Service Consolidation Research Articles

What lies beneath these creatures of the state: understanding the death of specialised governments in the U.S.

ABSTRACT After analysing 40 years of census data on U.S. local government change, this study finds that the dissolution of special districts (specialised governments) or ‘exits’ in U.S. counties are largely unrelated to demand factors. Using fixed effects regression specified at the urban county level, we find that restrictions on the fiscal autonomy of cities are associated with decreases in the special district exit rate and count. There is also evidence that state grants of ‘broad’ or ‘limited’ functional home rule to cities increase special district dissolutions. These results largely disappear when examining subgroups of districts classified by their asset specificity. The findings are consistent with the circumvention argument made in the local autonomy literature and may indicate some service consolidation, albeit from a different perspective.

Deep learning‐influenced joint vehicle‐to‐infrastructure and vehicle‐to‐vehicle communication approach for internet of vehicles

AbstractThe internet of vehicle (IoV) orchestration is an emerging technology in heterogeneous vehicles to contrivance diverse intelligent transportation applications. The roadside unit (RSU) plays a vital role during service provisioning. Vehicle‐to‐vehicle and vehicle‐to‐infrastructure communications have consistently accomplished the services in a vehicular network. However, persisting the increased vehicles' quality of experience and network vendors' utilities and which RSUs have to select for effective, reliable service are critical open research challenges to consolidate RSU services to enhance network service utility rate. In this article, we design a deep learning‐inspired RSU Service Consolidation Approach based on two‐models to enhance the service reliability by formulating the RSU coverage issue with the RSU Migration model and content delivery issue with Linear Programming‐based Multicast model. Adaptive Packet‐Error measurement system to optimize service reliability rate at the edge of cooperative vehicular network based on content correlation. The performance and efficiency are examined based on MATLAB. The simulation outcome shows RSC approach has low execution cost by 39%, service reliability rate by 71% than the state‐of‐art approaches.

An adaptive dual-population evolutionary paradigm with adversarial search: Case study on many-objective service consolidation

Optimizing many conflicting objectives simultaneously is one of the most challenging topics in the multi-criterion decision-making. This paper develops a dual-population co-evolutionary paradigm for solving many-objective service selection problems. It evolves two co-evolving populations separately with different scalarizing functions (SFs) and adversarial search orientations in parallel. In particular, one population, driven by convergence-oriented SF with ideal point, pulls the solutions toward the Pareto front; the other one, driven by diversity-oriented SF with nadir point, pushes the solutions backward from the nadir point. Accordingly, the search behaviors of the two populations are arguably complement to each other. Moreover, corner solutions and angle-based similarity are employed to enhance the coverage of population as widely as possible, the interaction and collaboration among populations are leveraged by a carefully crafted elitism pairing strategy. A series of experimental studies have been performed on challenging real-world service composition problems. Empirical results have demonstrated the competitiveness of our proposal against the state-of-the-art peers.

Flexible service consolidation with nested virtualization and library operating systems

SummaryIn Infrastructure‐as‐a‐service (IaaS) clouds, users can reduce costs by scale‐in or scale‐down when running services are underutilized. Since these optimizations of instance deployment require at least one minimum instance even for running an underutilized service, cost reduction is limited. For further optimization, multiple services can be consolidated into one instance. However, services have to be stopped temporarily at the consolidation time, and isolation between services becomes weaker after the consolidation. To solve these problems, this paper proposes FlexCapsule, which enables seamless and secure service consolidation in existing IaaS clouds. FlexCapsule runs each service in a lightweight virtual machine (VM) called an app VM, using a library operating system. An app VM runs inside an instance using a technique called nested virtualization. FlexCapsule can optimize instance deployment with negligible downtime by flexibly migrating app VMs. Due to strong isolation provided by app VMs, it can guarantee security between consolidated services. In addition, FlexCapsule provides multiprocess support using app VMs by emulating process fork and process pools. We have implemented FlexCapsule in Xen using both fully virtualized OSv and paravirtualized MiniOS. Then, we examined the effectiveness of FlexCapsule using several applications. Due to the premature implementation of nested virtualization in Xen, the performance of app VMs largely degraded, but we believe that the performance could be improved using several existing optimizations.

