Clouding Agents Research Articles

Dynamic Service Provisioning and Selection for Satisfying Cloud Applications and Cloud Providers in Hybrid Cloud

The paper presents a hybrid cloud service provisioning and selection optimization scheme, and proposes a hybrid cloud model which consists of hybrid cloud users, private cloud and public cloud. This scheme aims to effectively provide cloud service and allocate cloud resources, such that the system utility can be maximized subject to public cloud resource constraints and hybrid cloud users constraints. The paper makes use of a utility-driven approach to solve interaction among private cloud user, hybrid cloud service provider and public cloud provider in hybrid cloud environment. The paper presents hybrid cloud service provisioning and selection algorithm in hybrid cloud. The hybrid cloud market consists of hybrid cloud user agent, hybrid cloud service agent and hybrid cloud agent, which represent the interests of different roles. The experiments are designed to compare the performance of proposed algorithm with the other related work.

Evidence of high di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) exposure due to tainted food intake in Taiwanese pregnant women and the health effects on birth outcomes

The contamination of a clouding agent with di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), a substitute emulsifier-containing compound used in a variety of foods was announced on May 23, 2011. The aims of this study were as follows (1) compare the urine phthalates (PAE) metabolites concentration and estimate the daily intake (DI) of PAEs in pregnant women before and after the tainted food scandal and (2) examine the effect of relatively high PAEs exposure on birth outcome.One-hundred twelve pregnant women in Northern Taiwan participated in this study from March to December 2010, i.e., before the tainted food scandal. After the tainted food scandal, we collected 69, 73, and 180 urine specimens (January 2013 to August 2014) from women whom were in their first, second, and third trimesters of pregnancy, respectively. We measure urinary DEHP metabolite concentrations to estimate the DI of DEHP and the hazard quotient (HQ) of subjects. This was the first study to assess the effects of DEHP-tainted food scandal exposure in pregnant women across the three trimesters of pregnancy.After the tainted food report, the concentrations of urine PAE metabolite were significantly decreased, especially those of DEHP metabolites. Based on different reference limit values, the percentages of pregnant women whose HQDEHP value exceeded the limit ranged from 0.53% to 8.93%. Despite this low frequency, the higher ΣPAE exposure during the second trimester may significantly increase the risk of relatively low birth height compared to the lower exposure group (β=−0.63 (−1.20 to −0.06)).Our results support the hypothesis that exposure to relatively high concentrations of DEHP in pregnant Taiwanese women may have an adverse effect on birth outcomes. The percentage of subjects whose exposure level exceeded the exposure limit was low; however, high PAEs exposure appears to be significantly associated with birth outcomes. Therefore, we suggest that reference dose for PAEs should be revised.

CPPM: A Logical Architecture for the Cyber-Physical Production Model

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are not a fad anymore, they are changing the way industries and companies plan and model their businesses in a distributed, dynamic, service-oriented way using virtualized resources that are scalable and accessed over the Internet. This change raises new challenges and opportunities for companies. In the last decade the industrial automation field has been introducing important technologies that are changing and integrating the Internet and other emerging technologies, concepts, methods and tools, such as cloud computing, agents and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). These new approaches are resulting in the convergence of the physical world and the virtual world (cyberspace) in the direction of Industry 4.0. Industries are being forced to change and manage their IT and automation services through IT-enabled services to use new paradigms, and huge efforts of R & D are being made in this field. It is clear that in order to change the automation state many possibilities and paradigms are on the table. This work introduces a logical architecture for a cyber-physical production model, intending to help organizations adopting cyber- physical based services.

Distributed QoS-aware scheduling optimization for resource-intensive mobile application in hybrid cloud

In the paper, the distributed scheduling optimization model for resource-intensive mobile application is proposed. Lagrangian method is applied to achieve distributed scheduling optimization in hybrid cloud. By decomposing the Kuhn–Tucker conditions into different roles of mobile user, public cloud supplier and local cloud supplier, the scheduling optimization problem in hybrid cloud is converted into a distributed problem. The system design and example of distributed scheduling optimization for resource intensive mobile application is also given. The local or public cloud provider uses service-level agreement (SLA) in determining the share of resources to be allocated to the mobile user. The distributed scheduling optimization algorithm for resource intensive mobile application is proposed, which includes three parts: local cloud agent scheduling optimization, public cloud service scheduling and mobile application QoS optimization. The experiments study how data size, request arrival rate, number of mobile users and mobility have effect on the proposed algorithm and other related works.

