real-world examples, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition is an ideal book for courses on queueing theory at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. It is also a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners who analyze congestion in the fields of telecommunications, transportation, aviation, and management science.

Fundamentals of Queueing Theory

/pdf/a-break-in-the-clouds-towards-a-cloud-definition-svovsw1r5a.pdf

A Break in the Clouds: Towards a Cloud Definition

CO2 conversion covers a wide range of possible application areas from fuels to bulk and commodity chemicals and even to specialty products with biological activity such as pharmaceuticals. In the present review, we discuss selected examples in these areas in a combined analysis of the state-of-the-art of synthetic methodologies and processes with their life cycle assessment. Thereby, we attempted to assess the potential to reduce the environmental footprint in these application fields relative to the current petrochemical value chain. This analysis and discussion differs significantly from a viewpoint on CO2 utilization as a measure for global CO2 mitigation. Whereas the latter focuses on reducing the end-of-pipe problem “CO2 emissions” from todays’ industries, the approach taken here tries to identify opportunities by exploiting a novel feedstock that avoids the utilization of fossil resource in transition toward more sustainable future production. Thus, the motivation to develop CO2-based chemistry does...

Sustainable Conversion of Carbon Dioxide: An Integrated Review of Catalysis and Life Cycle Assessment

Despite hospitality and tourism researchers’ recent attempts on examining different aspects of online word-of-mouth [WOM], its impact on hotel sales remains largely unknown in the existing literature. To fill this void, we conduct a study to empirically investigate the impact of online consumer-generated reviews on hotel room sales. Utilizing data collected from the largest travel website in China, we develop a fixed effect log-linear regression model to assess the influence of online reviews on the number of hotel room bookings. Our results indicate a significant relationship between online consumer reviews and business performance of hotels.

The impact of online user reviews on hotel room sales [Summary]

Transaction commit protocols have widely been used to ensure the correctness and reliability of distributed applications. This paper investigates into the performance of such protocols within the context of composite web services. It presents a new commit protocol which aims to improve the performance of composite web services transactions. The proposed protocol is tested through various analytical experiments. These experiments reveal that the proposed protocol significantly improves the performance in committing a composite web service transaction. The experiments also exhibit the processing overhead of the proposed protocol in the case of unsuccessful execution of a web service transaction

An Efficient Transaction Commit Protocol for Composite Web Services

Extracting essential meaning from the regulatory text helps in the automation of the Compliance Management (CM) process. CM is a process where organizations assure that the processes are run according to requirements and expectations. However, extraction of meaningful text from regulatory guidelines comes with many research challenges such as dealing with different document-format, implicit document-structure, textual ambiguity and complexity. In this paper, the extended version of the Semantic-ART framework is described, which focuses on tackling the challenges of document-structure identification and regulatory-entity extraction. An initial result has shown an inspirational result as compared to the previous version of the framework.

Extracting meaningful entities from regulatory text: Towards automating regulatory compliance

A tentative commit protocol for composite web services

The data on 575 records of 270 Holstein Friesian and 818 records of 326 Jersey cows maintained in Punjab, Pakistan were analyzed. The cows were grouped into imported Holstein Friesian, imported Jersey, Farm born Holstein Friesian and farm born Jersey cows. Lactation milk yield of farm born Holstein Friesian and Jersey cows was significantly (P<0.05) lower than that of imported Holstein Friesian and Jersey cows. Breed group, season of calving and lactation number had significant (P<0.05) effect on lactation milk yield. The highest lactation milk yield was observed in imported and farm born Holstein Friesian cows calved during autumn, while in imported Jersey cows maximum lactation milk yield was observed in cows calved during spring season. The maximum lactation milk yield was observed in the third lactation in imported Holstein Friesian, imported Jersey and farm born Holstein Friesian cows, while in farm born Jersey cows maximum lactation milk yield was observed in the fifth lactation. The milk yield in all breed groups increased with increase in lactation length and service period.

Milk production potential of pure bred holstein friesian and jersey cows in subtropical environment of pakistan

Software-Defined Networks (SDN) has emerged as a dominant programmable network architecture for cloud based data centers. Its centralised programmable control plane decoupled from the data plane with a global view of the network state provides new opportunities to implement innovate security mechanisms. This research Ieverages this features of SDN and presents the architecture of a hierarchical and Iightweight Intrusion Detection System (IDS) for software enabled networks by exploiting the concept of SDN flows. It combines advantages of a flow-based IDS and a packet-based IDS in order to provide a high detection rate without degrading network performances. The flow-based IDS uses an anomaly detection algorithm based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) trained with DARPA Intrusion Detection Dataset. This first line of defence detects any intrusions on the network. When an attack is detected, the malicious flow is mirrored to a packet-based IDS, for further examination and actions. The results show that this scheme provides good detection rates and performances with minimal extra overhead.

/pdf/a-hierarchical-intrusion-detection-system-using-support-30d4tbivqf.pdf

Muhammad Younas

Papers

An Efficient Transaction Commit Protocol for Composite Web Services

Extracting meaningful entities from regulatory text: Towards automating regulatory compliance

A tentative commit protocol for composite web services

Milk production potential of pure bred holstein friesian and jersey cows in subtropical environment of pakistan

A Hierarchical Intrusion Detection System using Support Vector Machine for SDN Network in Cloud Data Center