Automated Teller Machine (ATM) service providers are increasingly challenged with improving the quality of customer service while reducing the cost of cash flow management. Effectively balancing the need to have enough cash in the ATMs to avoid out-of-cash incidents as well as to reduce the cash interest cost and the cash refill cost challenges the most experienced cash flow management teams. In this paper we propose an optimization framework for managing the ATM cash flow network. The interactions among various constraints and cost factors are included in the framework to allow decision-making regarding the optimal cash refill amount and schedule. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach using sample data from a large commercial bank.

Due to increased competition in the IT Services business, improving quality, reducing costs and shortening schedules has become extremely important. A key strategy being adopted for achieving these goals is the use of an asset-based approach to service delivery, where standard reusable components developed by domain experts are minimally modified for each customer instead of creating custom solutions. One example of this approach is the use of contract templates, one for each type of service offered. A compliance checking system that measures how well actual contracts adhere to standard templates is critical for ensuring the success of such an approach. This paper describes the use of document similarity measures - Cosine similarity and Latent Semantic Indexing - to identify the top candidate templates on which a more detailed (and expensive) compliance analysis can be performed. Comparison of results of using the different methods are presented.

This paper presents CARP, an integrated program and storage replication solution. CARP extends program replication systems which do not currently address storage errors, builds upon a record-and-replay scheme that handles nondeterminism in program execution, and uses a scheme based on recorded program state and I/O logs to enable efficient detection of silent data errors and efficient recovery from such errors. CARP is designed to be transparent to applications with minimal run-time impact and is general enough to be implemented on commodity machines. We implemented CARP as a prototype on the Linux operating system and conducted extensive sensitivity analysis of its overhead with different application profiles and system parameters. In particular, we evaluated CARP with standard unmodified email, database, and web server benchmarks and showed that it imposes acceptable overhead while providing sub-second program state recovery times on detecting a silent data error.

The multiprotocol transport networking (MPTN) architecture proposed in this paper is a general solution to providing interconnectivity for applications. The MPTN architecture provides a protocol-independent system interface that includes most functions provided by existing transport protocols. As a result, the MPTN architecture decouples higher-layer protocols, application programming interfaces, and applications from protocols at the transport layer and below. Using the MPTN architecture, current and new applications can function unmodified over any transport supported under the MPTN interface. In addition, MPTN transport-layer gateways provide an end-to-end communication facility across a number of networks running different protocols. Therefore, a collection of networks running different protocols can serve as a single logical network.>

The authors describe a tightly coupled environment architecture centered around a customized software development assistant, that uses underlying representations of the software development process, the objects and relationships being manipulated, the functionalities of the tools, and the roles of the various project members to provide automated support for this discipline. The assistant facilitates the interconnection of all the components of the environment. Features of a conceptual modeling language for specifying such representations and using them to generate customized assistants are emphasized.>