Methods for virtual machine scheduling with uncertain execution times in cloud computing

Execution times are crucial for effectiveness of tasks or jobs scheduling. It is very hard to accurately estimate execution times because they are influenced by many factors. Though there are some models for traditional machine scheduling problems, no attention has been paid on virtual machine scheduling in cloud computing. Based on cloud agent (VM administrator, scheduler or intelligent procedure) experiences, we develop integrated learning effects models to obtain accurate execution times. Based on the constructed learning effects model for single virtual machine scheduling, optimal schedule rules are proposed for minimizing makespan, the total completion time and the sum of (square) completion times. Problems with the total weighted completion time and the maximum lateness minimization are proved to be optimally solvable in polynomial time only for certain assumptions. Furthermore, we adapt the developed learning effects model to two special m-virtual machine MapReduce scenarios, for which optimal schedule rules are introduced correspondingly. Optimal solutions are demonstrated by examples of the problems under study using the constructed rules.

Load-Balancing Based Cross-Layer Elastic Resource Allocation in Mobile Cloud

The paper proposes a hybrid mobile cloud computing system, in which mobile applications can use different resources or services in local cloud and remote public cloud such as computation, storage and bandwidth. The cross-layer load-balancing based mobile cloud resource allocation optimization is proposed. The proposed approach augments local cloud service pools with public cloud to increase the probability of meeting the service level agreements. Our problem is divided by public cloud service allocation and local cloud service allocation, which is achieved by public cloud supplier, local cloud agent and the mobile user. The system status information is used in the hybrid mobile cloud computing system such as the preferences of mobile applications, energy, server load in cloud datacenter to improve resource utilization and quality of experience of mobile user. Therefore, the system status of hybrid mobile cloud is monitored continuously. The mathematical model of the system and optimization problem is given. The system design of load-balancing based cross-layer mobile cloud resource allocation is also proposed. Through extensive experiments, this paper evaluates our algorithm and other approaches from the literature under different conditions. The results of the experiments show a performance improvement when compared to the approaches from the literature.

Disagreement Over the Long-Run: The Effects of Higher Order Expectations on the Equity Premium

I present a novel asset pricing model where agents have private signals about the long-run conditional mean growth rates of their consumption and dividend endowments. Agents use their private information in combination with publicly known observables to endogenously form model consistent expectations. In the absence of arbitrage, agents are left forecasting the beliefs of other agents, more commonly known to the literature as higher order expectations. The model generates a countercyclical price of risk for news about long-run growth. Agents' precision about the true mean growth rate improves during bad times, rendering prices more sensitive to new information. However, the price of risk quickly becomes small and insubstantial if the scale noise grows large, clouding agents' perception of the true conditional mean. Therefore the success of asset pricing models with long-run risks hinges on agents' heterogeneous beliefs about future growth sharing a tight distribution around the truth. The model also makes a new contribution to the consumption based literature in that it can match features of time-varying disagreement in real consumption growth forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. Heteroskedasticity in agents' endowments drives the cross-sectional dispersion of beliefs about future consumption growth.

Energy‐aware cross‐layer resource allocation in mobile cloud

SummaryThis paper proposed an energy‐aware cross‐layer mobile cloud resource allocation approach. In this paper, a hybrid cloud architecture is adopted for provisioning mobile service to mobile device users, which include nearby local cloud and remote public cloud. The computation‐intensive tasks can be processed by the remote public cloud, while the delay‐sensitive computation can be processed by the nearby local cloud. On the basis of the system context and mobile user preferences, the energy‐aware cross‐layer mobile cloud resource allocation approach can optimize the consumption of cloud resource and system performance. The cooperation and collaboration among local cloud agent, public cloud supplier, and mobile cloud user are regulated through the economic approach. The energy‐aware cross‐layer mobile cloud resource allocation is performed on the local cloud level and the public cloud level, which comprehensively considers the benefits of all participants. The energy‐aware cross‐layer mobile cloud resource allocation algorithm is proposed, which is evaluated in the experiment environment, and comparison results and analysis are discussed.

Research progress on cloud stability of orange juice

After squeezed, pulp particles, cell wall fragments, orange oil drops, hesperidin crystal, cytochrome and some amorphous material in orange were dispersed in water ununiformly. They contribute to the turbidity of citrus juices, which was known as “cloud”. Quality factors such as flavor, color, texture, and aroma are partly attributable to the cloud. If the cloud particles were too large, cloud will settle down, with the occurrence of loss cloud, leading to cloud loss. In this paper, the main components and characteristics of cloud in orange juice were summarized. The cloud was made of pectin, protein, cellulose, hesperidin, and so on. Simultaneously, the factors affecting the stability of cloud in orange juice were reviewed, including the effect of pectin methylesterase, orange 's varieties and maturity, p H, calcium, and clouding agents. Addition of pectin methylesterase inhibitor, or usage of non-thermal processing technologies, such as ultra-high pressure homogenization technique and ultrasonic treatment, could maintain cloud stability in processing or storage of orange juices.Studying the cloud's component interaction mechanism and the orange juices processing new technology unceasingly in a deep-going way could improve cloud stability of orange juices in processing and storage, making orange juices keep better conditions in its shelflife.

Concurrent Negotiation using Software Agents in Cloud

Concurrent Negotiation using Software Agents in Cloud

Effects of high di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) exposure due to tainted food intake on pre-pubertal growth characteristics in a Taiwanese population

On May 23, 2011, a major scandal involving the illegal use of phthalates as clouding agents in food products was reported. Specifically, di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) was purposefully added to foods as a substitute emulsifier. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of DEHP exposure on the growth characteristics of the child victims of this scandal. Eighty-eight victims, originating from northern, central, and southern Taiwan and ranging in age from 6.0 to 10.5 years, were invited to participate in this study during clinic visits. The participants underwent follow-up health examinations from August 2012 to February 2013. We collected information on each participant's history of exposure to tainted food products using a questionnaire, and we analyzed their urinary concentrations of DEHP metabolites using high-performance liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry. These data were then used to estimate their daily DEHP intake (DIAll) during the scandal. We also measured physical development parameters (height, weight, and bone age) and hormone levels (thyroid, sex and growth hormones) to evaluate their overall growth characteristics. The average (SD) duration of DEHP intake from tainted nutrition supplements was 1.39 (1.01) years. The median DIAll values were 19.93 and 20.69μg/kg bw/day for boys and girls, respectively. Among the enrolled children, the DIAll values of 46.9% of boys and 51.3% of girls exceeded the reference dose (RfD) of 20μg/kg bw/day established by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Our results demonstrate that DIAll is negatively associated with the height percentile, weight percentile, bone age/chronological age, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) levels but not with IGF binding protein 3 (IGF-BP3) level, IGF-1/IGF-BP3, sex hormones, or thyroid hormone levels. The DEHP DIAll value exceeded the RfD at high rates among children of both genders. Our results suggest that high levels of DEHP exposure due to the consumption of tainted food products are negatively associated with body weight, height, bone age, and IGF-1 levels in children. The likelihood of delayed puberty among the affected children is therefore a reasonable concern, and further follow-up is required.

Exposure Estimation for Risk Assessment of the Phthalate Incident in Taiwan.

BackgroundIn May 2011, di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalates (DEHP) and, to a lesser extent, di-iso-nonyl phthalate (DiNP) were found to have been illegally used for many years in Taiwan as clouding agents in foods including sports drinks, juice beverages, tea drinks, fruit jam/nectar/jelly, and health or nutrient supplements.ObjectiveTo estimate the DEHP exposure for the study participants for the follow-up epidemiological study and health risk assessment.MethodsA total of 347 individuals possibly highly exposed to phthalate-tainted foods participated in the study. Exposure assessment was performed based on the participants' responses to a structured questionnaire, self-report of exposure history, urinary metabolite concentrations, and DEHP concentration information in 2449 food records. A Bayesian statistical approach using Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation was employed to deal with the uncertainties in the DEHP concentrations of the contaminated foods and the participants' likelihood of being exposed.ResultsAn estimated 37% and 15% of children younger than 12 years old were exposed to DEHP at medium (20–50 μg / kg_bw / day) and high AvDIs (50–100 μg / kg_bw / day), respectively, prior to the episode (9% and 3% in adults, respectively). Moreover, 11% of children and 1% of adults were highly exposed (> 100 μg / kg_bw / day), with a maximum of 414.1 μg / kg_bw / day and 126.4 μg / kg_bw / day, respectively.ConclusionsThe phthalate exposure-associated adverse health effects for these participants warrant further investigation. The estimation procedure may be applied to other exposure assessment with various sources of uncertainties.

Agent-Based Interactions and Economic Encounters in an Intelligent InterCloud

An InterCloud is an interconnected global “cloud of clouds” that enables each cloud to tap into resources of other clouds. This is the earliest work to devise an agent-based InterCloud economic model for analyzing consumer-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud interactions. While economic encounters between consumers and cloud providers are modeled as a many-to-many negotiation, economic encounters among clouds are modeled as a coalition game. To bolster many-to-many consumer-to-cloud negotiations, this work devises a novel interaction protocol and a novel negotiation strategy that is characterized by both 1) adaptive concession rate ( ACR ) and 2) minimally sufficient concession ( MSC ). Mathematical proofs show that agents adopting the ACR - MSC strategy negotiate optimally because they make minimum amounts of concession. By automatically controlling concession rates, empirical results show that the ACR - MSC strategy is efficient because it achieves significantly higher utilities than the fixed-concession-rate time-dependent strategy. To facilitate the formation of InterCloud coalitions, this work devises a novel four-stage cloud-to-cloud interaction protocol and a set of novel strategies for InterCloud agents. Mathematical proofs show that these InterCloud coalition formation strategies 1) converge to a subgame perfect equilibrium and 2) result in every cloud agent in an InterCloud coalition receiving a payoff that is equal to its Shapley value .

Hybrid cloud service selection strategy: Model and application of campus

ABSTRACTThe paper proposes hybrid cloud service selection optimization scheme. Hybrid cloud service selection optimization is distributed to and performed at two levels: hybrid cloud user agent‐ hybrid cloud service agent at hybrid cloud service layer and hybrid cloud service agent‐ hybrid cloud agent at hybrid cloud resource layer. Interactions among hybrid cloud user agent, hybrid cloud service agent, public cloud agents and private cloud agents are mediated by means of market mechanisms. Two level hybrid cloud service selection optimization maximizes the interests of hybrid cloud user agents, hybrid cloud service agent, public cloud agents and private cloud agents. Hybrid cloud service selection process includes two parts: hybrid cloud service provisioning and cloud resource allocation. The paper presents a two‐level hybrid cloud service selection algorithm used to perform service provisioning and resource allocation. In the simulations, compared with other related algorithm, our proposed hybrid cloud service selection algorithms achieve the better performance with acceptable overhead. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput. Appl. Eng. Educ. Comput Appl Eng Educ 23:645–657, 2015; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.21634

The functional and nutritional aspects of hydrocolloids in foods

Hydrocolloids are among the most commonly used ingredients in the food industry. They function as thickeners, gelling agents, emulsifiers, stabilizers, fat replacers, clarifying agents, flocculating agents, clouding agents and whipping agents; additionally, they have applications in the areas of edible films, encapsulating flavors and crystallization inhibition. Besides, hydrocolloids are currently being found to have many increasing applications in the health realm: they provide low-calorie dietary fiber, among many other uses. This review focuses on the trends and progress in the exploration of hydrocolloids to fit the demands for different food products, gives an encyclopedic description of their applications in the food industry as ingredients, food additives and health promoters. Since the use of hydrocolloids is on the rise in many fields, this review that covers both functionality and nutrition of hydrocolloids in foods is both timely and of great interest.

Double‐layered emulsions as beverage clouding agents

ABSTRACTThere is a constant interest in finding alternatives to gum arabic in flavour and beverage industries. The ability to prepare beverage‐cloud emulsions using a layer‐by‐layer deposition technique was developed with extremely low usage levels of proteins and polysaccharides. Sodium caseinate (S) and β‐lactoglobulin (L) were selected to stabilize the primary emulsions. Polysaccharides of sodium alginate (A), ι‐carrageenan (C), gum arabic (G) and pectin (P) were evaluated as secondary layers. Polysaccharide concentration was optimized based on droplet size and ζ‐potential. The performance of double‐layered emulsions in beverage‐cloud applications was evaluated. Polysaccharide concentration and pH were found critical to the formation of stable multilayered emulsions. Protein and polysaccharide type also impacted droplet size and ζ‐potential of multilayered emulsions. β‐Lactoglobulin was found to be better than sodium caseinate in forming protein–polysaccharide interfacial complexes, as demonstrated by smaller mean droplet diameters (MDD) of L–A, L–P and L–C than those of S–A, S–P and S–C. It was also found that the polysaccharide concentration has to be above a critical value (0.2–0.5 wt% depending on the type of polysaccharides) to prevent multilayered emulsions from bridging flocculation. Data showed that double‐layered emulsions of L–A, L–C and L–G formed by electrostatic deposition could provide the same performance as traditional emulsifiers of gum arabic (G) and modified starch (M). After four weeks of storage at room temperature, beverage clouds stabilized with G, M, L–A, L–C and L–G showed MDDs of 0.68, 0.67, 0.90, 0.82 and 0.65 µm, respectively, and turbidity losses of 18, 28, 22, 19 and 25%, respectively. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Exposure Reconstruction for the Complainants of the Plasticizer Food Scandal Who Were Possibly Highly Exposed to Phthalates in Taiwan

Phthalates (DEHP), a chemical as plastic softener, was accidentally found to have been illegally used as clouding agent in numerous food products for more than a decade in May, 2011 in Taiwan. The contaminated foods include five major categories: sports drinks, fruit juice, tea drinks, fruit jam/nectar/jelly, and health or nutrient supplements in tablet/capsule/powder form. Following the incident, a total of 353 individuals who were probably highly exposed to the contaminated foods were recruited for further examinations of possible adverse health effects. A structured exposure assessment questionnaire was designed to assess the extent of exposure and average daily intake (ADD) of phthalates was calculated by the summation of the DEHP concentration in contaminated food multiplied by the amount of intake, frequency, and period of each of the five food categories. Uncertainty in the concentration of the contaminated food product was estimated by the probability of mixture distribution of the overall concentrations of the food category using Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations. The exposure reconstruction results show that 31% and 14% of the children under age 12 and 10% and 7% of the adults were exposed to DEHP of medium ADD (20-50 ) and high ADD, respectively, prior to the outbreak of the phthalate scandal.

CernVM Online and Cloud Gateway: a uniform interface for CernVM contextualization and deployment

In a virtualized environment, contextualization is the process of configuring a VM instance for the needs of various deployment use cases. Contextualization in CernVM can be done by passing a handwritten context to the user data field of cloud APIs, when running CernVM on the cloud, or by using CernVM web interface when running the VM locally. CernVM Online is a publicly accessible web interface that unifies these two procedures. A user is able to define, store and share CernVM contexts using CernVM Online and then apply them either in a cloud by using CernVM Cloud Gateway or on a local VM with the single-step pairing mechanism. CernVM Cloud Gateway is a distributed system that provides a single interface to use multiple and different clouds (by location or type, private or public). Cloud gateway has been so far integrated with OpenNebula, CloudStack and EC2 tools interfaces. A user, with access to a number of clouds, can run CernVM cloud agents that will communicate with these clouds using their interfaces, and then use one single interface to deploy and scale CernVM clusters. CernVM clusters are defined in CernVM Online and consist of a set of CernVM instances that are contextualized and can communicate with each other.

A review on the response and management of the plasticizer-tainted food incident in Taiwan

While conducting an inspection project on counterfeit drugs in 2011, the Taiwan Food and Drug Administration (FDA) discovered a probiotic product that was contaminated with the plasticizer di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP). After a thorough investigation, it was confirmed that the plasticizer had been deliberately added to the clouding agent as a substitute for an emulsifier. The illegal use of DEHP contaminated a broad range of foods and nutraceutical products. Subsequent investigation revealed that another plasticizer, di-isononyl phthalate (DINP), was also used. Some contaminated food and beverages had already been exported abroad. This caused panic in the public in Taiwan and drew international attention. The government thus initiated emergency response actions for this food safety incident. Actions were undertaken to perform food source control, to strengthen monitoring and surveillance of the production and marketing chain, to adopt a proactive approach in communicating with the public, and to trade in a highly transparent manner. The Act Governing Food Sanitation was also revised to impose harsher penalties on unscrupulous companies and thereby ensure food safety with more consolidated and stricter regulation. The effort has regained the consumer confidence in Taiwanese products.

Taiwan food scandal: The illegal use of phthalates as a clouding agent and their contribution to maternal exposure

In 2011 the Taiwan Food and Drug Administration reported that plasticizers di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) and di-iso-nonyl phthalate (DiNP), endocrine disruptors, were illegally added to clouding agents used in foods and beverages. 965 products were found contaminated, of which 206 were exported to 22 countries. This study's purpose was to obtain English names for 28 contaminated products for which DEHP levels were reported, calculate estimated average daily intake (mg/kg/day) for a 50 kg woman consuming one portion, and compare to U.S. and E.U. guidelines for daily intake. We found that drinking just one bottle (500 ml) of sports drinks would result in an average DEHP intake of 0.14 mg/kg bw/day (range 0.091-0.341), which exceeds by several fold government guidelines (0.02-0.06 mg/kg bw/day). One (2 g) serving from 4/14 samples of contaminated dietary supplements exceeds the guideline of 0.02 mg/kg bw/day. In conclusion, consuming even one portion of tainted drinks and some powders would lead to daily intake of DEHP that greatly exceeds established safety guidelines, raising concerns about potential adverse effects, particularly reproductive tract development in the male fetus. Global distribution of DEHP-contaminated and other adulterated products should prompt governments to become proactive in food safety regulations and chemical testing.