Programmatic outcomes and impact of rapid public sector antiretroviral therapy expansion in adults prior to introduction of the WHO treat-all approach in rural Eswatini.

ObjectivesTo assess long‐term antiretroviral therapy (ART) outcomes during rapid HIV programme expansion in the public sector of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland).MethodsThis is a retrospectively established cohort of HIV‐positive adults (≥16 years) who started first‐line ART in 25 health facilities in Shiselweni (Eswatini) between 01/2006 and 12/2014. Temporal trends in ART attrition, treatment expansion and ART coverage were described over 9 years. We used flexible parametric survival models to assess the relationship between time to ART attrition and covariates.ResultsOf 24 772 ART initiations, 6% (n = 1488) occurred in 2006, vs. 13% (n = 3192) in 2014. Between these years, median CD4 cell count at ART initiation increased (113–265 cells/mm3). The active treatment cohort expanded 8.4‐fold, ART coverage increased 8.0‐fold (7.1% in 2006 vs. 56.8% in 2014) and 12‐month crude ART retention improved from 71% to 86%. Compared with the pre‐decentralisation period (2006–2007), attrition decreased by 5% (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] 0.95, 95% confidence interval 0.88–1.02) during HIV‐TB service decentralisation (2008–2010), by 17% (aHR 0.83, 0.75–0.92) during service consolidation (2011–2012), and by 20% (aHR 0.80, 0.71–0.90) during further treatment expansion (2013–2014). The risk of attrition was higher for young age, male sex, pathological baseline haemoglobin and biochemistry results, more toxic drug regimens, WHO III/IV staging and low CD4 cell count; access to a telephone was protective.ConclusionsProgrammatic outcomes improved during large expansion of the treatment cohort and increased ART coverage. Changes in ART programming may have contributed to better outcomes.

Interdomain I/O Optimization in Virtualized Sensor Networks.

In virtualized sensor networks, virtual machines (VMs) share the same hardware for sensing service consolidation and saving power. For those VMs that reside in the same hardware, frequent interdomain data transfers are invoked for data analytics, and sensor collaboration and actuation. Traditional ways of interdomain communications are based on virtual network interfaces of bilateral VMs for data sending and receiving. Since these network communications use TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) stacks, they result in lengthy communication paths and frequent kernel interactions, which deteriorate the I/O (Input/Output) performance of involved VMs. In this paper, we propose an optimized interdomain communication approach based on shared memory to improve the interdomain communication performance of multiple VMs residing in the same sensor hardware. In our approach, the sending data are shared in memory pages maintained by the hypervisor, and the data are not transferred through the virtual network interface via a TCP/IP stack. To avoid security trapping, the shared data are mapped in the user space of each VM involved in the communication, therefore reducing tedious system calls and frequent kernel context switches. In implementation, the shared memory is created by a customized shared-device kernel module that has bidirectional event channels between both communicating VMs. For performance optimization, we use state flags in a circular buffer to reduce wait-and-notify operations and system calls during communications. Experimental results show that our proposed approach can provide five times higher throughput and 2.5 times less latency than traditional TCP/IP communication via a virtual network interface.

Saskatchewan's Successful Strategy for Surgical Waitlist Reduction.

By 2015, Saskatchewan's surgical wait times, once among Canada's longest, were arguably the nation's shortest. This paper highlights the principal strategies that were implemented to address the exceptionally lengthy surgical wait times in Saskatchewan's SHR. These included the province's funding the establishment of a fair operating room allocation system, a centralized provincial surgery registry, integration of priority scoring tools and creation of the Saskatchewan Surgical Care network. This coordinated backdrop facilitated the integration of Lean principles, hospital service consolidation, private third-party surgical care delivery services and policy direction setting by the provincial government.

A hybrid approach to automatic IaaS service selection

Cloud computing provides on-demand resources and removes the boundaries of resources’ physical locations. By providing virtualized computing resources in an elastic manner over the internet, IaaS providers allow organizations to save upfront infrastructure costs and focus on features that discriminate their businesses. The growing number of providers makes manual selection of the most suitable configuration of IaaS resources, or IaaS services, difficult and time consuming while requiring a high level of expertise. In our previous paper we proposed QuARAM recommender, a general platform for automatic IaaS service selection. In this paper, we present in detail the hybrid approach to automatic service selection used in our platform. The selection process begins with automatic extraction of an application’s features, requirements and preferences, which are then used to produce a list of potential services for the application’s deployment. We use case-based reasoning and MCDM (Multi-criteria Decision Making) to provide a recommendation of suitable services for application deployment, clustering to handle the problem of a large search space and a service consolidation method to improve the resource utilization and decrease the total service price. We carry out a case study with a prototype implementation of our platform to demonstrate that automatic IaaS service selection using a combination of all the proposed approaches is both practical and achievable.

