Service Negotiation Research Articles

How Do Persons With Disabilities and/or Complex Health Conditions Perceive Oral Health? A Qualitative Study.

This qualitative study aimed to explore the experience and perception of the mouth, oral health, functioning and the social environment amongst adults with disabilities and complex health conditions. Purposive sampling using the maximum variation strategy was performed to select participants with a wide range of experiences in terms of demographics, disability and health conditions. Consent was sought, and semi-structured interviews were conducted, recorded and transcribed verbatim. Within the interpretivist tradition, a phenomenological approach was used to describe the lived, contextualised experience of people in relation to their mouths, as described by participants. Thematic analysis was undertaken. Eighteen participants with disabilities and complex health conditions were interviewed. Twelve individuals had an intellectual disability. Three main themes were identified: perception of the mouth and oral health; symptomatic perceptions and responses to oral health problems; and inter-relationships between the mouth, oral health and the socio-medical environment. The mouth had a central place in the lives of the participants, but its importance was only recognised when oral health problems interfered with daily life, function, social relationships, family life or autonomy. Certain social determinants of health were identified: social exclusion, financial insecurity, lack of autonomy, nutrition and negotiation of services. Oral problems were perceived as an additional burden to those with disabilities or complex health conditions. This study provided insight into the daily lives of adults with disabilities and complex health conditions. It helps to fill the gaps in the existing literature regarding the perceptions of the mouth and oral health, connecting oral function, general health and social environment for this population. This study was registered into ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT04815434).

Does Hospital–Physician Integration Improve Hospital Performance? Results from a USA Longitudinal Study

In a dynamic healthcare industry, aligning the goals and objectives of hospitals and physicians through integration has been suggested to influence performance. Physicians’ leadership and active involvement in governance can direct resource usage, Electronic Health Record (EHR) implementation, price negotiation, better coordination, and continuity of services for patients, thus affecting performance. This study aimed to examine the relationship between physician integration and hospital performance, investigating both financial and quality outcomes. We used a longitudinal study design. Our sample was hospital-level data from 2014 to 2019, which contained 6000 U.S. hospital-year observations. The dependent variables were quality outcomes (readmission rates) and financial outcomes (total and operating margins). The independent variable explored three dimensions of integration: high, low, and overall integration. Findings showed no impact of hospital–physician integration on quality outcomes and financial performance. High-integration hospitals did not show any significant relationships with quality outcomes and financial performance compared to hospitals that did not have high integration. Hospital–physician integration may have little potential to bring clinical integration even though vertical integration is present. A commitment to improving quality as a strategic priority may be vital in impacting quality outcomes, followed by financial performance.

BSSN-SDNs: A Blockchain-Based Security Service Negotiation for the SDN Interdomain

The security requirements for SDN (Software-Defined Network) cross-domain communication are diverse and dynamically changing; thus, a security service negotiation function is required for the SDN interdomain. However, the SDN interdomain distributed communication environment leads to a lack of trustworthiness and security. Therefore, this paper proposes a blockchain-based SDN interdomain security service negotiation mechanism, BSSN-SDNs, to provide automatic, secure, and trustworthy SDN interdomain security service negotiation. BSSN-SDNs proposes a three-layer reference architecture that enables joint on-chain and off-chain work by extending the security service negotiation module and blockchain client on the controller and deploying security service negotiation smart contracts on the blockchain. It especially adopts non-interactive key exchange and the message authentication code to ensure the confidentiality of the secure service negotiated on-chain. Finally, the timeliness as well as security and trustworthiness of BSSN-SDNs are analyzed, and the FISCO BCOS-based experiment results show that the delay of BSSN-SDNs is acceptable and is positively correlated with the number of policies and the number of SDN domains involved in negotiation.

Current Energy and Energy-Related Services Negotiations Viewed from Developing Countries Legal Protection

Current Energy and Energy-Related Services Negotiations Viewed from Developing Countries Legal Protection

Prevention of modern slavery within sex work: Study protocol of a mixed methods project looking at the role of adult services websites.

