Dynamical distribution of continuous service time model involving non-Maxwellian collision kernel and value functions

The distribution of continuous service time in call centers is investigated.A non-Maxwellian collision kernel combining two different value functions in the interaction rule are used to describe the evolution of continuous service time,respectively.Using the statistical mechanical and asymptotic limit methods,Fokker–Planck equations are derived from the corresponding Boltzmann-type equations with non-Maxwellian collision kernels.The steady-state solutions of the Fokker–Planck equation are obtained in exact form.Numerical experiments are provided to support our results under different parameters.

Service Function Chain Deployment Algorithm Based on Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

Aiming at the rapid growth of network services,which leads to the problems of long service request processing time and high deployment cost in the deployment of network function virtualization service function chain(SFC)under 5G networks,this paper proposes a multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient optimization algorithm for SFC deployment(MADDPG-SD).Initially,an optimization model is devised to enhance the request acceptance rate,minimizing the latency and deploying the cost SFC is constructed for the network resource-constrained case.Subsequently,we model the dynamic problem as a Markov decision process(MDP),facilitating adaptation to the evolving states of network resources.Finally,by allocating SFCs to different agents and adopting a collaborative deployment strategy,each agent aims to maximize the request acceptance rate or minimize latency and costs.These agents learn strategies from historical data of virtual network functions in SFCs to guide server node selection,and achieve approximately optimal SFC deployment strategies through a cooperative framework of centralized training and distributed execution.Experimental simulation results indicate that the proposed method,while simultaneously meeting performance requirements and resource capacity constraints,has effectively increased the acceptance rate of requests compared to the comparative algorithms,reducing the end-to-end latency by 4.942%and the deployment cost by 8.045%.

Service Function Chain Migration in LEO Satellite Networks

With the advancements of software defined network(SDN)and network function virtualization(NFV),service function chain(SFC)placement becomes a crucial enabler for flexible resource scheduling in low earth orbit(LEO)satellite networks.While due to the scarcity of bandwidth resources and dynamic topology of LEO satellites,the static SFC placement schemes may cause performance degradation,resource waste and even service failure.In this paper,we consider migration and establish an online migration model,especially considering the dynamic topology.Given the scarcity of bandwidth resources,the model aims to maximize the total number of accepted SFCs while incurring as little bandwidth cost of SFC transmission and migration as possible.Due to its NP-hardness,we propose a heuristic minimized dynamic SFC migration(MDSM)algorithm that only triggers the migration procedure when new SFCs are rejected.Simulation results demonstrate that MDSM achieves a performance close to the upper bound with lower complexity.

Risk-Balanced Routing Strategy for Service Function Chains of Cyber-Physical Power System Considering Cross-Space Cascading Failure

Cyber-physical power system(CPPS)has significantly improved the operational efficiency of power systems.However,cross-space cascading failures may occur due to the coupling characteristics,which poses a great threat to the safety and reliability of CPPS,and there is an acute need to reduce the probability of these failures.Towards this end,this paper first proposes a cascading failure index to identify and quantify the importance of different information in the same class of communication services.On this basis,a joint improved risk-balanced service function chain routing strategy(SFC-RS)is proposed,which is modeled as a robust optimization problem and solved by column-and-constraint generation(C-CG)algorithm.Compared with the traditional shortest-path routing algorithm,the superiority of SFC-RS is verified in the IEEE 30-bus system.The results demonstrate that SFC-RS effectively mitigates the risk associated with information transmission in the network,enhances information transmission accessibility,and effectively limits communication disruption from becoming the cause of cross-space cascading failures.

Research and Practice of Online Service Hall in Colleges and Universities

The needs of teachers and students, the requirements of educational modernization and informatization and the development of information technology promote the online service hall to become an important part of the smart campus. The online service hall is also a hot spot of information construction in universities in recent years. Taking China University of Geosciences (Beijing) for example, this paper probes into the problems and causes of the current difficulties of teachers and students in complicated school’s business process and puts forward the construction goal and ideas of the online service hall. A four-layer architecture which includes data layer, business service support layer, business service layer and presentation layer for service e-hall is designed and the organization and implementation steps of the online service hall are expounded. In addition, the extended applications such as integrated self-service printing terminal and electronic signature are considered. This paper can be used for reference for the construction and implementation of online service hall in other universities.

Stakeholders： the extension of service function of modem universities

Various ＂stakeholders＂ come into being around modern universities. Their emergence is based upon responsibility and contribution of extending university function to social public interest. Definitive stakeholders, expectant stakeholders and latent stakeholders constitute the objects of universities achieving their service function. Thus, management mode of universities undertakes exploration and reform. Yet ignoring part of the management status of ＂stakeholders＂ can also affect that universities fulfill their social responsibilities and promote their service functions to some extent.