A systematic approach for business service consolidation in virtual organizations

Various forms of partnerships have increasingly emerged among organizations, in both the manufacturing and service industry. In one type of structured partnership, called the Virtual Organization (VO), the member organizations share with each other a part of their capacities and capabilities, so that together they can seize a bigger market share and more opportunities. However, to excel the VO’s potential, the participating organizations must become fully informed about each other’s particular abilities and competencies, as represented by their shared business services (BSs). Our approach proposes the creation of a common shared pool of integrated BSs, and further optimizing it through consolidating similar and related BSs, to reduce the size of this shared pool and enhance its learning curve by the VO partners. To this end, we extend and adapt a Business Process merge technique to make it more suitable to BS consolidation and VO applicability. In this paper, a semiautomated methodology is introduced that creates an optimized, clean (i.e., anomaly-free consolidated model), and valid (i.e., approved by domain experts) set of consolidated BSs in the VO context. Design science principles are applied to this research, and a systematic literature review is also performed. Furthermore, a real case study from the construction industry is conducted to validate the introduced methodology.

Energy efficiency comparison of hypervisors

Current cloud data centers are fully virtualized for service consolidation and power/energy reduction. Although virtualization could reduce the real-time power consumption and overall energy consumption, the energy characteristics of hypervisors hosting different workloads have not been well profiled or understood thus far. In this study, we investigate the power and energy characteristics of four mainstream hypervisors and a container engine, namely VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, XenServer, and Docker, on six different platforms (three mainstream 2U rack servers, one emerging ARM64 server, one desktop server, and one laptop) with power measurements made over prolonged periods. We use computation-intensive, memory-intensive, and mixed Web server-database workloads to explore the power and energy characteristics of different hypervisors in order to emulate realistic multi-tenant cloud environments. The results of extensive experiments conducted with four workload levels (very light, light, fair, and very heavy) indicate that the hypervisors exhibit different power and energy characteristics. Our findings are as follows. (1) Hypervisors exhibit different power and energy consumptions on the same hardware running the same workload. (2) Although mainstream hypervisors have different energy efficiencies aligned with different workload types and workload levels, no single hypervisor outperforms the other hypervisors on all platforms in terms of power or energy consumption. (3) Although container virtualization is considered as lightweight virtualization in terms of implementation and maintenance, it is essentially not more power-efficient than conventional virtualization technology. (4) Although the ARM64 server has low power consumption, it completes computation tasks with a long execution time and, sometimes, high energy consumption. Further, ARM64 servers have medium energy consumption per database operation for mixed workloads. The results presented in this paper can provide system designers and data center operators with useful insights for power-aware workload placement and virtual machine scheduling.

A Longitudinal Analysis of the Effects of Service Consolidation on Local Government Expenditures

In the current era of fiscal retrenchment local governments are seeking means to provide core services at lower costs. One approach getting increased attention is service consolidation. One of the challenges for policy makers considering alternative service delivery options such as consolidation is the limited number of empirical investigations of the costs and benefits associated with such a difficult endeavor. This study focuses on the identified local governments in Wisconsin that consolidated a service between 1987 and 2009. I found that for communities that consolidated services, overall expenditures increased in some circumstances and expenditure reductions were only associated with one service: capacity management. When I examined protective services, we found limited evidence to suggest that spending increased in those communities following the consolidation.

