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Recently, growing cloud services (CSs) have been leased by organizations for high-performance computation and massive data storage of data-intensive applications (DiAs). To improve the resource utilization of leased CSs, it has become a challenging task to optimize infrastructure as a service CS composition for DiAs (ICSCDs) from the user side. This paper proposes a resource utilization-aware collaborative optimization approach. Targeting the collaboration features of tasks in a DiA, the environments—classes, agents, roles, groups, and objects model is used to formalize the ICSCD problem from the perspective of role-based collaboration. Aiming at the dynamic characteristics of the cloud environment, an integrated method is presented to evaluate the qualification of CSs via the interval numbers with multiple parameters. Based on the exact qualification values, the ICSCD can be optimized for improving the resource utilization of the CSs. A solution using the IBM ILOG CPLEX optimization package is put forward to solve the problem. The experimental results demonstrate that the approach can provide high precision, performance, stability, resource utilization, and low usage cost for the resource utilization-aware ICSCD from the user side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is an important topic to organize a team efficiently and keep it in a good state. In most cases, administrators try to avoid critical members. With this requirement, administrators prefer that their team members are able to be good at many things and expert in one (GMEO). However, that too many people are “good at many things” is definitely a waste. Role-based collaboration and its environments—classes, agents, roles, groups, and objects (E-CARGO) model are a good means to provide modeling and solutions to such a challenging problem. This paper formalizes the problem of GMEO into GMEO-1 (the fundamental form of GMEO) with the support of E-CARGO, clarifies two different forms of GMEO-1 and provides two highly practical solutions. The proposed solutions are verified by comparing with initial solutions using a linear programming solver, i.e., the IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimization Platform. The contributions of this paper are a thorough investigation of GMEO-1 that has no exact solutions even for a small group (e.g., ten people) and is normally managed by highly qualified administrators. The proposed solutions provide digital results with algorithms that form a solid foundation for decision making in dealing with similar issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Role assignment is an important and complex task in collaboration and management. Group role assignment (GRA) pursues the optimal team performance by assigning pertinent roles to agents in a team from the team’s viewpoint. There are many factors that should be considered when conducting role assignment. Budgets are such a factor. This paper presents a challenging role assignment problem in collaboration, called GRA with budget constraints (GRABC). This paper contributes a thorough investigation of the GRABC problem including: 1) the first formalization of the proposed problem; 2) a set of practical solutions to different forms of this problem by using the IBM ILOG CPLEX optimization package (CPLEX); 3) a set of necessary conditions for these problems to possess feasible solutions to improve the CPLEX solutions; and 4) a synthesized process to deal with GRABC problems. Contribution 2) actually clarifies a list of requirements in solving the GRABC problem. Simulations, experiments and a case study are used to verify the practicability and efficiency of the proposed solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Role assignment is a critical element in the role-based collaboration process. There are many different requirements to be considered when undertaking this task. This correspondence paper formalizes the group multirole assignment (GMRA) problem; proves the necessary and sufficient condition for the problem to have a feasible solution, provides an improved IBM ILOG CPLEX optimization package solution, and verifies the proposed solution with experiments. The contributions of this paper include: 1) the formalization of an important engineering problem, i.e., the GMRA problem; 2) a theoretical proof of the necessary and sufficient condition for GMRA to have a feasible solution; and 3) an improved ILOG solution to such a problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Role assignment is a critical element in the role-based collaboration process. There are many constraints to be considered when undertaking this task. This paper formalizes the group role assignment problem when faced with the constraint of conflicting agents, verifies the benefits of solving the problem, proves that such a problem is a subproblem of the extended integer linear programming (x-ILP) problem, proposes a practical approach to the solution, and assures performance based on the results of experiments. The contributions of this paper include: 1) formalization of the proposed problem; 2) verification of the benefit achieved by avoiding conflicts in role assignment through simulation; 3) theoretical proof that conflict avoidance is a subproblem of the x-ILP problem that is nonpolynomial-complete; and 4) a practical solution based on the IBM ILOG CPLEX optimization package (ILOG) and verification of the scale of problems that can be solved with ILOG. The proposed approach is validated by simulation experiments. Its efficiency is verified by comparison with the previous exhaustive search-based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SUMMARY Role-based collaboration is an emerging methodology to facilitate an organizational structure, provide orderly system behavior, and consolidate system security for both human and non-human entities, like agents, that collaborate and coordinate their activities with or within systems. Interaction management must, however, be able to handle run-time and dynamic scenarios. Hence, every role-based collaboration system must provide a good level of dynamism, that is, provide an agent with the capability to assume, use, and release a role depending on run-time conditions. Dynamism, however, does not suffice in adaptative scenarios: being able to use a role dynamically is important, but in order to enhance interagent communications, the capability to perceive a played role is important too. Role perceivability is the capability of an agent to autonomously recognize the role played by another entity without the need to ask a yellow-page directory. Whereas dynamism has been achieved with different techniques and often through language support, role perceivability is more difficult to achieve and to some extent even more important because it can boost sociality among entities and agents. In object-oriented programming languages, such as JAVA, role perceivability could be achieved with appropriate changes to the agent/entity class structure, but this requires compile time constraints that are, in their nature, not dynamic. This paper proposes an approach to remedy the above problems: maintaining an appropriate level of dynamism. The work presented here allows a JAVA agent to make its role perceivable to other entities as if it is applied at compile time. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]