Concrete Services Research Articles

Service innovation capabilities: what are they?

As innovation is of crucial importance in services, service-intensive organisations should pay attention to the management of their new service development capabilities. Still, academics have so far been focusing on predominantly conceptual discussions regarding the core definition of organisational capability, rather than on investigating what concretely constitutes specific capabilities, let alone in the service innovation context. Therefore, based on a literature review, as well as 34 exploratory interviews in several service-intensive highly innovative organisations, we have created a mapping of concrete service innovation capabilities and related practices, approached from a strategy, resource and process perspective. Our goal is to allow for a better understanding and management of service innovation capabilities, combining both theoretical and practical perspectives.

Study on Loading Method of Multi-Factor Durability Test about Concrete in the Atmospheric Environment

Damage and degradation of the concrete structure is based on the combination of the mechanical and environmental factors (double or multiple), so the durability of the concrete structure is a very complicated research subject. The key of the multi-factor durability test of concrete under load is how to choose the loading device. In this paper, the adopted loading device which is suitable for the multi-factor durability test of concrete in the atmosphere environment is determined by analyzing the force principle of different loading systems and comparing the advantages and disadvantages of various loading methods. So far, inland and aboard, the valuation about durability of concrete structure and service life, and also the improving measures are basically based on the research about single environment factor. While it is not conform to reality that the actual engineering bears the damage of multiple factors, mechanics, environmental change and the interaction among them. In fact, concrete structure is not only a structure that operates under different environment factors mixed, also a supporting load structure. Therefore, it is more realistically to reflect the damage of engineering structures suffered by carrying out the study about the loads of concrete multi-factor durability. The using dosage of concrete in engineering construction in our country is ranking in the world, most of the concrete structures including bridges, dams and other important projects are directly exposed to the atmosphere environment, corroded by CO2 and acid rain. Besides, the load always exists during the using process in actual structures, it is lacking of sufficient data to prove whether the structure stress state aggravate the degradation process of materials under the environment. So it is necessary to study the durability of concrete structure under loading in general atmospheric environment. The appropriate loading devices must be had for doing the test of loading concrete which carbonized or eroded by acid-rain. Firstly, the load applied should be the most common form in the structures. The researchers used to selecting bending load, because structure bending component can apply tensile stress to one side of concrete samples and apply compression stress to another side. Secondly, due to the limited volume of test boxes such as the carbonization tank, a loading device which have small volume and can not be affected by temperature changes and corrosive solution should be selected to assure the quantity and quality of the experiments. Besides, loading devices must have enough load precision, and considering the concrete samples are ponderous, so loading devices shall be as simple as possible to use.

Ranking-aware integration and explorative search of distributed bio-data

Motivation and Objectives High-throughput production of both biomolecular data and their annotations is providing a rapidly increasing amount of very valuable information that can potentially help finding also long-searched answers to fundamental biomedical questions. Yet, such data deluge makes difficult to extract the information most reliable and most related to the increasingly complex biomedical questions to be answered, which can simultaneously regard many heterogeneous aspects of single or multiple organisms, biological tissues, cells or biomolecular entities. To address such complex questions, many bio-data about several heterogeneous topics, which are available but dispersed in different data sources, must be searched, extracted, integrated and comprehensively queried. Different approaches have been proposed to combine individual search services available on the Web in order to support such heterogeneous searches (Hull et al., 2006; Nekrutenko, 2010). Yet, they rarely rely on a general model of the services to be integrated and none considers, in the integration process, the often available partial rankings of the data to be integrated. Lately, Search Computing (Ceri et al., 2010) has been proposed as a new software framework to build answers to complex search queries by interacting with a collection of cooperating search services and using ranking and joining of results as the dominant factors for service composition. By leveraging the peculiar features of search services, it offers query approaches, execution plans, plan optimization techniques, query configuration tools, and exploratory user interfaces. Here, we report and discuss our work aimed at supporting the explorative search of heterogeneous distributed bio-data and the automatic integration and global ranking of their individual search results, also taking into account the partial rankings of individual searches. In so doing, we make a step towards the computational support required for complex biomedical question answering and biomedical knowledge discovery. Methods According to the Service Mart modeling approach of Search Computing (Ceri et al., 2010), we selected an initial set of typical biomolecular topics (i.e. Protein, Gene, Gene Expression and Biological Function) and modeled the Service Marts (i.e. the generalized and normalized conceptual description) of the bioinformatics services that provide data regarding such topics. We did so by identifying their main and common attributes and normalizing their names. We also defined the semantic Connection Patterns, i.e. the pair-wise coupling, between Service Marts of services that provide data about different topics. This was done by identifying pairs of normalized attributes of the connected Service Marts and defining their comparison predicates, as conjunctive Boolean expressions, that allow joining their values semantically. In so doing, we defined the Semantic Resource Framework (SRF) depicted in Figure 1, which constitutes the reference used by Search Computing to enable the exploration of the services registered in the framework and integrate the data that they provide (Ceri et al., 2010). Then, using available Search Computing tools, we registered in the Search Computing framework five bioinformatics search services that provide data about the topics and semantic associations described in the biomolecular