A speed and departure time optimization algorithm for the pollution-routing problem

We propose a new speed and departure time optimization algorithm for the pollution-routing problem (PRP), which runs in quadratic time and returns an optimal schedule. This algorithm is embedded into an iterated local search-based metaheuristic to achieve a combined speed, scheduling and routing optimization. The start of the working day is set as a decision variable for individual routes, thus enabling a better assignment of human resources to required demands. Some routes that were evaluated as unprofitable can now appear as viable candidates later in the day, leading to a larger search space and further opportunities of distance optimization via better service consolidation. Extensive computational experiments on available PRP benchmark instances demonstrate the good performance of the algorithm. The flexible departure times from the depot contribute to reduce the operational costs by 8.36% on the considered instances.

Political and Functional Local Government Consolidation

This analysis explores the options for a theoretical model to guide regional collaboration by local governments that is both politically feasible and consistent with core public administration values. The analysis first examines the research on the adoption, implementation and performance of political consolidation. We then examine the theory and research that underlie functional consolidation and assess both types in lieu of the values of public administration. We find that local government managers and elected officials need a theoretical model for regional collaboration that addresses a key obstacle to service consolidation among local governments: the perceived loss of political power and control associated with consolidation efforts. We suggest multilevel governance theory and the concept of shared sovereignty offer an approach to regional problems with an eye to the political as well as administrative issues, and with instruments that promote core public administration values. The concept of shared sovereignty that underpins the regional collaboration of the countries in Europe has both descriptive and predictive theoretical potential as a multilevel governance theory. The EU functions from a web of interlaced, interdependent agreements to share sovereignty in ways that manage political issues, economic factors, and administrative values, and in a fashion aligned with core PA values in the US.

Electronic Commerce Personalized Recommendation Model under Cloud Computing Environment

With the maturity of virtualization technology, the advantages of cloud computing have been gradually apparent with low cost, improvement of resource utilization, energy conservation of service consolidation and convenience of using. Cloud manufacturing provides a huge amount of services and there are kinds of user requirements and devices which are complicated and changeable. So it is necessary that the users quickly develop personalized products to meet their needs. With the popularity of smart phones and the development of 3G technology, the amount of information grows dramatically fast, which makes it a trend to extract information that users are interested in from the world of information, but traditional recommendation methods cant meet the need of people. Starting from information resource requirements of users in the cloud environment, this article discusses the application of cloud computing in personalized information services, analyzes the necessity and feasibility of the cloud computing technology applying to personalized services, proposes the personalized service idea based on cloud computing, and builds a model to introduce cloud computing and cloud service idea to the management and service, hoping to find the integrating point of the cloud computing technology applications in the personalized field.

Enhanced Monitoring-as-a-Service for Effective Cloud Management

This paper introduces the concept of monitoring-as-a-service (MaaS), its main components, and a suite of key functional requirements of MaaS in cloud. We argue that MaaS should support not only the conventional state monitoring capabilities, such as instantaneous violation detection, periodical state monitoring, and single tenant monitoring, but also performance-enhanced functionalities that can optimize on monitoring cost, scalability, and the effectiveness of monitoring service consolidation and isolation. In this paper, we present three enhanced MaaS capabilities and show that window-based state monitoring is not only more resilient to noises and outliers, but also saves considerable communication cost. Similarly, violation-likelihood-based state monitoring can dynamically adjust monitoring intensity based on the likelihood of detecting important events, leading to significant gain in monitoring service consolidation. Finally, multitenancy support in state monitoring allows multiple cloud users to enjoy MaaS with improved performance and efficiency at more affordable cost. We perform extensive experiments in an emulated cloud environment with real-world system and network traces. The experimental results suggest that our MaaS framework achieves significant lower monitoring cost, higher scalability, and better multitenancy performance.

노인보건의료의 현황과 법 제도적 개선방안

As the population is getting older, medical expenses amount of the whole is keep increasing. So, the pressure of the finances, Health Insurance, Medical Care Assistance Act and etc, is getting higher. The share of healthcare-expense is increasing due to elderly illness. And it became a social problem; we analysed present state of senior healthcare in South Korea-looked into current laws and policies, and found problems. We tried to suggest improvements that drew from the current state of foreign country senior healthcare of those problems. For the result, we found the problem in relevant-law system of senior healthcare guarantee. In this study, we proposed the ways to qualitatively upgrade of medical standard that considered on elderly` features: the strengthened guarantee for healthcare, financial secure for long-term convalescence benefit, linking and functional reinforcement for elderly welfare and long-term convalescence insurance, the solution for overlapped laws about convalescence in long-term convalescence insurance and elderly welfare, a betterment of grading, and a home service consolidation. We need to secure right amount of emergency medical service budget, and effective management system for the improved level of senior severely emergency medical service. Furthermore, we suggested that South Korea needs to legislate [The Law for Senior Medical Secure] to respond to rapidly increasing senior healthcare fee.

