Improving sustainability through intelligent cargo and adaptive decision making

In the current society, logistics is faced with the challenge to meet more stringent sustainability goals. Shippers and transport service providers both aim to reduce the carbon footprint of their logistic operations. To do so, optimal use of logistics resources and physical infrastructure should be aimed for. An adaptive decision making process for the selection of a specific transport modality, transport provider and timeslot (aimed at minimisation of the carbon footprint) enables shippers to achieve this. This requires shippers to have access to up-to-date capacity information from transport providers (e.g. current and scheduled loading status of the various transport means and information on carbon footprint) and traffic information (e.g. city logistics and current traffic information). A prerequisite is an adequate infrastructure for collaboration and open exchange of information between the various stakeholders in the logistics value chain to obtain the up-to-date information. This paper gives a view on how such an advanced information infrastructure can be realised, currently being developed within the EU iCargo project. The paper describes a reference logistics value chain, including business benefits for each of the roles in the logistics value chain of aiming for sustainability. A case analysis is presented that reflects a practical situation in which the various roles collaborate and exchange information for realizing sustainability goals, using adaptive decision making for selecting a transport modality, transport provider, and timeslot. A high-level overview is provided of the requirements on and technical implementation of the supporting advanced infrastructure for collaboration and open information exchange.In the current society, logistics is faced with the challenge to meet more stringent sustainability goals. Shippers and transport service providers both aim to reduce the carbon footprint of their logistic operations. To do so, optimal use of logistics resources and physical infrastructure should be aimed for. An adaptive decision making process for the selection of a specific transport modality, transport provider and timeslot (aimed at minimisation of the carbon footprint) enables shippers to achieve this. This requires shippers to have access to up-to-date capacity information from transport providers (e.g. current and scheduled loading status of the various transport means and information on carbon footprint) and traffic information (e.g. city logistics and current traffic information). A prerequisite is an adequate infrastructure for collaboration and open exchange of information between the various stakeholders in the logistics value chain to obtain the up-to-date information. This paper gives a view on how such an advanced information infrastructure can be realised, currently being developed within the EU iCargo project. The paper describes a reference logistics value chain, including business benefits for each of the roles in the logistics value chain of aiming for sustainability. A case analysis is presented that reflects a practical situation in which the various roles collaborate and exchange information for realizing sustainability goals, using adaptive decision making for selecting a transport modality, transport provider, and timeslot. A high-level overview is provided of the requirements on and technical implementation of the supporting advanced infrastructure for collaboration and open information exchange.In the current society, logistics is faced with the challenge to meet more stringent sustainability goals. Shippers and transport service providers both aim to reduce the carbon footprint of their logistic operations. To do so, optimal use of logistics resources and physical infrastructure should be aimed for. An adaptive decision making process for the selection of a specific transport modality, transport provider and timeslot (aimed at minimisation of the carbon footprint) enables shippers to achieve this. This requires shippers to have access to up-to-date capacity information from transport providers (e.g. current and scheduled loading status of the various transport means and information on carbon footprint) and traffic information (e.g. city logistics and current traffic information). A prerequisite is an adequate infrastructure for collaboration and open exchange of information between the various stakeholders in the logistics value chain to obtain the up-to-date information. This paper gives a view on how such an advanced information infrastructure can be realised, currently being developed within the EU iCargo project. The paper describes a reference logistics value chain, including business benefits for each of the roles in the logistics value chain of aiming for sustainability. A case analysis is presented that reflects a practical situation in which the various roles collaborate and exchange information for realizing sustainability goals, using adaptive decision making for selecting a transport modality, transport provider, and timeslot. A high-level overview is provided of the requirements on and technical implementation of the supporting advanced infrastructure for collaboration and open information exchange