Analysis of Fatigue and Cumulative Damage Characteristics for Concrete in Freezing-Thawing Environment

Through analyzing the characteristic of concrete freezing-thawing cumulative damage, concrete freezing-thawing damage can be with fatigue problems with similar methods to analysis. Coagulation Earth material property discrete and cause damage in a given amount of state natural freeze-thaw cycle times is a random variable, analysis found that it is better to obey three-parameter Weibull distribution. Based on three parameters Weibull distribution model, the test data in had established, on the basis of freezing-thawing environment concrete damage and freeze-thaw cycles of the probability of the relation curve, and regression to obtain different guarantee rate of freezing-thawing damage cumulative model for freezing-thawing environment,which could be provides reference for concrete service life prediction and health diagnosis.

A software-assisted comparative assessment of the effect of cement type on concrete carbonation and chloride ingress

Utilization of supplementary cementing materials (SCM) by the cement industry, as a highly promising solution of sustainable cement development aiming to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, necessitates a more thorough evaluation of these types of materials on concrete durability. In this study a comparative assessment of the effect of SCM on concrete durability, of every cement type as defined in the European Standard EN 197-1 is taking place, using a software tool, based on proven predictive models (according to performance-related methods for assessing durability) developed and wide-validated for the estimation of concrete service life when designing for durability under harsh environments. The effect of Type II additives (fly ash, silica fume) on CEM I type of cement, as well as the effect of every Portland-composite type of cement (and others) are evaluated in terms of their performance in carbonation and chloride exposure, for a service life of 50 years. The main aim is to portray a unified and comprehensive evaluation of the efficiency of SCM in order to create the basis for future consideration of more types of cement to enter the production line in industry.

Research on Generating Mechanism and Treatment Measures of Concrete Bubbles

Concrete bubble is a common phenomenon in the concrete construction process. Generation and existence of concrete air bubble not only influence the concrete appearance, but also affects concrete service life. Especially for concrete surface with high requirements just as water diversion tunnel, concrete bubble gradually raises concern of engineering construction parties. Engineering technical personnel take a number of measures to eliminate concrete surface bubble in project practice. Based on analysis of many bubble elimination methods, generating mechanism and treatment measures of concrete bubble are discussed, providing reference for eliminating concrete bubbles.

Towards Automatic Composition of Web Services: SAT-Based Concretisation of Abstract Scenarios

Automating the composition of web services is an object of a growing interest. In our paper [13] we proposed a method for converting the problem of the composition to the problem of building a graph of worlds consisting of formally defined objects, and presented the first phase of this composition aimed at building a graph of types of services an abstract graph. In this work we propose a method of replacing abstract flows of this graph by sequences of concrete services able to satisfy the user's request. The method is based on SAT-based reachability checking for timed automata with discrete data and parametric assignments.