Eye casualty services in London

The combined pressures of the European Working Time Directive, 4 h waiting time target, and growing rates of unplanned hospital attendances have forced a major consolidation of eye casualty departments across the country, with the remaining units seeing a rapid increase in demand. We examine the effect of these changes on the provision of emergency eye care in Central London, and see what wider lessons can be learned. We surveyed the managers responsible for each of London's 8 out-of-hours eye casualty services, analysed data on attendance numbers, and conducted detailed interviews with lead clinicians. At London's two largest units, Moorfields Eye Hospital and the Western Eye Hospital, annual attendance numbers have been rising at 7.9% per year (to 76 034 patients in 2010/11) and 9.6% per year (to 31 128 patients in 2010/11), respectively. Using Moorfields as a case study, we discuss methods to increase capacity and efficiency in response to this demand, and also examine some of the unintended consequences of service consolidation including patients travelling long distances to geographically inappropriate units, and confusion over responsibility for out-of-hours inpatient cover. We describe a novel 'referral pathway' developed to minimise unnecessary travelling and delay for patients, and propose a forum for the strategic planning of London's eye casualty services in the future.

Toward a multiplane framework of NGSON: a required guideline to achieve pervasive services and efficient resource utilization

The next generation service overlay network will enable the provision of pervasive services over a common IP-based transport infrastructure. However, along with the service consolidation over IP and the rapid increase of network scale, the task of service and network management has become extremely complex and disordered. Efforts are being made in various areas, such as SOA, web services, IMS, P2P/CDN overlay, and cloud computing, to achieve a scalable, secure, converged, and selfmanaged service network framework to shorten the time to market of new services, as well as lower the management costs of network/service providers. Nevertheless, these technologies are not developed in a coordinated manner for optimal scalability, resource utilization, and QoS performance. In this article, we propose a multiplane framework (MPF) for NGSON based on the integration of service composition, management, and delivery, which is a top-down reference model to achieve pervasive services and efficient resource utilization.

Toward an Autonomic Service Management Framework: A Holistic Vision of SOA, AON, and Autonomic Computing

The next-generation network will enable provision of various multimedia applications, with different QoS requirements, over a common IP- based transport infrastructure. However, along with the service consolidation over IP and the rapid increase of network scale, the task of service and network management has become extremely complex and costly. Efforts are being made in various areas, for example, SOA, application-oriented networking, and autonomic computing, to achieve a scalable, secure, and self-managed service delivery framework to shorten the time-to-market of new Internet applications, as well as lower the management costs of service providers. Nevertheless, these technologies are not developed in a coordinated manner for optimal scalability, resource utilization, and QoS performance. In this article, we propose a prototype architecture and discuss related implementation issues for an autonomic service management framework, based on a holistic view of SOA, AON, and autonomic computing. In ASMF, a business or management application with end-to-end QoS requirements can be automatically composed from standard service components in a distributed manner and autonomically managed according to service level agreements.

Service consolidation--an idea whose time is coming.

Pacing and Clinical ElectrophysiologyVolume 17, Issue 5 p. 980-980 Service Consolidation—An Idea Whose Time is Coming DANIEL E. NICKELSON, Corresponding Author DANIEL E. NICKELSON Department of Government Affairs, The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Washington, DCAddress for reprints: Dan Nickelson, Dept. of Government Affairs, The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, 200 L St. N.W., Suite 200, Washington, DC, 20036. Fax: (202) 872–0834.Search for more papers by this author DANIEL E. NICKELSON, Corresponding Author DANIEL E. NICKELSON Department of Government Affairs, The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Washington, DCAddress for reprints: Dan Nickelson, Dept. of Government Affairs, The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, 200 L St. N.W., Suite 200, Washington, DC, 20036. Fax: (202) 872–0834.Search for more papers by this author First published: May 1994 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-8159.1994.tb01442.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume17, Issue5May 1994Pages 980-980 RelatedInformation