Examining enterprise architecture for digital transformation

The Digital Transformation era has unlocked unique opportunities for organizations to disrupt and innovate with digital products and services by leveraging novel emerging technologies such as mobile computing, big data analytics, cloud computing, and the internet of things. Consequently, the emergence of this new digital generation has increased the awareness of disruptive innovations, posing multiple challenges to organizations that had adopted traditional Enterprise Architecture approaches, such as materializing digital business strategies with regard to federated applications. These business strategies must address the dynamic changes of the involved services and their data interfaces; and, therefore, require higher interoperability for seamless integration. This paper introduces preliminary results from conducting a systematic literature review focused on identifying the constituents of Digital Transformations reflected as new opportunities to improve conventional Enterprise Architecture practices. The findings are classified into four categories: (1) Customer Journey, Customer Experience and Value Creations Streams; (2) Architecture Agility &amp; Evolution; (3) Architecture Modularity (Interoperability); and (4) Social and Cultural Alignment of the Enterprise.</p

Improving lifecycle query in integrated toolchains using linked data and MQTT-based data warehousing

The development of increasingly complex IoT systems requires large engineering environments. These environments generally consist of tools from different vendors and are not necessarily integrated well with each other. In order to automate various analyses, queries across resources from multiple tools have to be executed in parallel to the engineering activities. In this paper, we identify the necessary requirements on such a query capability and evaluate different architectures according to these requirements. We propose an improved lifecycle query architecture, which builds upon the existing Tracked Resource Set (TRS) protocol, and complements it with the MQTT messaging protocol in order to allow the data in the warehouse to be kept updated in real-time. As part of the case study focusing on the development of an IoT automated warehouse, this architecture was implemented for a toolchain integrated using RESTful microservices and linked data.Comment: 12 pages, worksho

Design and implementation of a federated health record server

This paper describes the practical implementation of a federated health record serverbased on a generic and comprehensive public domain architecture and deployed in alive clinical setting.The authors, working at the Centre for Health Informatics and MultiprofessionalEducation (University College London), have built up over a decade of experiencewithin Europe on the requirements and information models that are needed to underpincomprehensive multi-professional electronic health records. This work has involvedcollaboration with a wide range of healthcare and informatics organisations and partnersin the healthcare computing industry across Europe though the EU Health Telematicsprojects GEHR, Synapses, EHCR-SupA, SynEx and Medicate. The resultingarchitecture models have influenced recent European standards in this area, such asCEN TC/251 ENV 13606. UCL has now designed and built a federated health recordserver based on these models which is now running in the Department ofCardiovascular Medicine at the Whittington Hospital in north London. A new EC FifthFramework project, 6WINIT, is enabling new and innovative IPv6 and wirelesstechnology solutions to be added to this work.The north London clinical demonstrator site has provided the solid basis from which toestablish "proof of concept" verification of the design approach, and a valuableopportunity to install, test and evaluate the results of the component engineeringundertaken during the EC funded projects

InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape

Information architecture for a federated health record server

This paper describes the information models that have been used to implement a federated health record server and to deploy it in a live clinical setting. The authors, working at the Centre for Health Informatics and Multiprofessional Education (University College London), have built up over a decade of experience within Europe on the requirements and information models that are needed to underpin comprehensive multi-professional electronic health records. This work has involved collaboration with a wide range of health care and informatics organisations and partners in the healthcare computing industry across Europe though the EU Health Telematics projects GEHR, Synapses, EHCR-SupA, SynEx and Medicate. The resulting architecture models have fed into recent European standardisation work in this area, such as CEN TC/251 ENV 13606. UCL has implemented a federated health record server based on these models which is now running in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Whittington Hospital in North London. The information models described in this paper reflect a refinement based on this implementation experience

Models simulation and interoperability using MDA and HLA

In the manufacturing context, there have been numerous efforts to use modeling and simulation tools and techniques to improve manufacturing efficiency over the last four decades. While an increasing number of manufacturing system decisions are being made based on the use of models, their use is still sporadic in many manufacturing environments. Our paper advocates for an approach combining MDA (model driven architecture) and HLA (High Level Architecture), the IEEE standard for modeling and simulation, in order to overcome the deficiencies of current simulation methods at the level of interoperability and reuse.Comment: 8 page

Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways