This article presents a proof-of-concept implementation of a managed service for real-time rating, charging, and billing. The formal model of the usage tariffs and the operational interface utilized for this service are based on open standards. An end-to-end use case from the domain of medical image processing is outlined to illustrate the ease of integration of rating and charging into existing IT services.

This article presents a concept to integrate real-time rating and charging functionality into a federated cloud environment. It is part of the work in the ITEA2 EASI-CLOUDS project that aims at advancing cloud computing in Europe, Egypt and Korea with the main objective to provide a federated cloud computing infrastructure with enhanced reliability, elasticity, security and ease-of-use characteristics at all levels. The article examines already existing standards for Web Services-based rating, charging, account management and user management and illustrates the need for real-time rating and charging to enhance transparency for payments. Based on a brief overview about the general possibilities how to address rating, charging and billing in federated clouds, the chosen `adjunct rating and charging' approach and the main functions that have to be realized in this context are described.

In this article, we describe a service creation environment (SCE) that allows for protocol- and technology-independent development, deployment, and maintenance of interactive, menu-driven mobile services for cellular networks. The presented SCE eases the maintenance of mobile services, in particular by means of versioning and access right management. The SCE even allows third-party content providers to deploy services on their own by remotely accessing the SCE residing at a mobile network operator (MNO). The presented SCE is based on an open source content management system and currently supports maintenance of HTML-based service descriptions.

Current techniques for the verification of software as e.g. model checking are limited when it comes to the verification of complex distributed embedded real-time systems. Our approach addresses this problem and in particular the state explosion problem for the software controlling mechatronic systems, as we provide a domain specific formal semantic definition for a subset of the UML 2.0 component model and an integrated sequence of design steps. These steps prescribe how to compose complex software systems from domain-specific patterns which model a particular part of the system behavior in a well-defined context. The correctness of these patterns can be verified individually because they have only simple communication behavior and have only a fixed number of participating roles. The composition of these patterns to describe the complete component behavior and the overall system behavior is prescribed by a rigorous syntactic definition which guarantees that the verification of component and system behavior can exploit the results of the verification of individual patterns.