Information technology in Nigerian banks: The limits of expectations

In the last ten years, banks in developed countries have been investing more and more in information technology (IT) as a means to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency. An investigation of the application of IT in Nigerian banks was carried out in order to determine the expectations and success of IT implementations in the sector. The data were generated from a survey of randomly selected branches of 56 banks in Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria. Almost all the banks had an IT policy, the main thrusts of which where to achieve full application of IT, to be able to meet organisational goals, to secure competitive advantage, and to be up to date. Only 54.6% of them actually achieved some measure of successful implementations. The expected benefits of investment in IT were realised in only a relatively few number of banks. The consequence was that less than 40% of the banks were poised to maximise the benefits of IT through major investments, especially in the areas of online access and transactions, electronic commerce, and electronic publishing. It is estimated that at least 60% of the branches of these banks are spending less than $150,000 annually on IT. An upsurge of investment is, however, expected, first by the banks that style themselves as progressive and have already made some success in IT implementations, and later by the other banks.     

Ultraviolet photodetectors and readout based on a-IGZO semiconductor technology

In this work, real-time ultraviolet photodetectors are realized through metal–semiconductor–metal (MSM) structures. Amorphous indium gallium zinc oxide (a-IGZO) is used as semiconductor material and gold as metal electrodes. The readout of an individual sensor is implemented by a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) consisting of an all-enhancement a-IGZO thin-film transistor (TFT) operational amplifier and a switched capacitor (SC) as feedback resistance. The photosensor and the transimpedance amplifier are both manufactured on glass substrates. The measured photosensor possesses a high responsivity R , a low response time t _{R E S} , and a good noise equivalent power value NEP .     

Automated property verification for large scale B models with ProB

In this paper we describe the successful application of the ProB tool for data validation in several industrial applications. The initial case study centred on the San Juan metro system installed by Siemens. The control software was developed and formally proven with B. However, the development contains certain assumptions about the actual rail network topology which have to be validated separately in order to ensure safe operation. For this task, Siemens has developed custom proof rules for Atelier B. Atelier B, however, was unable to deal with about 80 properties of the deployment (running out of memory). These properties thus had to be validated by hand at great expense, and they need to be revalidated whenever the rail network infrastructure changes. In this paper we show how we were able to use ProB to validate all of the about 300 properties of the San Juan deployment, detecting exactly the same faults automatically in a few minutes that were manually uncovered in about one man-month. We have repeated this task for three ongoing projects at Siemens, notably the ongoing automatisation of the line 1 of the Paris Métro. Here again, about a man month of effort has been replaced by a few minutes of computation. This achievement required the extension of the ProB kernel for large sets as well as an improved constraint propagation algorithm. We also outline some of the effort and features that were required in moving from a tool capable of dealing with medium-sized examples towards a tool able to deal with actual industrial specifications. We also describe the issue of validating ProB, so that it can be integrated into the SIL4 development chain at Siemens.     

Critical Success Factors for Managing Systems Integration

System integration is a complex technological task, and an infrastructure decision that seems right today might well be obsolete tomorrow. This article proposes a framework of critical success factors (CSFs) that can be used to manage IS integration projects, according to a firm's current stage of IT integration maturity and other IS infrastructure characteristics. To demonstrate the potential utility of this CSF framework, the authors analyze case studies at two firms using 86 metrics for 20 CSFs developed by the authors.     

Model-based cloud resource management with TOSCA and OCCI

Software and Systems Modeling - With the advent of cloud computing, different cloud providers with heterogeneous cloud services (compute, storage, network, applications, etc.) and their related...     

