Efficacy of Alternative Service Quality Measures to Predict Satisfaction and Future Intention

Purpose:This research focuses on comparing various service quality measures including disconfirmation measures(performance-minus-importance and performance-minus-expectation),performance-only measure,and importance-weighted measures(importance-weighted performance-only and importance-weighted disconfirmation)in a festival setting.It also explores the relationship between the constructs of service quality and other variables including visitors’perceptions of overall service quality,overall satisfaction,and future intentions.Reliability,convergent validity,discriminant validity,and predictive validity of five service quality measures are tested and compared.The result shows that the importance-weighted performance-only measure exhibits the highest reliability and validity.

Dominant AHP as Measuring Method of Values in Service Society

Today, service science provides the authors with a new paradigm, as well as new values, which are able to be co-createa through the supportive efforts of people, facilitated by advanced technologies. Thus, the author, believing that analyzing and interpreting the characteristics and the properties of service science is significant, proves the effectiveness and validity of Dominant AHP as a measuring method of economic and service values in this paper.

Assessment of Alexandria Container Terminal Efficiency by Applying Performance Indicators

Containerization with its increasing share in seaborne trade highlights the importance of assessing container terminals performance indicators. The world economical situation and the global container market have improved slightly after the 2008 world economical crises. Egyptian container terminals are important to serve the world liner services in particular the main east-west routes. Egypt is considered the leading country in Africa and the 18th worldwide in serving the liner markets. Alexandria container terminal as a medium size terminal shows an acceptable super/infra structure facilities and throughput. The analysis of Alexandria container terminal performance indicators from 2007 to 2011 shows a slightly progressive trend. Selected indicators, reflecting production, productivity, utilization and service measures, were used according to the available data. Terminal production shows a slight increasing demand concerning number of vessels and TEUs （Twenty Equivalent Units）. Furthermore, productivity indicators proved remarkable development in moves per working hours rather than moves per hours in port, deducing lack of port services accompanying cargo handling. Moreover, Utilization measurements show the terminal occupancy ratio fluctuating from 45% to 67% with slight development. Finally, Service measures show progress in vessels turnaround time, while long wasted time consumed in processes rather than operation was observed.

Shared Resource Quality Monitoring and Dynamic Trust Management in a Community Cloud

The collaboration tools offered by Cloud Computing have increased the need to share data and services within companies or between autonomous organizations. This has led to the deployment of community cloud infrastructures. However, several challenges will arise from this grouping of heterogeneous organizations. One of the main challenges is the management of trust between the actors of the community. Trust issues arise from the uncertainty about the quality of the resources and entities involved. The quality of a resource can be examined from a security or functional perspective. Therefore, ensuring security and monitoring the quality of resources is to ensure a high level of trust. Therefore, we propose in this paper a technique for dynamic trust management and quality monitoring of resources shared between organizations. Our approach consists, on the one hand, in evaluating the quality of resources based on quality of service measurement attributes and, on the other hand, in updating the trust values according to the information deduced from these measurements. The proposed framework is evaluated in terms of resource sharing success rate and execution time. Experimental results and comparison with TNA-SL and InterTrust models show that the framework can identify and track the behavior of malicious organizations with relatively low execution time.

Coordinated target localization base on pseudo measurement for clustered space robot

This paper presents a coordinated target localization method for clustered space robot.According to the different measuring capabilities of cluster members,the master-slave coordinated relative navigation strategy for target localization with respect to slavery space robots is proposed;then the basic mathematical models,including coordinated relative measurement model and cluster centralized dynamics,are established respectively.By employing the linear Kalman flter theorem,the centralized estimator based on truth measurements is developed and analyzed frstly,and with an intention to inhabit the initial uncertainties related to target localization,the globally stabilized estimator is designed through introduction of pseudo measurements.Furthermore,the observability and controllability of stochastic system are also analyzed to qualitatively evaluate the convergence performance of pseudo measurement estimator.Finally,on-orbit target approaching scenario is simulated by using semi-physical simulation system,which is used to verify the convergence performance of proposed estimator.During the simulation,both the known and unknown maneuvering acceleration cases are considered to demonstrate the robustness of coordinated localization strategy.