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This research probes into the execution of small and medium‐sized enterprises’ value creativities by a difference analysis with different classifications, different capital, different turnover, different employees, and different established years. This study develop a questionnaire about value creativity with five dimensions and thirty‐five items according to “Valuation” by McKinsey and Company, Inc. and Copeland et al., such as: “Aspiration and target,” “Portfolio management,” “Organization design,” “Process management,” and “Business and individual performance management.” The results are as follows: (1) Most small and medium‐ sized enterprises (SMEs) have executed value creativities; (2) There is a difference in the execution of value creativities between the livelihood industry and the chemical industry; the execution of value creativities by livelihood industry is better than the chemical industry; (3) For value creativities of the execution of different capital and turnover for SMEs, bigger entities are better than smaller ones; (4) For the value creativities of the execution of different numbers of staff in SMEs, those with more staff are better than those with fewer staff; (5) For the value creativities of the execution of different established years for SMEs, those established longer are better than those established shorter.

The causes of valuation inaccuracy, the approaches, basis and procedures used for value estimation were not profoundly identified in Ethiopia. Particularly, the causes of property valuation inaccuracy for court decisions have not been assiduously studied by scholars. Hence, the ultimate goal of this study aims to identify the determinant variables of valuation inaccuracy, the approaches, basis and procedures used for court execution purposes.

This study employed both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The target populations of the study were the courts at the federal and regional levels. A purposive sampling technique was employed to undertake this study. The survey data was analyzed using the Relative Importance Index (RII).

The finding of this research revealed that courts have not outshined and uniform valuation manuals and guidelines that clearly state the approaches, procedures and bases of valuation. As a consequence, courts execute based on the opinion of value determined by other institutions. The insignificant numbers of independent valuation institution with the lack of uniform standards in the country prejudice the implementation of the decision of the court and faced injustice. The finding also reveals as there are several causative variables for real property valuation inaccuracy.

To alleviate the problem, the government should strengthen the valuation sector by creating an independent institution for advancing valuation regulation and policymaking.

This study was the first of all and could be a pointer for different government and non-government bodies regarding the limitations of valuation for judgment execution purposes.

The purpose of this study is to introduce several metrics that enable universal and fine-grained characterization of arbitrary Linked Data repositories. Publicly accessible SPARQL endpoints contain vast amounts of knowledge from a large variety of domains. However, oftentimes these endpoints are not configured to process specific workloads as efficiently as possible. Assisting users in leveraging SPARQL endpoints requires insight into functional and non-functional properties of these knowledge bases.

This study presents comprehensive approaches for deriving these metrics. More specifically, the study utilizes concrete SPARQL queries to determine corresponding values. Furthermore, it validates and discusses the introduced metrics through extensive evaluation on real-world SPARQL endpoints.

The evaluation determined that endpoints exhibit different characteristics. While it comes as no surprise that latency and throughput are influenced by the network infrastructure, the costs for join operations depend on a number of factors that are not obvious to a data consumer. Moreover, as the author discusses mean, median and upper quartile values, it was found both endpoints behaving consistently as well as repositories offering varying levels of performance.

On the one hand, the contribution of the authors work lies in assisting data consumers in evaluation of the quality of service of publicly available SPARQL endpoints. On the other hand, the performance metrics introduced in this study can also be considered as additional input features for distributed query processing frameworks. Moreover, the author provides a universal means for discerning characteristics of different SPARQL endpoints without the need of (synthetic or real-world) query workloads.

How does the era of austerity affect flexibility and control in budget implementation? The execution phase of the budget has remained underexplored in the budgeting literature. Theoretically, a crisis and austerity period may trigger changes in budget execution in one of two key directions: either toward greater control or greater flexibility. This paper seeks to uncover which outcome is more likely.

The authors conducted elite interviews of key officials involved in the budget execution phases in two European countries: Portugal and Austria.

The cases demonstrate that the experience of a fiscal crisis and period of austerity tend to lead to greater control and constrained flexibility in budget execution.

The execution phase of the budget process has remained underexplored in the public budgeting literature, and there has been only limited discussion on how the experience of austerity affects it. This empirical study of Portugal and Austria helps to shed light on that question.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an integrated analysis base to facilitate computational neuroscience experiments, following a user-led approach to provide access to the integrated neuroscience data and to enable the analyses demanded by the biomedical research community.

The design and development of the N4U analysis base and related information services addresses the existing research and practical challenges by offering an integrated medical data analysis environment with the necessary building blocks for neuroscientists to optimally exploit neuroscience workflows, large image data sets and algorithms to conduct analyses.

The provision of an integrated e-science environment of computational neuroimaging can enhance the prospects, speed and utility of the data analysis process for neurodegenerative diseases.

The N4U analysis base enables conducting biomedical data analyses by indexing and interlinking the neuroimaging and clinical study data sets stored on the grid infrastructure, algorithms and scientific workflow definitions along with their associated provenance information.

Virtually every literature reviewed asserted that value management (VM) originated from the United States of America (USA). The practice has been into practice during and after World War II. There have been several implementations of VM practice in the US construction industry, and there have been manifestations in other sectors. This is just pointing the direction to how established the VM practice is rampant in this construction industry before spreading across to other countries. The introduction part of the research points to value involving planning, execution, controlling and management for the benefit of the client and concerned professionals. With the history of VM founded in the United States, the originator drafted initial procedures and stages concerned with the practice before being modified by various countries to suit their environmental needs. Early challenges were also recorded in the research, and conclusions were made on the work's general outlook.

