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The execution of services is requested by incoming tasks, however, services may be absent on an edge node, which is not so rare in real edge environments, e.g., in a smart cities setting. Therefore, edge nodes should deal with the timely and wisely decision on whether to perform a service replication (pull-action) or tasks offloading (push-action) to peer nodes when the requested services are not locally present. In this paper, we address this decision-making challenge by introducing an intelligent mechanism formulated upon the principles of optimal stopping theory and applying our time-optimized scheme in different scenarios of services management. A\u00a0performance evaluation that includes two different models and a comparative assessment that includes one model are provided found in the respective literature to expose the behavior and the advantages of our approach which is the OST. Our methodology (OST) showcases the achieved optimized decisions given specific objective functions over services demand as demonstrated by our experimental results.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3233\/scs-220015","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,3,31]],"date-time":"2023-03-31T16:02:49Z","timestamp":1680278569000},"page":"277-299","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":2,"title":["Time-optimized sequential decision making for service management in smart city environments"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"1","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0101-4458","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Saleh","family":"ALFahad","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1517-6757","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Christos","family":"Anagnostopoulos","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, 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