Modeling and Analyzing Adaptive User-Centric Systems in Real-Time Maude

Pervasive user-centric applications are systems which are meant to sense the presence, mood, and intentions of users in order to optimize user comfort and performance. Building such applications requires not only state-of-the art techniques from artificial intelligence but also sound software engineering methods for facilitating modular design, runtime adaptation and verification of critical system requirements. In this paper we focus on high-level design and analysis, and use the algebraic rewriting language Real-Time Maude for specifying applications in a real-time setting. We propose a generic component-based approach for modeling pervasive user-centric systems and we show how to analyze and prove crucial properties of the system architecture through model checking and simulation. For proving time-dependent properties we use Metric Temporal Logic (MTL) and present analysis algorithms for model checking two subclasses of MTL formulas: time-bounded response and time-bounded safety MTL formulas. The underlying idea is to extend the Real-Time Maude model with suitable clocks, to transform the MTL formulas into LTL formulas over the extended specification, and then to use the LTL model checker of Maude. It is shown that these analyses are sound and complete for maximal time sampling. The approach is illustrated by a simple adaptive advertising scenario in which an adaptive advertisement display can react to actions of the users in front of the display.Comment: In Proceedings RTRTS 2010, arXiv:1009.398

Ways of Applying Artificial Intelligence in Software Engineering

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have become more powerful and easier to use they are increasingly deployed as key components of modern software systems. While this enables new functionality and often allows better adaptation to user needs it also creates additional problems for software engineers and exposes companies to new risks. Some work has been done to better understand the interaction between Software Engineering and AI but we lack methods to classify ways of applying AI in software systems and to analyse and understand the risks this poses. Only by doing so can we devise tools and solutions to help mitigate them. This paper presents the AI in SE Application Levels (AI-SEAL) taxonomy that categorises applications according to their point of AI application, the type of AI technology used and the automation level allowed. We show the usefulness of this taxonomy by classifying 15 papers from previous editions of the RAISE workshop. Results show that the taxonomy allows classification of distinct AI applications and provides insights concerning the risks associated with them. We argue that this will be important for companies in deciding how to apply AI in their software applications and to create strategies for its use

The Road Ahead for Networking: A Survey on ICN-IP Coexistence Solutions

In recent years, the current Internet has experienced an unexpected paradigm shift in the usage model, which has pushed researchers towards the design of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of the existing architecture. Even though both Academia and Industry have investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN, achieving the complete replacement of the Internet Protocol (IP) is a challenging task. Some research groups have already addressed the coexistence by designing their own architectures, but none of those is the final solution to move towards the future Internet considering the unaltered state of the networking. To design such architecture, the research community needs now a comprehensive overview of the existing solutions that have so far addressed the coexistence. The purpose of this paper is to reach this goal by providing the first comprehensive survey and classification of the coexistence architectures according to their features (i.e., deployment approach, deployment scenarios, addressed coexistence requirements and architecture or technology used) and evaluation parameters (i.e., challenges emerging during the deployment and the runtime behaviour of an architecture). We believe that this paper will finally fill the gap required for moving towards the design of the final coexistence architecture.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, 3 table

A Review on Present State-of-the-Art of Self Adaptive Dynamic Software Architecture

Enterprises across the world are increasingly depending on software to drive their businesses. It is more so with distributing computing technologies in place that pave way for realization of seamless business integration. On the other hand those complex software systems are expected to adapt changes dynamically without causing administrative overhead. Moreover software systems should exhibit fault tolerance, location transparency, availability, scalability self-adaptive capabilities to fit into present enterprise business use cases. To cope with such expectations software systems are to be built with a dynamic and self-adaptive software architecture which drives home quality of services perfectly. The point made here is that software systems are facing unprecedented level of complexity and aware of self-adaptation. Therefore it is essential to have technical knowhow pertaining to self adaptive dynamic software architecture. Towards this end, we explore present state-of-the-art of this area in software engineering domain. It throws light into dynamic software architectures, distributed component technologies for realizing such architectures, besides dynamic software composition and metrics to evaluate the quality of dynamic adaptation

Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations

Context-sensitive user Interfaces for semantic services

Service-centric solutions usually require rich context to fully deliver and better reflect on the underlying applications. We present a novel use of context in the form of customized user interface services with the concept of User Interface as a Service (UIaaS). UIaaS takes user profiles as input to generate context-aware interface services. Such interface services can be used as context to augment semantic services with contextual information leading to UIaaS as a Context (UIaaSaaC). The added serendipitous benefit of the proposed concept is that the composition of a customized user interface with the requested service is performed by the service composition engine, as is the case with any other services. We use a special-purpose language (called User Interface Description Language (UIDL)) to model and realize user interfaces as services. We use a real-life e-government application, human services delivery for the citizens, as a proof-of-concept. We also present a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed approach using a functional evaluation and a nonfunctional evaluation consisting of an end user usability test and expert usability reviews