In the past few years, HB-like protocols have gained much attention in the field of lightweight authentication protocols due to their efficient functioning and large potential applications in low-cost radio frequency identification tags, which are on the other side spreading so fast. However, most published HB protocols are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks such as GRS or OOV attacks. The purpose of this research is to investigate security issues pertaining to HB-like protocols with an aim of improving their security and efficiency.

In this paper, a new and secure variant of HB family protocols named HB-MP* is proposed and designed, using the techniques of random rotation. The security of the proposed protocol is proven using formal proofs. Also, a prototype of the protocol is implemented to check its applicability, test the security in implementation and to compare its performance with the most related protocol.

The HB-MP* protocol is found secure against passive and active adversaries and is implementable within the tight resource constraints of today’s EPC-type RFID tags. Accordingly, the HB-MP* protocol provides higher security than previous HB-like protocols without sacrificing performance.

This paper proposes a new HB variant called HB-MP* that tries to be immune against the pre-mentioned attacks and at the same time keeping the simple structure. It will use only lightweight operations to randomize the rotation of the secret.

Pier scour is one of the main causes of damage to the columns of the river bridges. It is essential to select the best method among various repair methods based on different evaluation indices. However, there is no procedure for ranking these repair methods based on their attributes. The present study seeks to set an approach for this ranking.

In this paper, a multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) model is presented for ranking the repair techniques, in which alternatives are examined using the most important evaluation criteria. In addition, a combination of entropy and eigenvector methods has been proposed for weighting these attributes. A case study is then used to demonstrate the applicability and the validity of the method.

The execution of the model using two multi-criteria methods yielded similar results, which confirms its accuracy and precision. Moreover, the research findings showed the consistency of the objective and subjective weighting methods and the conformity of the weights obtained for the attributes from the combination of these methods to the nature of the problem.

The selection of the proper method for repairing the bridge columns plays an essential role in success of the bridge restoration. The proposed model introduces an approach for ranking repair methods and selecting the best one that has not been presented so far. Also, the weighing method for attributes is an innovative method for ranking restoration methods that has been proven in a case study.

Simulation-based optimization is a decision-making tool for identifying an optimal design of a system. Here, optimal design means a smart system with sensing, computing and control capabilities with improved efficiency. As compared to testing the physical prototype, computer-based simulation provides much cheaper, faster and lesser time-and resource-consuming solutions. In this work, a comparative analysis of heuristic simulation optimization methods (genetic algorithms, evolutionary strategies, simulated annealing, tabu search and simplex search) is performed.

In this work, a comparative analysis of heuristic simulation optimization methods (genertic algorithms, evolutionary strategies, simulated annealing, tabu search and simplex search) is performed. Further, a novel simulation annealing-based heuristic approach is proposed for critical infrastructure.

A small scale network of 50–100 nodes shows that genetic simulation optimization with multi-criteria and multi-dimensional features performs better as compared to other simulation optimization approaches. Further, a minimum of 3.4 percent and maximum of 16.2 percent improvement is observed in faster route identification for small scale Internet-of-things (IoT) networks with simulation optimization constraints integrated model as compared to the traditional method.

In this work, simulation optimization techniques are applied for identifying optimized Quality of service (QoS) parameters for critical infrastructure which in turn helps in improving the network performance. In order to identify optimized parameters, Tabu search and ant-inspired heuristic optimization techniques are applied over QoS parameters. These optimized values are compared with every monitoring sensor point in the network. This comparative analysis helps in identifying underperforming and outperforming monitoring points. Further, QoS of these points can be improved by identifying their local optimum values which in turn increases the performance of overall network. In continuation, a simulation model of bus transport is taken for analysis. Bus transport system is a critical infrastructure for Dehradun. In this work, feasibility of electric recharging units alongside roads under different traffic conditions is checked using simulation. The simulation study is performed over five bus routes in a small scale IoT network.

Converting knowledge or competency into long‐term business value is, in practice, a far more difficult process than in theory. While developing and implementing knowledge or competence management solutions, companies experience difficulties in measuring the contribution of their intangibles to business results and, what is more critical, companies fail in their efforts to reproduce the conditions and the processes that have unlocked the value creation potential of their intangibles. Building and maintaining large skills inventories, designing complex intranets, keeping large terabytes of knowledge or implementing performing document‐management systems and other technology solutions, do not necessarily lead to an improved cash flow stream. It simply brings inefficiency and leads to limited value creation as most of these solutions fail to identify the value‐creation patterns or prove the link with organizational performance. What value‐contributions bring these terabytes of information to the production process, or to the sales process or to a cash flow stream? This paper seeks to address this issue.

The paper uses a case study to describe an approach and a methodology to identify and record the value flows (value‐adding sequences) among knowledge, competencies, partnerships and operational systems and processes, and to measure their contributions to the overall corporate value creation process.

The case study findings demonstrate that the use of the described methodology increased the knowledge base, reducing software implementation cycle time and increasing competitive advantage. Building a strong knowledge base has freed up 20 percent of consultant time and reduced the competence development time for new employees.

The paper presents and demonstrates a methodology that can help organization build and exploit knowledge bases more quickly.