Influence of varied drought types on soil conservation service within the framework of climate change:insights from the Jinghe River Basin,China

Severe soil erosion and drought are the two main factors affecting the ecological security of the Loess Plateau,China.Investigating the influence of drought on soil conservation service is of great importance to regional environmental protection and sustainable development.However,there is little research on the coupling relationship between them.In this study,focusing on the Jinghe River Basin,China as a case study,we conducted a quantitative evaluation on meteorological,hydrological,and agricultural droughts(represented by the Standardized Precipitation Index(SPI),Standardized Runoff Index(SRI),and Standardized Soil Moisture Index(SSMI),respectively)using the Variable Infiltration Capacity(VIC)model,and quantified the soil conservation service using the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation(RUSLE)in the historical period(2000-2019)and future period(2026-2060)under two Representative Concentration Pathways(RCPs)(RCP4.5 and RCP8.5).We further examined the influence of the three types of drought on soil conservation service at annual and seasonal scales.The NASA Earth Exchange Global Daily Downscaled Projections(NEX-GDDP)dataset was used to predict and model the hydrometeorological elements in the future period under the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios.The results showed that in the historical period,annual-scale meteorological drought exhibited the highest intensity,while seasonal-scale drought was generally weakest in autumn and most severe in summer.Drought intensity of all three types of drought will increase over the next 40 years,with a greater increase under the RCP4.5 scenario than under the RCP8.5 scenario.Furthermore,the intra-annual variation in the drought intensity of the three types of drought becomes smaller under the two future scenarios relative to the historical period(2000-2019).Soil conservation service exhibits a distribution pattern characterized by high levels in the southwest and southeast and lower levels in the north,and this pattern has remained consistent both in the historical and future periods.Over the past 20 years,the intra-annual variation indicated peak soil conservation service in summer and lowest level in winter;the total soil conservation of the Jinghe River Basin displayed an upward trend,with the total soil conservation in 2019 being 1.14 times higher than that in 2000.The most substantial impact on soil conservation service arises from annual-scale meteorological drought,which remains consistent both in the historical and future periods.Additionally,at the seasonal scale,meteorological drought exerts the highest influence on soil conservation service in winter and autumn,particularly under the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios.Compared to the historical period,the soil conservation service in the Jinghe River Basin will be significantly more affected by drought in the future period in terms of both the affected area and the magnitude of impact.This study conducted beneficial attempts to evaluate and predict the dynamic characteristics of watershed drought and soil conservation service,as well as the response of soil conservation service to different types of drought.Clarifying the interrelationship between the two is the foundation for achieving sustainable development in a relatively arid and severely eroded area such as the Jinghe River Basin.

Research on the Integrated Development of Disability Services in the Greater Bay Area From the Perspective of Media Functions

As the main window for the public to understand the outside world,mass media has an undeniable influence on economic and social development.The way in which the media reports on issues related to people with disabilities not only affects the voice of the disabled community,which determines the public image of the“disappearing”disabled community,but also affects the public awareness and recognition of the disability cause.To further explore the current status of mainstream media’s coverage of the disability cause,this article combines relevant concepts from media function theory and analyzes reports related to the integrated development of the disability cause in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area by using the examples of the Zhuhai Special Zone Daily,Southern Metropolis Daily,and Shenzhen Special Zone Daily since the release of the Development Plan Outline for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area in 2019.The results show that the“Integrated Development of the Disability Cause in the Bay Area”presented in the reports has the characteristics of service-oriented and cooperation-based,which is in line with the overall trend of the development of China’s disability cause.However,due to factors such as a small overall quantity of related reports,a relatively single style of reporting and information sources,and a strong promotional tone,there still exists a certain difference between the“media reality”and objective reality constructed by these reports.Therefore,this article suggests that institutional media should fully strengthen their coverage of relevant topics,while enhancing the timeliness and readability of reports by enriching various reporting elements.By further enhancing the effectiveness of reporting and communication,the integrated development of the disability cause in the Bay Area can be effectively promoted.

The college students' response to customized information services based on Library2.0 technologies at universities in Nanjing

Through a questionnaire survey of students’ response from 6 universities in Nanjing, this paper aims to determine their varying degrees of satisfaction about the customized information service based on Library2.0 technologies. In so doing, the authors carefully examined the data collected from the returned questionnaires about such key issues as the students’ perceptions about the customized information service via a Library2.0platform, self-initiated use experience of such a mechanism, their achieved information searching results vis-à-vis their expectations, etc. In addition, the authors also made a comparative study between information providers(i.e. librarians) and information consumers(i.e. students) at Chinese and American academic libraries.