The core challenge this study addressed is that Adult Services Websites (ASWs) are an extensive and pervasive feature of the digital world that facilitate the advertising, negotiation and purchase of sexual services yet are also considered to be harbourers of sexual exploitation, modern slavery and human trafficking (MSHT) Giommoni L. et al. 2021, Milivojevic S. et al. 2020, Sanders, T., et al. 2018. Whilst awareness of cases of internet facilitated MSHT has entered the public and policy domain, little is known about the role and responsibilities of ASWs in this domain. Collaboratively with our partners, the findings from this study will first contribute to understanding how ASWs facilitate exploitation and second how they can become part of the prevention mechanisms and reporters of crimes. We present the design of our mixed methods study, underpinned by a peer Action Learning Set (ALS) approach. By working closely with ten survivors of sexual exploitation from 7 countries, the peer group have informed the study through participation in the advisory group, instrument design, implementation, analysis and dissemination. A training and support needs analysis prior to engagement in the research project ascertained what skills people would bring, what they would need for further personal and career development and if there were any additional requirements to enable participation. We provided capacity building through a bespoke training package over the project's lifetime. Conducting a peer-researcher ALS project informs the research topic by both empowering survivors of sexual exploitation, whilst engaging with their expertise and lived experience to shape the methods and focus. The summative evaluation of our methods informs wider peer research methodologies, little utilised in the field of MSHT research. Thus, this research produces evidence which acknowledges survivors as experts with value towards social science research.

An Incentive-based robust flexibility market for congestion management of an active distribution system to use the free capacity of Microgrids

Microgrids (MG) formation has changed the passive structure of the distribution system. MGs participate in local energy markets as separate decision-making units to optimize their economic profit by energy trading with the distribution system operator. However, in the transition-duration from passive to active configuration, the lack of sufficient infrastructure may define new challenges for distribution system security. This paper proposes a robust model of a local flexibility market to incentivize the MGs to provide flexibility services to relieve line congestion. The proposed market model is, based on a request and response structure by adopting a modified ADMM method for flexibility services negotiations. The proposed flexibility market is considered a complementary market for bilateral energy trading of MGs and a distribution system for a fairer environment. The distributed market frameworks keep data privacy and a low computational burden for the market clearing process. The IEEE 33 bus test system with four connected MGs is considered to simulate the proposed model. For results validation, the social welfare function result is compared with the centralized problem structure, and the effects of flexibility market separation are analyzed with a comparison with a security constraints-based market design.

New Mobile Cloud Computing Approach Based Multi-Agent System For OWL-S Services

Using mobile cloud technology, local application resources can move into the cloud computing resource pool in the form of web services. The web services discovery and execution processes in the mobile environment are considered as a very difficult challenge. Moreover, these processes may degrade network performance due to the mobile environment. To overcome these issues, we present a new approach for better discovery, selection, execution, and negotiation of OWL-S services by utilizing a multi-agent system in mobile cloud computing. By using the Multi-Agent System (mobile agent and fixed agent), these processes are made with the minimum utilization of resources because the mobile agents migrate to targeted services and interact locally with them. Moreover, the use of mobile agent overcomes the problems related to the mobile environment and wireless devices. Besides, it automatizes the discovery, selection, execution, and negotiation of OWL-S services. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. Moreover, we conclude that the mobile agent is a good solution to eliminate the problem of wireless devices and the mobile environment, and reduced the execution time of service discovery and invocation. Also, the finding indicates that cloud computing is a good solution to eliminate the problem of storage and execution in mobile devices. Besides, the context-aware provides a more accurate service selection.

Multi-attribute negotiation mechanism for manufacturing service allocation in smart manufacturing

Smart manufacturing is undergoing rapid development along with many disruptive technologies, such as Internet of Things, cyber-physical system and cloud computing. A myriad of heterogeneous manufacturing services can be dynamically perceived, connected and interoperated to satisfy various customized demands. In smart manufacturing, the market equilibrium is variable over time due to changes in demand and supply. Thus, efficient manufacturing service allocation (MSA) is critical to implementation of smart manufacturing. This paper considers the MSA problem under market dynamics with maximization of utility of customers and service providers. Many conventional methods generally allocate manufacturing services to the customers by multi-objective optimization without considering the impact of interactions between customers and service providers. This paper presents a multi-attribute negotiation mechanism to address the MSA problem under time constraints relying on autonomous agents. The proposed negotiation mechanism is composed of two models: an atomic manufacturing service negotiation model and a composite manufacturing service coordination. The former model is based on automated negotiation to seek an atomic manufacturing service over multiple attributes for an individual subtask. The latter model incorporates the global distribution and surplus redistribution to coordinate and control multiple atomic manufacturing service negotiations for the whole manufacturing task. Numerical studies are employed to verify the effectiveness of the multi-attribute negotiation mechanism in solving the MSA problem. The results show that the proposed negotiation mechanism can address the MSA problem and surplus redistribution can effectively improve the success rate of negotiations.

