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The term Tactile Internet broadly refers to a communication network that is capable of delivering real-time control, touch, and sensing/actuation information through sufficiently reliable, responsive, and intelligent connectivity. Envisioned to enable unprecedented applications, the Tactile Internet provides a promising opportunity to reshape industrial communication and transform the operation of many existing industrial systems. This paper investigates the role of Tactile Internet in current and future industrial systems and reviews the technological trends from legacy industrial networks to emerging industrial wireless networks, and beyond. To this end, this paper begins with an overview of the Tactile Internet. Complementing prior efforts, it presents a taxonomy of the key Tactile Internet applications. This paper covers the relevant background on the emergence of industrial communication. Then, it discusses the role of the Tactile Internet for various industrial systems and identifies the key use cases with respective connectivity requirements. This paper provides a technology landscape for the Tactile Internet to enable high-performance industrial wireless communication. Specifically, it provides insights into the recent Third Generation Partnership Project developments for enabling ultrareliable and low-latency communications over 5G mobile/cellular networks. It also examines the potential of the IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15 standards for industrial control applications. Besides, it reviews the role of artificial intelligence and edge-computing platforms in overcoming the imperfections of wireless environments. Finally, this paper provides a roadmap for future, investigating the role of Tactile Internet in next generation industrial systems along with some directions and challenges for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless technologies combined with advanced computing are changing industrial communications. Industrial wireless networks can improve the monitoring and the control of the entire system by jointly exploiting massively interacting communication and distributed computing paradigms. In this paper, we develop a wireless cloud platform for supporting critical data publishing and distributed sensing of the surrounding environment. The cloud system is designed as a self-contained network that interacts with devices exploiting the time synchronized channel hopping protocol (TSCH), supported by WirelessHART (IEC 62591). The cloud platform augments industry-standard networking functions as it handles the delivery (or publishing) of latency and throughput-critical data by implementing a cooperative-multihop forwarding scheme. In addition, it supports distributed sensing functions through consensus-based algorithms. Experimental activities are presented to show the feasibility of the approach in two real industrial plant sites representative of typical indoor and outdoor environments. Validation of cooperative forwarding schemes shows substantial improvements compared with standard industrial solutions. Distributed sensing functions are developed to enable the autonomous identification of recurring cochannel interference patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The allocation of limited yet costly police resources is a daily dilemma for police commanders. More than 50% of police department costs go into patrolling operations, which include responding to emergencies and maintaining police presence in patrolling areas. This research aims to address the managerial challenges and tradeoffs that police commanders face when designing patrolling strategies: lessening the economic burden of crime prevention and maintaining high levels of public safety. The proposed framework is implemented through a mathematical framework and simulation to obtain the best patrolling strategies for the Seattle Police Department, and the simulation results show that patrol performance can be improved using the proposed framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In tactical missions, seamless and effective communication is crucial for mission success. For future deployed networks, the user experience can be improved with proper resource allocation mechanisms, taking into consideration quality of service characteristics of the traffic. Such a resource allocation method requires knowledge of the key performance indicators of the communication path. In this article, we present a framework for the key performance indicator estimation service for deployed heterogeneous networks. Our proposal utilizes several different approaches for measuring key performance indicators. Several mechanisms are used to improve the accuracy and reliability of the service. We also discuss the lessons learned during the key performance indicator estimation service implementation and the validation process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wireless local area networking technologies are widely used in communication-based train control (CBTC) systems, where handoff latency is the key factor affecting the transmission performance. A multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO)-assisted handoff (MAHO) scheme for CBTC systems is proposed in this paper to reduce handoff latency. During the handoff procedure, the mobile station (MS) communicates with the serving access point (AP) and the candidate AP concurrently with handoff signaling transmitted by one antenna and data packets transmitted by another one so that the station can handoff from one to the other without interrupting data transmission. The interference is canceled by a zero-forcing algorithm in the uplink (UL) and by space–time block code (STBC) interference cancelation algorithms in the downlink. The handoff performance, including transmission delay of train-control-related information due to handoff, the frame error rate (FER) of the handoff signaling, the error-free period, and the required intersite distance, are analyzed and compared with traditional break-before-make schemes. The results show that the MAHO scheme can significantly reduce the handoff latency of CBTC services and that the FER of the handoff signaling is lower than traditional schemes when the data rates are no more than 13 Mb/s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On the basis of an extensive survey study conducted among business professionals engaging in global communication, this paper discusses communicative competence. Rapid changes in work environments, particularly advancing globalization and new technology, have highlighted the need for expanding our knowledge of the elements that constitute communicative competence in global encounters. Competence has been investigated by several researchers; however, the language perspective, particularly the language used for international communication, that is, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), has largely been ignored. Our findings indicate that global communicative competence (GCC) consists of three layers: multicultural competence, competence in English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF) and the communicator's business know-how. Based on our findings, we present a model for GCC, which includes language as a key component. Implications for theory, practice, and education include the need for a multidisciplinary approach and the acknowledgement of ELF/BELF as the language of global interaction. ELF/BELF assumes a shared “core” of the English language, but focuses on interactional skills, rapport building, and the ability to ask for and provide clarifications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Capturing information about employees can give organizations insight into underlying knowledge processes. Analyzing email communications, for example, can produce an informal structure that's flexible and that organizations can recalculate regularly to capture information flow among employees. The structure could also help institutions to both identify collaboration patterns and predict changes in those patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on how privacy can be protected with the implementation and development of new technologies. According to the author, it is important to distinguish the best way to protect individuals when personal information is collected and distributed. Mostly, informational privacy are given much attention which has noted the distinction among different forms of privacy. In businesses, mobile phones are being used to monitor if the employees are working in the appropriate place during work hours.

