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This paper aims to present Long4Cloud (long-running workflows execution environment for cloud), a distributed and adaptive LRW execution environment delivered “as a service” solution.

LRWs last for hours, days or even months and their duration open the possibility of changes in business rules, service interruptions or even alterations of formal regulations of the business before the workflow completion. These events can lead to problems such as loss of intermediary results or exhaustion of computational resources used to manage the workflow execution. Existing solutions face those problems by merely allowing the replacement (at runtime) of services associated with activities of the LRW.

LONG4Cloud extends the previous works in two main aspects, namely, the inclusion of dynamic reconfiguration capabilities and the adoption of an “as a service” delivery mode. The reconfiguration mechanism uses quiescence principles, data and state management and provides multiple adaptive strategies. Long4Cloud also adopts a scenario-based analysis to decide the adaptation to be performed. Events such as changes in business rules or service failures trigger reconfigurations supported by the environment. These features have been put together in a solution delivered “as a service” that takes advantage of cloud elasticity and allows to better allocate cloud resources to fit into the demands of LRWs.

The original contribution of Long4Cloud is to incorporate adaptive capabilities into the LRW execution environment as an effective way to handle the specificities of this kind of workflow. Experiments using current data of a Brazilian health insurance company were carried out to evaluate Long4Cloud and show performance gains in the execution of LRWs submitted to the proposed environment.

eScience workflows use orchestration for integrating and coordinating distributed and heterogeneous scientific resources, which are increasingly exposed as web services. The rate of growth of scientific data makes eScience workflows data‐intensive, challenging existing workflow solutions. Efficient methods of handling large data in scientific workflows based on web services are needed. The purpse of this paper is to address this issue.

In a previous paper the authors proposed Data‐Flow Delegation (DFD) as a means to optimize orchestrated workflow performance, focusing on SOAP web services. To improve the performance further, they propose pipelined data‐flow delegation (PDFD) for web service‐based eScience workflows in this paper, by leveraging from the domain of parallel programming. Briefly, PDFD allows partitioning of large datasets into independent subsets that can be communicated in a pipelined manner.

The results show that the PDFD improves the execution time of the workflow considerably and is capable of handling much larger data than the non‐pipelined approach.

Execution of a web service‐based workflow hampered by the size of data can be facilitated or improved by using services supporting Pipelined Data‐Flow Delegation.

Contributions of this work include the proposed concept of combining pipelining and Data‐Flow Delegation, an XML Schema supporting the PDFD communication between services, and the practical evaluation of the PDFD approach.

Effective translation has become essential for seamless cross-cultural communication in an era of global interconnectedness. Translation management systems (TMS) have redefined the translation landscape, revolutionizing project management and execution. This study examines the attitudes of translation agencies and professional translators towards integrating and utilizing TMS, with a specific focus on Saudi Arabia.

The study's design was based on a thorough mixed-methods strategy that purposefully combined quantitative and qualitative procedures to create an array of findings. Through a survey involving 35 participants (both project managers and professional translators) and a series of interviews, this research explores the adoption of TMS, perceived benefits, influencing factors and future considerations. This integrated approach sought to investigate the nuanced perceptions of Saudi translation companies and expert translators about TMS. By combining the strengths of quantitative data's broad scopes and qualitative insights' depth, this mixed-methods approach sought to overcome the limitations of each method, ultimately resulting in a holistic understanding of the multifaceted factors shaping attitudes within Saudi Arabia's unique translation landscape.

Based on questionnaires and interviews, the study shows that 80% of participants were familiar with TMS, and 57% had adopted it in their work. Benefits included enhanced project efficiency, collaboration and quality assurance. Factors influencing adoption encompassed cost, compatibility and resistance to change. The study further delved into participants' demographic profiles and years of experience, with a notable concentration in the 6–10 years range. TMS adoption was linked to improved translation processes, and participants expressed interest in AI integration and mobile compatibility. Deployment models favored cloud-based solutions, and compliance with industry standards was deemed vital. The findings underscore the evolving nature of TMS adoption in Saudi Arabia, with diverse attitudes shaped by cultural influences, technological compatibility and awareness.

This research provides a holistic and profound perspective on the integration of TMS, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of the opportunities, obstacles and potential pathways to success. As the translation landscape continues to evolve, the findings from this study will serve as a valuable compass guiding practitioners and researchers towards effectively harnessing the power of technology for enhanced translation outcomes.

Compressing the schedule by using overlapping activities is a commonly adopted approach for accelerating projects. However, this approach might channel a variety of risks into the construction processes. Risks imply waste; still, evaluating the effects of using overlapping activities on schedule quality has been a looming gap in construction research. Therefore, this paper aims to study the quality of overlapping in terms of emerging waste and to demarcate the boundaries of the overlapping envelope.

This study presents a method for assessing the consequences of implementing overlapping activities in a schedule on two types of waste namely waiting time and variation gap. A critical path method (CPM) network including eleven activities is modeled stochastically where the durations of individual activities are sampled as beta-distributions. Using program evaluation and review technique (PERT) assumptions to calculate the schedule dates, the network is simulated for various amounts of overlapping and the corresponding waste is quantified each time.

Results show that not only the returns on overlapping are diminishing after a certain overlap percentage, but also waste in the production system increases. Particularly, results reveal that compressing the schedule leads to a decrease in variation gaps, but at the same time, it leads to a larger increase in waiting times, which creates more waste.

The presented study shows through simulation how overlapping activities affects productivity by identifying wastes. It shows that despite the apparent gains, overlaps should be used with caution, and while considering the side-effects of increased waste which introduces a need for increased managerial awareness.

Aims to discuss the development of workflow standards in the context of the internet.