Converging on Empathy: Perspectives on Baltimore City's Specialized Prostitution Diversion Program

This article explores perceptions of 17 women currently or formerly engaged in prostitution regarding Baltimore City's Specialized Prostitution Diversion program. Findings indicate that most perceive the program positively because they are in desperate need of services and because they hope it augurs the readiness of the criminal justice system to understand what leads them to engage in prostitution. Their desire to be treated like “human beings” in need of assistance, which undergirds requests for concrete services, reveals gendered understandings of responsibility and dependence that are compatible with problem-solving models of justice. It is therefore likely to resonate with criminal justice stakeholders.

E³: A Multiobjective Optimization Framework for SLA-Aware Service Composition

In Service-Oriented Architecture, each application is often designed as a set of abstract services, which defines its functions. A concrete service(s) is selected at runtime for each abstract service to fulfill its function. Since different concrete services may operate at different quality of service (QoS) measures, application developers are required to select an appropriate set of concrete services that satisfies a given Service-Level Agreement (SLA) when a number of concrete services are available for each abstract service. This problem, the QoS-aware service composition problem, is known NP-hard, which takes a significant amount of time and costs to find optimal solutions (optimal combinations of concrete services) from a huge number of possible solutions. This paper proposes an optimization framework, called E^3, to address the issue. By leveraging a multiobjective genetic algorithm, E^3 heuristically solves the QoS-aware service composition problem in a reasonably short time. The algorithm E^3 proposes can consider multiple SLAs simultaneously and produce a set of Pareto solutions, which have the equivalent quality to satisfy multiple SLAs.

Effective Service Composition in Large Scale Service Market

The web has undergone a tremendous shift from information repository to the provisioning capacity of services. As an effective means of constructing coarse-grained solutions by dynamically aggregating a set of services to satisfy complex requirements, traditional service composition suffers from dramatic decrease on the efficiency of determining the optimal solution when large scale services are available in the Internet based service market. Most current approaches look for the optimal composition solution by real-time computation, and the composition efficiency greatly depends on the adopted algorithms. To eliminate such deficiency, this paper proposes a semi-empirical composition approach which incorporates the extraction of empirical evidence from historical experiences to provide guidance to solution space reduction to real-time service selection. Service communities and historical requirements are further organized into clusters based on similarity measurement, and then the probabilistic correspondences between the two types of clusters are identified by statistical analysis. For each new request, its hosting requirement cluster would be identified and corresponding service clusters would be determined by leveraging Bayesian inference. Concrete services would be selected from the reduced solution space to constitute the final composition. Timing strategies for re-clustering and consideration to special cases in clustering ensures continual adaption of the approach to changing environment. Instead of relying solely on pure real-time computation, the approach distinguishes from traditional methods by combining the two perspectives together.

Social Workers' Role in Combating the New Epidemic of Type 2 Diabetes in Children: Clinical Interventions at the Hall Family Center for Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes

A variety of modalities can be employed by social work within the hospital setting to combat the phenomenon of obesity and the type 2 diabetes that it triggers in children. These issues are now plaguing our pediatric population. Social workers can provide meaningful interventions to foster needed lifestyle changes. These may include a combination of individual, family, group, and outreach medical education modalities, as well as provision of concrete services such as food stamps. Social workers are uniquely qualified to evaluate and address the underlying psychosocial stressors that may be obstacles to a child's successful adherence to recommended medical protocol. In the urban clinical setting of the Hall Family Center at Mount Sinai, offering a “menu” of flexible options has helped to engage families and motivate patients to adopt new healthy habits.

Ambiguous citizenship: ‘Postmodern’ versus ‘modern’ welfare at the margins

This article discusses the classic welfare state problem of balancing universal values with an attention to particular individuals and needs. Welfare for marginalized citizens is addressed as a particular urgent case in point. The article first considers Baumann as emblematic for a postmodern position on welfare. In contrast, Luhmann's systems theory is then presented to form a program of observation of concrete welfare services, using the ‘rigour’ of the latter to bound the ‘liquidity’ of the first. Instead of suspecting modern institutions tout cout, the article analyses in detail the discursive ordering practices of welfare services for marginalized citizens, i.e. the homeless. On this basis, it contrasts what we term a ‘modern’ versus a ‘postmodern’ perspective upon organized welfare. Some limits to a postmodern position are indicated, in particular with respect to the ideal of including ‘the whole person’ in modern welfare arrangements.