The LHCb experiment at CERN will have an on-line trigger farm composed of up to 2000 PCs. In order to monitor and control each PC and to supervise the overall status of the farm, a farm monitoring and control system (FMC) was developed. The FMC is based on distributed information management (DIM) system as network communication layer, it is accessible both through a command line interface and through the Prozeβvisual- isierungs und Steuerungssystem (PVSS) graphical interface, and it is interfaced to the finite state machine (FSM) of the LHCb experiment control system (ECS) in order to manage anomalous farm conditions. The FMC is an integral part of the ECS, which is in charge of monitoring and controlling all on-line components; it uses the same tools (DIM, PVSS, FSM, etc.) to guarantee its complete integration and a coherent look and feel throughout the whole control system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy refinement is meant to derive low-level enforceable policies from high-level guidelines. Although recent advances have been made to solve this open problem, the holistic implications confronting systematic policy refinement have not been explicitly addressed. This article presents a methodological approach towards the policy refinement problem. We provide a generic procedure to define policy hierarchies, which is essential to achieving systematic policy refinement. We also provide the considerations while defining high-level guidelines, and describe a policy refinement framework that formalizes the requirements to refine high-level guidelines into executable policies. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with a scenario applied to the quality of service (QoS) management domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief editorial describes the field of professional communication, comments on its evolution, and then explains how research and findings in corpus linguistics can aid in enriching the field of professional communication even further Four articles and two tutorials, representative of studies and applications in corpus linguistics, are then presented in a brief preview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because English is the lingua franca of world trade, the language of commerce, finance, and economics is characterized by an ever-increasing use of Anglicisms. Polysemic English loan words are particularly problematic in translation, as their meanings do not always match across donor and receptor languages. An Anglicism may, for example, convey a subset of the senses expressed by the same word in English and/or it may convey meanings typically expressed by a synonymous English word. It is no wonder that translator trainees often get into difficulty when having to decide whether and how to translate an English word with an established Anglicism in Italian. This tutorial presents a corpus-based teaching methodology that draws on the data-learning approach devised by Tim Johns and aims to equip translator trainees with a kit of analytical tools for better understanding Anglicisms in cross- and inter-linguistic professional communication so that they can produce accurate and effective translations. After briefly reviewing recent studies of Anglicisms in Italian, I outline the main features of the proposed educational methodology and illustrate how it has been applied to the analysis of the lemma business in the Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) translation classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corpus studies are revolutionizing the study of language practice, including professional communication, by substituting actual examples of practice for prescriptive intuition. Corpora are often put together by researchers who exert much care in what goes into a corpus. Yet professional communicators also experience corpora as commodities in the marketplace, bundles of ‘writing models’ for sale that cross genres of professional and personal communication. When writers purchase these bundles, what are the latent rhetorical strategies they are purchasing? A corpus study of 728 canned letters across 15 genres taken from a best-selling trade book was undertaken. The texts were tagged for rhetorical features and factor analyzed for latent rhetorical dimensions of proficiency. The study concludes that the latent rhetorical proficiencies brought into evidence are heavily weighted on skills of collecting or raising money. While this study requires replication over a wider sample, it illustrates how corpus approaches can help us rigorously retrieve latent rhetorical skills across a collection of rhetorically diverse texts. It further helps us see how corpus studies allow one to maintain close ties between the avowed standards of communication practice and the close description of the practices themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on examples taken from the business section of the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Correspondence (in preparation), this paper intends to discuss the linguistic means employed to express authority and convey stance in relation to different recipients (peers, superiors, or subordinates) and different subject matters (e.g., legal controversy as opposed to ordinary, routine transactions). In particular, the aim is to present a survey of the positive and negative politeness strategies adopted by encoders of varying status (e.g., bank officials, publishers, but also working-class contractors). After a general Outline of the corpus currently being compiled, different cases are discussed, in which hierarchical discourse is observed. Our concluding remarks focus on the implications this type of study may have for sociohistorical linguists on the one hand, and the study of the earliest stages of professional discourse on the other; indeed, the latter aspect may be of considerable interest also for present-day practitioners who may gain insights concerning the pragmatic strategies that have proved to be most successful over time. Similar ways of encoding stance and distance, for example, are still found in present-day formal exchanges, though the focus is probably more on corporate identity rather than on individual participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contract net protocol (CNP) is a widely used coordination mechanism in multiagent systems. It has a lot of communication overhead due to the broadcast of the task announcements. The performance of the CNP degrades drastically when the number of communicating agents and the number of tasks announced increases. Hence, it has problems of scalability. In order to overcome this limitation, an instance-based learning (IBL) mechanism is designed that uses previously stored instances in order to select a target agent. This avoids the expensive bidding process. The scheme is implemented in a simulated distributed hospital system where the CNP is used for resource sharing across hospitals. Experimental results demonstrate that with the incorporation of the IBL, the system performance improves significantly. The system is better scalable with respect to the number of tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the use of business performance to communicate change. Change management; Communication strategies; Use of B.D. Ruben's model to drive a supply chain reengineering project; Taking the change plunge; Involvement of employees in the effort; Employee motivation.

Discusses how communication in the software development sector can improve product quality. Software quality scenario; Methods for handling communication within software; Communication model for systems organization.

Focuses on the problem of customer/seller communication in software development. Customers' lack of knowledge in their role in the development process; Need for the submission of a range bid; Customers' definition of the project's scope; Specification and validation of pertinent requirements.