ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic is a major health threat and its global spread has led governments worldwide to take a series of public health and social measures and restrictions, aiming to reduce its transmission. As COVID-19 outbreak continues, there is a crucial need for further analysis and evaluation of the main features that seem to affect the clinical status of a patient infected by SARS-CoV-2. In this context, the present paper introduces a Covid Patient Assessment Analysis (CPAA) based on operational research, which examines the patient profile, taking into consideration characteristics like gender and age, and also categorizes the experiencing COVID-19 symptoms and the dependency of patient's clinical status from potential comorbidities. Finally, evaluating all the aforementioned features, CPAA ranks COVID-19 cases based on the severity of each case in low-, medium-, and high-risk groups. For the modeling and the implementation of the CPAA, the Pairwise Comparison (PWC) has been used as an integral part of a decision-making process. The outcomes of the paper are the first step towards an overall operational research framework that would be used to evaluate the clinical status of patients and take automate decisions for their potential hospitalization. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The cloud broker is an IT role and a business model that acts as an intermediary agent between cloud providers and end users. The exponentially increasing adoption of the IaaS market has contributed significantly to the so far growth of the Cloud Broker market. The unprecedented scenario of COVID-19 pandemic has upgraded the role and the contribution of broker to the cloud market, since cloud adoption has been further accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis. Cloud broker guarantees the availability of a given amount of resources for use at a specific time, offering pricing policies that benefit consumers and boost broker’s profitability. Into that context a cloud brokering model, is introduced and described, together with a profit maximization economic model, suggesting and evaluating different pricing policies that ensure the viability of the business and boost profitability. The pricing policy that is able to lead to the maximum profit potential is also highlighted. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.