Blast-resistant characteristics of ultra-high strength concrete and reactive powder concrete

Recent advances in nanotechnology research have been applied to improve the durability, serviceability, and safety of ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC). Furthermore, improvements in the compressive strength of concrete have allowed concrete structural member size and self-weight to be significantly reduced, which has in turn resulted in cost reduction and structural aesthetic enhancement. Among many UHPCs currently available on the market, the most representative ones are ultra-high strength concrete (UHSC) and reactive powder concrete (RPC). Even though UHSC and RPC have compressive strengths of over 100 MPa, their safety has been questioned due to possible ultra-brittle failure behavior and unfavorable cost-to-performance efficiency. The blast-resistant capacities of UHSC and RPC were experimentally evaluated to determine the possibility of using UHSC and RPC in concrete structures susceptible to terrorist attacks or accidental impacts. Slump flow, compressive strength, split tensile strength, elastic modulus, and flexure strength tests were carried out. In addition, ANFO blast tests were performed on reinforced UHSC and RPC panels. Incidental and reflected pressures, as well as maximum and residual displacements and the strains of rebar and concrete were measured. Blast damage and failure modes of the reinforced panel specimens were recorded. Our results showed that UHSC and RPC have better blast explosion resistance than normal strength concrete. The study results are discussed in detail.

Stochastic Modeling of Service Life of Concrete Structures in Chloride-Laden Environments

Chloride-induced rebar corrosion is a common degradation process for concrete infrastructure, which is a practical concern for cold-climate states and coastal areas. In this work, numeric models based on the FEM are utilized to study service life of concrete structures subject to chloride ingress, where two models are utilized. The first one deals with multiple ionic species in the concrete pore solution, while the second one only accounts for the presence of chloride ions. The stochastic nature of model inputs is taken into consideration because each factor of interest is subject to random variabilities and inherent uncertainties. Specifically, the surface chloride concentrations and concrete cover depth follow the normal distribution; the diffusion coefficients obey the gamma distribution; the actual chloride threshold features the triangular distribution. The nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) to characterize the spatial and temporal evolution of ionic species are numerically solved, the results of which were utilized to elucidate the influence of various factors on concrete service life, such as mix design, surface chloride concentrations, cracking level, and coarse aggregate and concrete cover depth.

The Model for Predicting the Remaining Service Life of Reinforced Concrete Bridges in-Service and Applicability

There is a strong need in maintenance and management of bridge that analyzes and predicts remaining service life (RSL) of reinforced concrete bridge. Since structural resistance of concrete bridge is generally suffered from environment, load and material etc. factors, which are intercoupled and time-varying. Hence researchers should consider the economic development of road traffic area, environment of operational bridge, variation of load, deterioration law of materials, and maintenance cost of LCC for predicting RSL of bridge. This paper reviews recent model of predicting the remaining service life (RSL) for concrete bridge and serviceability, analyzes model characteristic and defects, and looks forward to future research from the viewpoint of structure durability, reliability and life cycle cost, respectively.

On Formalization of the Concept of Value Proposition

This paper presents an original description and a semi-formal definition of the concept of a value proposition, which has been so far used in service science rather intuitively. Our approach is based on utility functions and conceptual modelling techniques. The proposed semi-formalization can be exploited to describe services from the point of view of their (potential) utility for their clients. This description can be used especially to organize a service portfolio in an enterprise in a better way, aid in computer-assisted service composition/decomposition, and provide additional criteria for indexing services in a service brokering task. In order to be able to describe a value proposition more accurately, we present a semi-formal definition of the concept of a service system. We perceive a value proposition as the main input taken into account by a future service client when evaluating whether or not to become the client of the service proposed by a service provider. A value proposition itself is modelled as a collection of values which indicate the extent of “how much” a given service behaves according to a given set of service characteristics. The presented approach is illustrated on the example of a concrete service. [Service Science, ISSN 2164-3962 (print), ISSN 2164-3970 (online), was published by Services Science Global (SSG) from 2009 to 2011 as issues under ISBN 978-1-4276-2090-3.]