Activity-Based Costing of Library Services in Universities——A Case Study of a Private University

An organization’s costing system is a system that helps the management with the strategy planning while the system plays an important role in providing accurate cost information about the products and customers.In other words,the costing management system is important to provide timely and quality information to help managers in their decision-making process.Producing quality graduates is the main objective of any university and the cost of quality or the cost of poor quality is one that is often difficult to measure in higher education.This can be partly attributed to the fact that most accounting systems are not structured to capture important cost-of-quality information.In order to succeed,many organizations tend to shift from conventional or traditional costing system to Activity-based costing(ABC).ABC provides both higher education administrators and policymakers with better information on which to base decisions.The use of multiple cost pools and drivers under ABC leads to more detailed and accurate product costing than that provided by traditional cost systems.This paper attempts to investigate the possibilities and limitations of implementing ABC in universities.More specifically the study makes use of the case study method to illustrate the implementation of activity-based costing of library services in a private university in the Kingdom of Bahrain.The research methodology of the case study is a combination of both descriptive and quantitative analyses.The study identified six categories of cost pools which are related to the activities of the library as well as 17 relevant cost drivers.Accordingly,ABC should lead to a better understanding of what drives costs and,by extension,what changes are necessary to reduce costs.Unnecessary activities that do not add value to services can be identified and eliminated.Further ABC is feasible in an academic library and that much can be gained from the process of analyzing activities.However,more work needs to be done in terms of designing accounting and other information systems to capture cost and activity transaction data in a more routine and disaggregated form for ABC analysis.

The Ethical Dilemmas and Beyond Demands of Colleges and Universities＇ Social Services

Social Services ethical behavior is the norm university college norms and values of social service selection. The current lot of negative factors that exist in society, leading to social service ethic universities face many practical difficulties： for guiding spirit of paranoia shaken ethical orientation of social services for the blind t,argets deep extension of the apparent deviation ethics of social services, the service Preference object affects the ethical tone of social services for their properties to accommodate non-independent eroding the foundation of ethics established by the social services. Therefore, the identification of good ethical order, to call college cultural consciousness, lifting universities utilitarian development difficulties, reasonably determine the role of university social services, the ability to face the limits of educational services, social services, colleges and universities to guide ethical behavior.

How to Optimize the Management of Science and Technology Funds in Colleges and Universities Based on the Policy of Streamlining Administration,Delegating Powers,Improving Regulation,and Strengthening Services

To advance the field of science and technology,we need to revitalize the development of science and technology through innovation.The development of science and technology has many beneficial implications on the revitalization of the country.For this reason,universities in China should give full attention to their role as the main propeller of science and technology.“Streamlining administration,delegating powers,improving regulation,and strengthening services”is a policy issued by the Chinese government for the management of science and technology funds in colleges and universities.Based on the policy of“streamlining administration,delegating powers,improving regulation,and strengthening services,”colleges and universities must optimize the management of science and technology funds for their efficient use.In this paper,we analyzed the importance of the policy and put forward an effective management strategy,aiming to improve the management of science and technology funds in colleges and universities.

Preliminary Evaluation on Urban Forest Ecosystem Services Function in Meizhou City

In order to better explore the function of urban forest in human habitation and settlement environment,the ecosystem functions were evaluated in terms of air purification,water conservation,soil conservation,maintenance of biodiversity in Meizhou by the methods of market price,shadow prices approach and opportunity cost,and the problems of the value assessment at home and abroad in urban forest ecosystem services function were simply discussed.

Role-Play and Its Functions in Oral English Teaching in Universities

Role-play is recommended as a useful method to solve the problem of oral English teaching. It's much more than a performance and it can be considered as a way to vary the kinds of spoken interaction that learners can experience in the classroom of universities. Through the use of role-play, oral English teaching becomes more interesting and attractive; university students can gain more oral English skills in the mini society atmosphere, and the accuracy and fluency of their oral English will be improved.

A preliminary study of cryosphere service function and value evaluation

Cryosphere science research and development(R&D) has been strongly committed to public service, integrating natural sciences with socioeconomic impacts. Owing to the current shift from purely natural cryosphere scientific research to linking cryosphere science with socioeconomic and cultural science, cross-disciplinary research in this field is emerging, which advocates future cryosphere science research in this field. Utilizing the cryosphere service function(CSF), this study establishes CSF and its value evaluation system. Cryosphere service valuation can benefit the decisionmakers' and public's awareness of environmental protection. Implementing sustainable CSF utilization strategies and macroeconomic policymaking for global environmental protection will have profound and practical significance as well as avoid environmental degradation while pursuing short-term economic profits and achieving rapid economic development.

Preface to the 2nd Special Issue on Climate Science for Service Partnership China

It is a great pleasure to introduce this second special issue of Advances in Atmospheric Sciences with new highlights from the Climate Science for Service Partnership(CSSP,Scaife et al.,2021)between China and the UK.The CSSP harnesses expertise in the China Meteorological Administration’s National Climate Centre(CMA NCC),the Institute of Atmospheric Physics(IAP)at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Met Office,plus key UK and Chinese universities and institutes to deliver a vibrant programme of collaborative research.

A Universal Activation Function for Deep Learning

Recently,deep learning has achieved remarkable results in fields that require human cognitive ability,learning ability,and reasoning ability.Activation functions are very important because they provide the ability of artificial neural networks to learn complex patterns through nonlinearity.Various activation functions are being studied to solve problems such as vanishing gradients and dying nodes that may occur in the deep learning process.However,it takes a lot of time and effort for researchers to use the existing activation function in their research.Therefore,in this paper,we propose a universal activation function(UA)so that researchers can easily create and apply various activation functions and improve the performance of neural networks.UA can generate new types of activation functions as well as functions like traditional activation functions by properly adjusting three hyperparameters.The famous Convolutional Neural Network(CNN)and benchmark datasetwere used to evaluate the experimental performance of the UA proposed in this study.We compared the performance of the artificial neural network to which the traditional activation function is applied and the artificial neural network to which theUA is applied.In addition,we evaluated the performance of the new activation function generated by adjusting the hyperparameters of theUA.The experimental performance evaluation results showed that the classification performance of CNNs improved by up to 5%through the UA,although most of them showed similar performance to the traditional activation function.

Dynamic Backup Sharing Scheme of Service Function Chains in NFV

Service function chains(SFC)mapping takes the responsibility for managing virtual network functions(VNFs).In SFC mapping,existing solutions duplicate VNFs with redundant instances to provide high availability in response to failures.However,as a compromise,these solutions result in high resource consumption due to device maintenance.In this paper,we propose a novel method named dynamic backup sharing(DBS)that allows SFCs to dynamically share backups to reduce resource consumption.DBS formulates the problem of sharing backups among different VNFs as an integer linear programming(ILP).Thereafter,we design a novel online algorithm based on dynamic programming to solve the problem.The experimental results indicate that DBS outperforms state-ofthe-art works by reducing resource consumption and improving the number of accepted requests.

AdaptNF: Adaptive service chain scheduling with stateless migration and NF consolidation

The combination of network function virtualization and software-defined networking allows various network functions to process flows according to their characteristics and requirements.Due to the highly dynamic nature of the workload,the network infrastructure needs to properly schedule the underlying resources in order to respond to workload changes in a timely manner.However,the existing NFV platform lacks a comprehensive solution for how to scale under workload variation,which may seriously hurt the overall system performance.To improve the scalability of the NFV platform and ensure consistent high performance under dynamic workloads,we propose AdaptNF,a novel NFV platform designed to support a combination of course-grained and fine-grained resource scheduling strategies.To deal with resource imbalance,which is the essential scheduling problem that leads to insufficient NFV performance,AdaptNF adopts a novel algorithm that can efficiently balance the workload among multiple network function instances through stateless flow migration.Our controlled experiments show that the AdaptNF scheme can optimize resource allocation and ensure outstanding performance after scaling.In terms of network throughput and latency,AdaptNF significantly improves the performance of the underlying NFV platform.

Service Function Chain in Small Satellite-Based Software Defined Satellite Networks

Software Defined Satellite Networks(SDSN) are proposed to solve the problems in traditional satellite networks, such as time-consuming configuration and inflexible traffic scheduling. The emerging application of small satellite and research of SDSN make it possible for satellite networks to provide flexible network services. Service Function Chain(SFC) can satisfy this need. In this paper, we are motivated to investigate applying SFC in the small satellite-based SDSN for service delivery. We introduce the structure of the multi-layer constellation-based SDSN. Then, we describe two deployment patterns of SFC in SDSN, the Multi-Domain(MD) pattern and the Satellite Formation(SF) pattern. We propose two algorithms, SFP-MD, and SFP-SF, to calculate the Service Function Path(SFP). We implement the algorithms and conduct contrast experiments in our prototype. Finally, we summarize the applicable conditions of two deployment patterns according to the experimental results in terms of hops, delay, and packet loss rate.