This article describes a distributed e-healthcare system that uses the service-oriented architecture as a means of designing, implementing, and managing healthcare services. Effective and timely communication between patients, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other healthcare professionals is vital to good healthcare. Current communication mechanisms, based largely on paper records and prescriptions, are old-fashioned, inefficient, and unreliable. In an age of electronic record keeping and communication, the healthcare industry is still tied to paper documents that are easily mislaid, often illegible, and easy to forge. When multiple healthcare professionals and facilities are involved in providing healthcare for a patient, the healthcare services provided aren't often coordinated. Countries that have centralized healthcare systems such as the UK have made considerable progress toward electronic medical records and prescriptions, including patient access to them. Despite concerns about security and privacy, such systems provide increased accuracy and efficiency, better communication among healthcare professionals, and reduced risk of prescription errors.In the US, such record keeping and communication are difficult to establish because of the highly diverse and decentralized nature of healthcare. Physicians' offices, clinics, hospitals, and 24IT Pro March/April 2008 P u b l i s h e d b y t h e I E E E C o m p u t e r S o c i e t y 1520-920 /08/$25.00
Web services can be used to automate business activities that span multiple enterprises over the Internet. Such business activities require a coordination protocol to reach consistent results among the participants in the business activity. In the current state of the art, either classical distributed transactions or extended transactions with compensating transactions are used. However, classical distributed transactions lock data in the databases of different enterprises for unacceptable durations or involve repeated retries, and compensating transactions can lead to inconsistencies in the databases of the different enterprises. In this article, we describe a novel reservation protocol that can be used to coordinate the tasks of a business activity. Instead of resorting to compensating transactions, the reservation protocol employs an explicit reservation phase and an explicit confirmation and cancellation phase. We show how our reservation protocol maps to the Web services coordination specification, and describe our implementation of the reservation protocol. We compare the performance of the reservation protocol with that of the two-phase commit protocol and optimistic two-phase commit protocol. We also compare the probability of inconsistency for the reservation protocol with that for compensating transactions.
The MIDAS system is an automated supply chain management system that enables customers, manufacturers, and suppliers to cooperate over the Internet. MIDAS aims to achieve high customer satisfaction by supporting the build-to-order customization model and to reduce inventory carrying costs and logistics administration costs at the manufacturer by supporting the just-in-time manufacturing model. It allows a manufacturer to choose from the MIDAS Registry, suppliers of components, and negotiate based on the prices, availability, and delivery times of those components. The manufacturer can use one of several strategies to aggregate customers’ orders before processing them, and one of several strategies to accumulate suppliers’ quotes before deciding on a particular supplier. The paper presents an evaluation of these strategies in terms of the customer’s satisfaction, as measured by the customer response time, and the manufacturer’s gain, as measured by the number of orders aggregated or the best price ratio.
The MIDAS system is an automated supply chain management system that enables customers, manufacturers, and suppliers to cooperate over the Internet. MIDAS aims to achieve high customer satisfaction by supporting the build-to-order customization model and to reduce inventory carrying costs and logistics administration costs at the manufacturer by supporting the just-in-time manufacturing model. It allows a manufacturer to choose from the MIDAS Registry, suppliers of components, and negotiate based on the prices, availability, and delivery times of those components. The manufacturer can use one of several strategies to aggregate customers’ orders before processing them, and one of several strategies to accumulate suppliers’ quotes before deciding on a particular supplier. The paper presents an evaluation of these strategies in terms of the customer’s satisfaction, as measured by the customer response time, and the manufacturer’s gain, as measured by the number of orders aggregated or the best price ratio.
In this paper we present a Collaborative Computing Infrastructure that enables applications that are distributed across a network of computers to collaborate using the Atom Publishing Protocol. The Collaborative Computing Infrastructure couples together, and facilitates interactions between, application programs using the pull-based, eventbased distributed computing paradigm. The Atom Server allows publishers to publish events as Atom feed entries for consumers to read. The current specification of the Atom Publishing Protocol, which we have implemented, requires feed entries to be retrieved one by one. To provide better performance, we have also implemented a modification of the Atom Publishing Protocol that supports retrieval of all of the feed entries in a collection at once. This modification results in shorter retrieval times for feed entries, fewer connections to the Atom Server for each consumer, and larger numbers of concurrent consumers.
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