Game the Oretic Approach for Cloud Service Negotiation

Cloud computing is a booming technology in the area of digital markets. Tackling the nonfunctional characteristics is a big challenge between service consumers (SC) and service providers (SP). Without proper negotiation between the participants specifying their quality of service (QoS) requirements, service level agreement (SLA) cannot be achieved. Two strategies that are commonly prevalent in the negotiation process are concession model and trade off model. The concession model assures the service consumer (SC) receiving the services on time without any deferment. But service consumer has only limited utility. To balance the utility and achievement rates, the authors propose a mixed negotiation approach for cloud service negotiation, which is based on “Game of Chicken.” Extensive results show that a mixed negotiation approach brings equal amount of satisfaction to both service consumer and service provider in terms of achieving higher utility and outperforms the concession approach, while taking fewer time delays than that of a tradeoff approach.

Efficiency of Semantic Web Implementation on Cloud Computing: A Review

Semantic web and cloud technology systems have been critical components in creating and deploying applications in various fields. Although they are self-contained, they can be combined in various ways to create solutions, which has recently been discussed in depth. We have shown a dramatic increase in new cloud providers, applications, facilities, management systems, data, and so on in recent years, reaching a level of complexity that indicates the need for new technology to address such tremendous, shared, and heterogeneous services and resources. As a result, issues with portability, interoperability, security, selection, negotiation, discovery, and definition of cloud services and resources may arise. Semantic Technologies, which has enormous potential for cloud computing, is a vital way of re-examining these issues. This paper explores and examines the role of Semantic-Web Technology in the Cloud from a variety of sources. In addition, a "cloud-driven" mode of interaction illustrates how we can construct the semantic web and provide automated semantical annotations to web applications on a large scale by leveraging Cloud computing properties and advantages.

Reflexions on the Scope and Classification of Logistics Services in Trade Negotiations

Logistics services are an important issue for trade in services negotiations. However, there are different perspectives related to the scope of logistics services, not only for policy makers involved in services negotiations but also academia. This leads to differing understandings and classifications of logistics services depending on the perspective. A bibliometric and network analysis was conducted to identify keywords and propose an expanded definition that reflects the current role and scope of services offered by logistics service providers. A novel nomenclature for logistics services classification is advanced based on an expanded definition. WTO, Trade logistics, Logistics service, LSP definition and classification, Trade in services negotiation

Smart City and Smart Tourist Destinations

Digital transformation has been a worldwide reality since the late 1990s. However, the 21st century has promoted its acceleration and scope for its use. Tourism professionals have sought the benefits that digital connections via smartphones bring to the diffusion and negotiation of services and products. However, young people from the internet age seek autonomy in the elaboration of their own travel itineraries, contributing to the emergence of intelligent tourist destinations. Based on the correlation with the principles of smart cities that increasingly become the goal of global managers, this study seeks to demonstrate the potential of the insertion of the tourist segment in this new perspective of social behavior. The results show that the co-creation by the travelers in search of experiences of impact in their lives is here to stay with QR Codes and Apps of cell phones. Information and digital communication technologies bring greater autonomy and creativity to the universe of tourists.

Brokered pricing model for agent-based negotiation of data-driven services in the cloud

Brokered pricing model for agent-based negotiation of data-driven services in the cloud

An Overview of Current Multi-Attribute Techniques in Double Auction Frameworks

Double auction is becoming the preferred negotiation protocol for cloud service negotiation due to its economic efficiency, capability in facilitating dynamic pricing, and suitability for handling a large number of customers and service providers. However, as far as this research work is concerned, there is no framework using double auction that simultaneously and comprehensively addresses the heterogeneity of cloud services in multi-attributes negotiation. Before such a framework can be designed, suitable multi-attributes negotiation techniques and its attributes should be identified. Therefore, this paper’s objective is to distinguish and provide an overview of multi-attributes techniques used in double auction negotiations. The sources are from the Scopus Database. It is found that the current multi-attributes techniques lacked in addressing the preferential dependency, selective attributes and utility optimization simultaneously in double auction frameworks. These concerns need to be addressed in order to devise a practical framework. The future direction for double auction framework in multi-attributes negotiation is suggested.

Look before you leap: are your oil patch liability clauses enforceable?: (An analysis under civil law jurisdictions with emphasis on Brazil)

Abstract The oil and gas industry requires huge investments involving extraordinary financial, environmental and safety risks. Dramatic images of the Deepwater Horizon (Gulf of Mexico, 2010), Alpha Piper (Scotland, 1988), P-51 (Brazil, 2001) and Campeche (Mexico, 1979) disasters offer chilling reminders of the monumental loss of life, property and environmental integrity that can quickly result from human error. With this backdrop, industry participants and their insurers learned early on that the normal fault-based approach to wellsite liability did not fit the nature and needs of the petroleum business. This article analyzes the risks inherent in applying the laws of a civil law jurisdiction to an oil and gas wellsite contract based on common law principles, with special emphasis on Brazil. It first briefly describes the traditional common law approach to liability allocation in wellsite contracts, including “knock-for-knock” principles (“K4K”). Next, it outlines the traditional civil law approach to liability (responsbilité) through French and Brazilian prisms. The authors do not deeply discuss the pros and cons of K4K clauses nor the policy implications of anti-indemnity statutes. Rather, they assume the reader is contemplating the negotiation of a wellsite services contract subject to the laws of a civil law jurisdiction, and describe the relevant risks and possible mitigation strategies.