Outlines the history behind process interoperability standards such as Wf‐XML and BPEL4WS.

Concludes that it will take a while for the dust to settle and the winners of the current standards battles to emerge.

Provides a useful source of information on workflow and web service standards.

Changes in workflow relevant data of business processes at run-time can hinder their completion or impact their profitability as they have been instantiated under different circumstances. The purpose of this paper is to propose a context engine to enhance a business process management (BPM) system’s context-awareness. The generic architecture provides the flexibility to configure processes during initialization as well as to adapt running instances at decision gates or during execution due to significant context change.

The paper discusses context-awareness as the conceptual background. The technological capabilities of business rules and complex event processing (CEP) are outlined in an architecture design. A reference process is proposed and discussed in an exemplary application.

The results provide an improvement over the current situation of static variable instantiation of business processes with local information. The proposed architecture extends the well-known combination of business rules and BPM systems with a context engine based on CEP.

The resulting architecture for a BPM system using a context engine is generic in nature and, hence, requires to be contextualized for situated implementations. Implementation success is dependent on the availability of context information and process compensation options.

Practitioners receive advice on a reference architecture and technology choices for implementing systems, which can provide and monitor context information for business processes as well as intervene and adapt the execution.

Currently, there is no multi-purpose non-proprietary context engine based on CEP or any other technology available for BPM, which facilitates the adaptation of processes at run-time due to changes in context variables. This paper will stimulate a debate between research and practice on suitable design and technology.

Enterprise systems (ESs) are hard to maintain, since they embed a large fraction of organisational data and tasks, which are often intertwined and highly interdependent. The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology for enterprise resource planning (ERP) post-implementation change management to support business analysts during perfective maintenance.

The methodology draws a parallel line with engineering change management and considers the steps of mapping the dependencies among ES components, understanding the ripple effects of change, and defining metrics to quantify and assess the impact of change. The methodology is instantiated in the case of ERP systems, for which a tool has also been implemented and evaluated by ERP implementation experts.

Experts positively evaluated the proposed methodology. General design principles to instantiate the methodology in the case of systems other than ERP have been derived.

While existing ESs change management methodologies help to identify the need for change, the proposed methodology help to structure the change process, supporting the task of perfective maintenance in an efficient way.

The purpose of this paper is to present a prototype pluggable service‐oriented virtual learning environment, enabling teachers to create an integrated teaching environment using tools that have been chosen to best meet their academic requirements.

This is an implementation of a WAFFLE Bus. A microkernel software design pattern is used to enable tools to be added and removed from the system. An enterprise service bus is used to provide workflow and message transformation functionality. Tools are managed through web service interfaces and Shibboleth is used to effect interoperability at the web application user interface. The initial services for the prototype were chosen to implement a simple web service teaching workflow.

First, Shibboleth is shown to provide a solution to the virtual learning environment tools' interoperability problem. Second, the service‐oriented virtual learning environment naturally leads to the ability to operate with many different types of information channels in and out of the system. This leads to a multiplicity of possible types of context‐dependent user interface. Third, immersive 3D, possibly the most interesting interface, will provide a context amenable to even the smallest development teams for the introduction of artificial intelligence into teaching. Finally, web service workflow is shown to provide a viable option for the implementation of learning designs with advantages and disadvantages compared to existing approaches.

Different types of information channels are associated with different security problems. It will be important to determine what the best ways are of establishing secure channels to student personal learning environments. The present web service workflow design tools are of the highest quality and usability, but the design process is still a job for a specialist. It might be possible, however, to modify these open source tools to bring the design process within the grasp of non‐specialists.

The software system presented herein represents one possible path leading away from VLE monolithy using a service‐oriented approach. A new solution to the tools' interoperability problem is presented along with a multi‐faceted approach to the user interface. The enterprise service bus creates a flexible platform for the delivery of web service teaching and learning workflows. It is posited that the use of an immersive 3D user interface will create a context that facilitates the introduction of an artificial intelligence layer into the virtual learning environment that can serve robot teaching avatars.

Advises retailers that traditional strategies will not be adequate to cope with trends such as unprecedented customer diversity, market polarization and dominant mega‐retailers. Explains what capabilities will retailers need to remain relevant to demanding customers. Suggests how retail executives should begin preparing to embrace fundamental change and become truly customer‐centric.

Using scenario techniques to examine retailing in 2010, the authors explore a “world of extremes”. In it retailers will face a consumer marketplace defined by unprecedented social diversity, competitive intensity and market complexity.

As the marketplace polarizes across a variety of dimensions, corporate thinking needs to shift from “bell curves” – where firms try to serve a generic mass market but do not meet anyone's needs particularly well – to “well curves” – where companies drive growth by applying distinct business models in each part of their business to deliver the greatest value to explicitly defined groups of customers. In 2010, retailers will succeed to the extent that they abandon the undifferentiated middle and focus their organizations on serving the extremes of the demand curve, even if they play both sides.

This is one scenario from a set of possible futures for retailing in 2010.

By learning how the world of extremes scenario is being shaped by long‐running social and industry trends which, when added together, will bring about fundamental changes in the retail market, business can anticipate what steps they must take now to prepare for survival and success in 2010. These include: Craft an exceedingly focused, distinctive brand proposition; Drive customer‐valued innovation through deeper insight; Optimize core activities through systematic intelligence; Realign the organization to operationalize customer centricity.

Based on research at the IBM Institute for Business Value and work with clients worldwide, IBM Consulting identified five key “mega‐trends” that are redrawing the rules of competition for retailers: Customer value drivers fragment; Customers become more guarded; Information exposes all; Mega‐retailers break the boundaries; Partnering becomes pervasive.