Each year, disasters (natural or man-made) cause a lot of damage and take many people's lives. In this situation, many volunteers come to help. While the proper management of volunteers is very effective in controlling the crisis, the lack of proper management of volunteers can create another crisis. Therefore, we introduce a model to deal with the volunteer assignment problem by considering two qualitative objective functions: The first one is minimizing the mean importance of Emergency Department (ED) centers' unmet needs by volunteers, and the second one is minimizing the mean degree of unsatisfied preferences of selected volunteers. To evaluate the introduced qualitative indexes, two Fuzzy Inference Systems (FISs) are used to encapsulate decision makers' knowledge as well as the human reasoning process. FISs are embedded in two evolutionary algorithms for solving the proposed model: Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) and Non-Dominated Ranked Genetic Algorithm (NRGA). Also, 30 small-size problems, as well as 30 large-size problems, are randomly generated and solved by both metaheuristic algorithms. Using the obtained data, the performance of NSGA-II and NRGA is measured and compared based on four criteria: CPU Time, Number of Non-dominated Solutions (NNS), Mean Ideal Distance (MID), and Spacing Metric (SM). Statistical tests show that both algorithms have the same performance in small-size problems. However, in large-size problems, NSGA-II is faster, and NRGA produces more optimal solutions. The proposed model is flexible enough to adapt to different scenarios just by updating linguistic rules in FISs. Also, since employed algorithms produce a set of optimal solutions, decision-makers can easily choose the most appropriate solution among the Pareto front based on the circumstances.

The skill shortage is becoming an ever-increasing challenge for IT departments. Allocation of resources in the best possible way is even more important. The challenge is to improve the enterprise not only on the side of the organizational and process level, but to develop new strategies and approaches in human resource management. Only a symbiosis of the disciplines economics, psychology and information technology will enable relevant and indispensable employees and promote loyalty to the company. A frequent change of the work place, for a well-trained professional, is so long associated with normality until they find the best environment for fulfilling their needs and expectations. These expectations are no longer just on a financial level. This paper will analyse the previous work on these topics and demonstrate first conclusions regarding a way forward.

This contribution provides an overview of cloud governance aspects based on a representative survey of trends in the perception, assessment and adoption of Cloud Computing within the enterprise. The survey was conducted through a two-fold research approach and combined a meta-study of existing and published empirical studies with an own empirical study within a representative group of European and International enterprises. We consider governance through the prism of adoption drivers and focus on the role of cloud brokers and cloud marketplaces more specifically.

Dependability should be considered throughout the phases of the SOA life cycle. This article proposes the application of a service level management approach to address dependability and presents dependability-related activities for every stage (Model, Assemble, Deploy, and Manage) of the SOA life cycle. Furthermore, we describe the concepts and the formalisms that are behind these activities. Following these activities service providers and aggregators can offer optimized levels of dependability from their existing services and thus better meet user requirements.

Event-driven architecture is gaining momentum in research and application areas as it promises enhanced responsiveness and asynchronous communication. The combination of event-driven and service-oriented architectural paradigms and Web service technologies provide a viable possibility to achieve these promises. This paper outlines an architectural design and accompanying implementation technologies for its realization as a Web services-based event-driven SOA.

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) systems can be a valuable contribution for a sustainable innovation management and product development. A major precondition is a standardized process with defined business services that encompasses project data repository, project assessment, selection, reporting, and portfolio reevaluation. This paper presents a multidimensional evaluation framework for research and development projects in industrial engineering that also considers innovation aspects. Furthermore, we describe the business services needed for PPM and evaluate its practical applicability by mapping these business services to technical web services provided by a commercial software product.

A typical citizen engages with governmental agencies at several hierarchical levels - local, regional and national. Federal and international communities add even more layers atop of them. We denote this as the concept of layered government. A citizen within such a community expects to find similar procedures and HCI interfaces to accomplish tasks, e.g., voting registration or business registration. Such commonly designed single points of contact are emerging as real challenges and are often mandated by legal regulations. We use the examples of the German E-Government Initiative and the EU Services Directive to define technical problem domains and propose concepts that address them.

Service-based systems are becoming the dominating technology for providing and combining functionality in distributed systems. They also can be a viable solution to address E-Government aspects. A typical citizen engages with governmental agencies at several hierarchical levels - local, regional and national. Federal and international organizations come atop. We denote this as the concept of layered government. The citizen expects to find similar procedures at every level. Such commonly designed single points of contact are emerging as real challenges and are often mandated by legal regulations. We use the examples of the German E-Government Initiative "Germany Online" and the EU Services Directive to propose areas where service orientation can be beneficial.

This paper evaluates replication possibilities for Web services at the operating system level and how they affect Web service performance. This is done in the context of architectural translucency - an approach that defines layers in a service-oriented architecture and states that similar measures have different implications on nonfunctional properties when applied at different layers in different ways. The observed layer here is the operating system. The work presents current request processing techniques and how they are implemented in a typical platform for Web services (Windows Server 2003, IIS and .NET). It then proposes two ways to replicate Web services - per-process replication and per-thread replication and techniques to configure them on the selected platform. The case study demonstrates the feasibility of the concept with performance advantages of up to 50%.

Web-services based systems present challenges for service level enforcement. Contrary to typical enterprise architectures where we are in control of all services and can easily specify and monitor service levels, here we need self-adapting approaches. The paper proposes techniques for service level enforcement in the context of a four step approach. The proposed techniques are: formalization of requirements using a service level objective, formalization of Web Service properties in a service level capability statement, and adaptive actions based on translucent replication of services. For an experimental evaluation we deployed a Web Service benchmark and our replication framework in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. It provided continuous meeting of specified service levels.