Multi-modal social networks for modeling scientific fields

This paper analyzes whether methods from social network analysis can be adopted for the modeling of scientific fields in order to obtain a better understanding of the respective scientific area. The approach proposed is based on articles published within the respective scientific field and certain types of nodes deduced from these papers, such as authors, journals, conferences and organizations. As a proof of concept, the techniques discussed here are applied to the field of `Mobile Social Networking'. For this purpose, a tool was developed to create a large data collection representing the aforementioned field. The paper analyzes various views on the complete network and discusses these on the basis of the data collected on Mobile Social Networking. The authors demonstrate that the analysis of particular subgraphs derived from the data collection allows the identification of important authors as well as separate sub-disciplines such as classic network analysis and sensor networks and also contributes to the classification of the field of `Mobile Social Networking' within the greater context of computer science, applied mathematics and social sciences. Based on these results, the authors propose a set of concrete services which could be offered by such a network and which could help the user to deal with the scientific information process. The paper concludes with an outlook upon further possible research topics.

Behavior of Reinforced Concrete Subjected to Boric Acid Corrosion of Nuclear Power Plant

Reaches on durability of concrete has been made great advances over the past decades. However, little works have been done on the corrosion of reinforced concrete exposed to boric acid in cooling pond of heating exchange system of nuclear power plant. The purpose of this study is to experimentally investigate the behavior of reinforced concrete in such circumstance. Tests were carried out on specimens cured in a standard moisture room at a temperature of 20±3°C. Three different concentration of boric solution (2000ppm, 8000ppm, 30000ppm) were simulated to accelerate the corrosion. The compressive and splitting tensile strength,elastic modulus of concrete , mass loss rate of steel bar, bond strength and flexural bearing capacity of reinforced concrete at 60, 90, 120, 150 and 180 days were obtained respectively. The results indicate that the presence of boric acid below 30000ppm does not significantly affect serviceability of concrete. The corrosion is slight for the specimens with crack less than 0.4 mm under flexural loads. Boric acid almost has no effect on the corrosion of the steel bar and bond strength.

Research and Development of one Kind of Acousto-Elastic Sensitive Concrete Material

A tentative experiment has been conducted on polymer modified cement concrete now widely used. By filtering through 297 kinds of traces of polymer modified cement concrete samples tentatively mixed, we acquire a proper mix proportion, according to which, a total of 75 groups of 225 polymer modified cement concrete specimens are produced. After further selective preference of these specimens, ultrasonic test is done on the selected ones under different loading conditions. Afterwards, signal processing is accomplished by using wavelet transformation and we preliminarily find a kind of acousto-elastic sensitive concrete material which is comparatively sensitive to stress. This kind of material is produced by mixing epoxy resin, styrene-acrylic emulsion, acrylic emulsion, auxiliaries and iron powder into cement concrete together. The sensitivity of ultrasound and stress of this kind of modified concrete behaves preferably well as follows: at the low stress stage, not only the correlativity curve of ultrasound velocity and stress but also the correlativity curve of weighted spectrum area and stress arises apparently. If this kind of material can be applied to the practical engineering successfully, the acousto-elastic test accuracy of the concrete service stress will be greatly improved.

Enterprise unified authentication and authorization system based on Web services

In order to achieve the goal of unified scheduling and unified management in application system,unified authentication and authorization has become more and more important and sophisticated.The background and the goal of unified authentication and unified authorization system were analyzed firstly,then the unified authentication,authorization and Web services were analyzed and compared,and a unified method of authentication and authorization in enterprise combining the Web services was proposed;therefore,it was more convenient to administer the concrete application system for administrator,which truly reconstructed completely unified authentication and authorization,and the design and implementation of the concrete service specification(or interface) by the practical project were given.