Question

a) List some applications which find batch-mode processing useful. Justify your answer.

b) List some applications which find interactive-mode processing useful. Justify your answer

Answer 1

a) Batch mode processing is a excecution of non-interactive processing tasks, that means no user interaction is required once batch processing is underway. Batch mode processing invovles processing multiple data items together as a group or batch. The term associated with scheduled processing jobs run in off- hours, known as batch window. It helps in handling tasks like payroll, end-of-month reconciliation, or settling trades overnight.

The following are some applications of batch mode processing.

i) Affinity Water :- Affinity Water is the largest water and only supply in the UK, it uses an automated system to read meters for more than 3.6 million customers, who use over 900 million litres of water each day. Batch mode processing allows Affinity to prioritize its computing processes so that actions such as meter reading and billing take place quickly and accurately, without unnecessarily diverting any critical resources from other data processing jobs.

ii) Almerys :- When we want to handle the vast amounts of data generated by healthcare billing, Almerys knows a thing or two about batch processing. As a result, Almerys is able to manage over 1 million paperless, third-party healthcare transactions each day.

iii) Transactions :- Banks that proceses transactions such as international money transfer, batch mode processing helps to do banking tasks. Many firms are slowly shifting towards more modern techniques such as worload automation that allows asynchronous processing efficiently.

iv) Reporting :- A manufacturer produces a daily operationals report for production line that is run batch window and delivered to managers in early morning.

b) Interactive mode processing refers to a direct link between the user and the computer. In this processing, the user enters his data through a terminal and receives results directly. Such interaction between user and computer is the single greatest advantage of this type of processing.

The following are some applications of Interactive mode processing.

i) Embedded systems :-  Interactive mode processing is used in embedded systems for analog sensor systems that open a department store door, or turn on lights when someone enters a room. At a more complex level, most cars being built today include air bag deployment systems and antilock brakes that operate invisibly by gathering data from the environment and inserting computer control between our actions and the environment.

ii) Pattern recognition and Speech recognition :- Interactive mode processing uses agents that are evolving from using stores of data acquired from user activity to acquiring real-time data based on new information including facial and gesture pattern recognition and speech recognition.

iii) Visualization :- The visualization of abstract data to sensory interfaces is central to software including geographic information systems and data mining applications, among others. With visualization techniques and new forms of input devices, such as data gloves, hand movements is used to manipulate virtual objects represented graphically in a virtual world. This virtual environment was presented to the user via two display screens.