An improved pricing algorithm for infrastructure as a service cloud

Marketing in cloud systems enables users to trade and share resources. For the sales of services, client applications and service providers negotiate to make a service level agreement. Offering prices in the negotiation of services become one that is challenging. A federal cloud is an efficient approach of recent interest to better balance risk sharing between services provider and customer. This work presents a new algorithm to increase service provider revenue and reducing user costs simultaneously. The auction of remaining time spent on resources and interactions between federal clouds increases the profits of clouds, the number of successful requests, and reduces users' costs. The simulation results confirm the expectations of the proposed approach.

Cloud service negotiation framework for real-time E-commerce application using game theory decision system

A major demanding issue is developing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) based negotiation framework in the cloud. To provide personalized service access to consumers, a novel Automated Dynamic SLA Negotiation Framework (ADSLANF) is proposed using a dynamic SLA concept to negotiate on service terms and conditions. The existing frameworks exploit a direct negotiation mechanism where the provider and consumer can directly talk to each other, which may not be applicable in the future due to increasing demand on broker-based models. The proposed ADSLANF will take very less total negotiation time due to complicated negotiation mechanisms using a third-party broker agent. Also, a novel game theory decision system will suggest an optimal solution to the negotiating agent at the time of generating a proposal or counter proposal. This optimal suggestion will make the negotiating party aware of the optimal acceptance range of the proposal and avoid the negotiation break off by quickly reaching an agreement.

The Blue Ocean Strategy Analysis of Chrysanthemum Flower

West Java as the central production of flower commodity in Indonesia is supported by 9 central districts, which Cianjur, one of the top three, contributes 53.67% of the West Java flower production. A high competition within the flower businesses result a growing issue for PT Alam Indah Bunga Nusantara (Alinda) as one of Chrysanthemum business leader in Cianjur. Thus, the company considers a more relevant strategy which makes this research aims on examining a) the competition factors, b) company's industrial situation, and c) different business strategy by using the Blue Ocean Strategy approach. Exploratory sequential mixed method was conducted. The analysis shows that PT Alinda need to reconstruct the market boundaries, consider new potential market through product differentiation. PT Alinda need to rebuild the consumer value by eliminate the payment negotiation service factor, reduce the product quality assurance factor, increase the order ease factor, and create a new business line such as offering flower arrangements and dried flower handicrafts. The third step of the strategy formulation aims to maximize strategy formulation for non-consumer markets. Furthermore, the Blue Ocean Strategy testing should be focused on the underperforming factors.

Negotiation of Specific Commitments under the Gats Scope and Negotiating History – A Legal Commentary on Article Xix Gats

This contribution offers a comprehensive analysis of Art. XIX GATS, entitled “Negotiation of Specific Commitments”, which clarifies the manner in which negotiations under the GATS should proceed in order to progressively achieve higher levels of liberalization. This provision also identifies various factors that should be taken into account during the future negotiations on services, such as Members’ national policy objectives and their level of development, and ensuring appropriate flexibility for developing countries. The fact that the single undertaking approach appears to be currently in retreat in favour of a plurilateral approach offers interesting perspectives. Negotiations for additional services liberalization alone can also create an important number of trade-offs as many economies, developed and developing alike, maintain several barriers to trade in services. For this to occur, services negotiations will need to be driven by domestic priorities and forces that gradually encompass the extensive payoffs associated with the pursuit of regulatory reforms in the service sector.

A Framework of Heterogeneous Cloud Service and Multi Attributes Negotiation using Double Auction

Many double auction frameworks have been proposed for cloud service negotiations 1. However, the frameworks are not able to accommodate both the heterogeneous cloud services and multi-attributes negotiation simultaneously. Therefore, this paper proposed a double-auction framework to accommodate heterogeneous cloud services and multi-attributes negotiation. The study postulated four activities namely literature review, cloud service marketplace investigation, data formulation and double auction-based negotiation framework development. The market requirements, auction requirements and two new mechanisms of a double auction framework have been proposed. © 2020, World Academy of Research in Science and Engineering. All rights reserved.