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The manufacturing paradigm is shifting from being a central system to a distributed system and is increasingly becoming dependent on wide area networks for the management of information services. The information subsystem employed in a manufacturing setting is susceptible to getting congested when used in a wide area network setting during peak hours. The issue of information and control subsystem integration and the characterization of network congestion have been researched in this paper using faded information field architecture.

A wide area network was simulated with all its associated components like routers, switches, gateways, etc. by programming a simulation engine. The simulation engine mimicked a wide area network employed in a manufacturing enterprise.

The architecture holds the promise to address the integration and congestion issues in a manufacturing system by employing autonomous decentralized and autonomous information fading techniques. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique in addressing the issue of network congestion in a distributed wide area network.

The issue of information and control subsystems of a manufacturing system has been reported earlier. However, the network‐centric problems like congestion during peak hours of operation have not been addressed in these emerging paradigms. The research reported in this paper focuses on the congestion issue and could be useful to wide area networked manufacturing system designers and managers.

Mobile data traffic globally is increasing rapidly in both enterprise and consumer segments. The purpose of this paper is to identify a new network architecture and opportunity that support ubiquitous mobile work for higher-education institutions.

It reviews existing literature and enabling technologies and proposes integrating both wide-area Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-Advanced) and local-area IEEE 802.11ac networks for seamless, gigabit-speed services. A decision framework for moving toward such architecture and a cost/benefit analysis are also presented.

Integrating both LTE-Advanced and IEEE 802.11ac networks for seamless connectivity is technically and organizationally feasible, provided that a higher-education institution has faculty and staff that require locational and interactional mobility. The cost/benefit analysis also shows that moving to the new architecture has potential benefits that can accrue to the higher-education institution.

With the coming availability of these wide-area and local-area gigabit networks, a new architecture that can ubiquitously supports mobile workers may be advantageous to universities and colleges.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first that proposes such integrated architecture in the context of higher-education institutions. In addition to the examination of technological issues and proposed architecture, the decision framework, and cost/benefit analysis should be valuable for institutions contemplating the move toward the new architecture and for guiding further research in this area.

Describes a project currently under way in the Pittsburgh Public Schools seeking to develop new environments for teaching and learning using the technology of wide area computer networks. The history of this project offers lessons for other school districts which might wish to develop similar resources for their own use. Extracts a set of guidelines that can be followed by these other school districts.

The banking and thrift industries are experiencing a technological metamorphosis. New technologies such as advanced computer operating systems, wide and local area networks (WAN, LAN), and the Internet, are becoming significant strategic areas for financial institutions. The impact, composition, and trends of information technology on the banking and thrift institutions within a seven‐state region of the southeastern United States are examined. Bank characteristics such as asset size, number of employees, number of full service locations, areas of lending, and return on assets are evaluated in relation to the status, scope, and experience with computer network systems. Research indicates that a number of bank composition and operations variables behaved statistically independent between size variables (assets, number of employees, and number of branches) and WAN access. The survey data also indicate that return on assets and network system variables are independent. Therefore, networks systems have not had a direct impact on the bottom line.

The purpose of this paper is to characterise a number of current and future computing environments and summarises their resource discovery requirements. It then seeks to analyse, with respect to the requirements of each environment, several established service discovery protocols and some newer protocols that are still in the research domain. In addition, the key features of a new resource discovery protocol that has been developed to operate with heterogeneous computing environments are described.

A comprehensive literature survey was undertaken, highlighting the shortcomings of existing resource discovery protocols with respect to large pervasive computing environments. Given the identified gaps in existing protocols, an alternative protocol is suggested.

The main findings of this paper relate to the identified shortcomings of existing resource discovery protocols. It was also found that a hybrid resource discovery protocol capable of spanning dynamic, mobile computing environments and more stable ones was able to overcome many of the challenges presented by large‐scale pervasive computing environments.

This paper presents comprehensive literature survey of the state‐of‐the‐art in resource discovery protocols, pointing out some of the problems that are not solved. The paper describes the design of an alternative protocol, and presents an evaluation of it. The pervasive computing research community can draw upon the survey and evaluation to guide the design of future resource discovery protocols for the increasingly dynamic world in which we live.

The basic technical components of ‘information networking’ have been in place since the mid‐1970s, when the first generation online bibliographic services such as the INSPEC databases and MEDLINE, implemented on dial‐up hosts like Dialog and ESA changed the ways in which librarians approached bibliographic searching — at least in the better funded organizations. The peak of diversification and growth of the online bibliographic database probably came around 1988 when Williams reviewed the near‐exponential growth of new services and the extraordinary diversity of the sources which appeared to be viable. At about the same time, however, it was being pointed out that despite the excitement this was generating in libraries, it amounted to less than 15% of the European market in electronic information services, with data‐oriented financial services dominating the remainder. The share of the host‐based financial data services has probably subsequently grown — at the time of writing in August 1993, Reuters (a market leader in financial data services) was reported as having difficulty in disposing of its trading profits.

Leicester Polytechnic Library uses two types of local area network (LAN). The library is connected to the polytechnic campus Cambridge Ring network which allows data communications within the library, throughout the polytechnic sites and with the wide area network. The library provides various services including an OPAC on this polytechnic network. A second LAN, a 3COM Ethernet, is used for a research project investigating the development of a decision support system on networked microcomputers. This article gives the background to these developments, provides a brief summary of local area networking and describes the network configurations implemented.

The extensive increase in power demand has challenged the ability of power systems to deal with small-signal oscillations such as inter-area oscillations, which occur under unseen operating conditions. A wide-area measurement system with a phasor measurement unit (PMU) in the power network enhances the observability of the power grid under a wide range of operating conditions. This paper aims to propose a wide-area power system stabilizer (WAPSS) based on Gaussian quantum particle swarm optimization (GQPSO) using the wide-area signals from a PMU to handle the inter-area oscillations in the system with a higher degree of controllability.

In the design of the wide-area stabilizer, a dead band is introduced to mitigate the influence of ambient signal frequency fluctuations. The location and the input signal of the wide-area stabilizer are selected using the participation factor and controllability index calculations. An improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique, namely, GQPSO, is used to optimize the variables of the WAPSS to move the unstable inter-area modes to a stable region in the s-plane, thereby improving the overall system stability.

The proposed GQPSO-based WAPSS is compared with the PSO-based WAPSS, genetic algorithm-based WAPSS and power system stabilizer. Eigenvalue analysis, time-domain simulation responses and performance index analysis are used to assess performance. The various evaluation techniques show that GQPSO WAPSS has a consistently good performance, with a higher damping ratio, faster convergence with fewer oscillations and a minimum error in the performance index analysis, indicating a more stable system with effective oscillation damping.

This paper proposes an optimally tuned design for the WAPSS with a wide-area input along with a dead-band structure for damping the inter-area oscillations. Tie line power is used as the input to the WAPSS and optimal tuning of the WAPSS is performed using an improved PSO algorithm, known as Gaussian quantum PSO.