Burner Performance Evaluation Using Test Code

Development of new burner technology is common practice nowadays. Standardized test codes are available to conduct tests to determine operating characteristics and thermal performance of different parts of steam generating units. This paper describes the results of testing performed to evaluate thermal efficiency of a 74.5?kW fire-tube steam generator fired with a new premixed flame burner in comparison to a typical standard-retrofit diffusion flame burner system. Two premixed flame burners sized at 7.6 and 10.1?cm were tested. Testing was performed in accordance with the ASME PTC 4.1 Power Test Code. The evaluation was conducted in the range of small- to mid-sized, natural gas-fired applications, from 1.06?to?2.64×106?kJ/h. The environmental nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions performance was also compared for both burner technologies. The results of this evaluation indicate that firing the test boiler with the 7.6?cm new burner slightly improves unit thermal efficiency by 4.0–3.3% for a unit load ranging from approximately 1.06?to?1.79×106?kJ/h, respectively. Operation with the 10.1?cm new burner improves the thermal efficiency by approximately 1.6% at 2.32×106?kJ/h. The uncertainty in the measurements used in the efficiency calculations should account for approximately ±1.5% uncertainty in the reported gross efficiency. Reductions in NOx emissions of the order of 10% resulted from operation with the new premixed flame burners.     

Wann sind Lieferaufträge profitabel?

The paper aims to optimize the final part of a firm’s value chain with regard to attended last-mile deliveries. It is assumed that to be profitable, e-commerce businesses need to maximize the overall value of fulfilled orders (rather than their number), while also limiting costs of delivery. To do so, it is essential to decide which delivery requests to accept and which time windows to offer to which consumers. This is especially relevant for attended deliveries, as delivery fees usually cannot fully compensate costs of delivery given tight delivery time windows. The literature review shows that existing order acceptance techniques often ignore either the order value or the expected costs of delivery. The paper presents an iterative solution approach: after calculating an approximate transport capacity based on forecasted are accepted or rejected expected delivery requests and a cost-minimizing routing, actual delivery requests aiming to maximize the overall value of orders given the computed transport capacity. With the final set of accepted requests, the routing solution is updated to minimize costs of delivery. The presented solution approach combines well-known methods from revenue management and time-dependent vehicle routing. In a computational study for a German metropolitan area, the potential and the limits of value-based demand fulfillment as well as its sensitivity regarding forecast accuracy and demand composition are investigated.     

Automated industrial IoT-device integration using the OpenPnP reference architecture

Distributed control systems are currently evolving towards industrial Internet of Things (IoT) systems communicating fully using Internet protocols. This creates opportunities for streamlining costly commissioning processes, which today require substantial manual work for installing, configuring, and integrating thousands of actuators and sensors. The vision of “plug-and-produce” control systems has been pursued for more than 15 years, but existing approaches fell short regarding configuration tasks and vendor neutrality. This paper introduces the standards-based IoT reference architecture OpenPnP, which allows largely automating the configuration and integration tasks of industrial commissioning processes. The architecture includes a number of design and technology decisions and the required implementation can be scaled down to resource-constrained industrial devices. This paper demonstrates how OpenPnP can reduce configuration and integration efforts up to 90% in typical settings, while potentially scaling well up to tens of thousands of communicated signals. Practitioners can orient their implementations towards OpenPnP, therefore potentially enabling “plug-and-produce” in many thousands of control systems.     

Distributed Approximation of Capacitated Dominating Sets

We study local, distributed algorithms for the capacitated minimum dominating set (CapMDS) problem, which arises in various distributed network applications. Given a network graph G=(V,E), and a capacity cap(v)∈ℕ for each node v∈V, the CapMDS problem asks for a subset S⊆V of minimal cardinality, such that every network node not in S is covered by at least one neighbor in S, and every node v∈S covers at most cap(v) of its neighbors. We prove that in general graphs and even with uniform capacities, the problem is inherently non-local, i.e., every distributed algorithm achieving a non-trivial approximation ratio must have a time complexity that essentially grows linearly with the network diameter. On the other hand, if for some parameter ε>0, capacities can be violated by a factor of 1+ε, CapMDS becomes much more local. Particularly, based on a novel distributed randomized rounding technique, we present a distributed bi-criteria algorithm that achieves an O(log Δ)-approximation in time O(log ³ n+log (n)/ε), where n and Δ denote the number of nodes and the maximal degree in G, respectively. Finally, we prove that in geometric network graphs typically arising in wireless settings, the uniform problem can be approximated within a constant factor in logarithmic time, whereas the non-uniform problem remains entirely non-local.