Sustainable urban regeneration of historic city centres: lessons learnt

Cities are society’s centres of human interaction, creativity, knowledge, diversity, culture, commerce and economic creativity. The accretion of several layers of history tends to reveal a great deal about the city's past, present and even future. Historic city centres are usually endowed with a multitude of historic buildings, heritage sites and the like. However, it is also these historical centres that are most prone to the undesirable and consequential effects of growth and rapid technological advancement, where a range of environmental and developmental challenges find their crude expression. The rehabilitation and conservation of historic city centres serves as a fundamental catalyst for change. Furthermore, urban regeneration of historical city centres also promotes social interaction between inhabitants of the city, and the adoption of its urban spaces encourages public activity. This paper scrutinizes the city centre of two historical cities which are Barcelona, Spain and Istanbul, Turkey. Successful aspects of their ecological performance are highlighted. The two downtown areas discussed in this paper represent the downtown of two Mediterranean cities, and both are distinguished historical cities who have contextual similarities. The historical city centres of these Mediterranean cities have undergone variety of projects and strategic plans for urban regeneration, development and beautification. Moreover, various attempts have been made for the improvement of their environmental quality and ecological performance. This is through increases in urban green spaces and public parks, increased dependence on renewable energy technologies (RETs) and adopting sustainable transportation modes as opposed to undesirable and harmful vehicular transport. In essence, many urban regeneration plans have been aimed at conserving and preserving buildings and sites that are considered symbolic of the two cities heritage and legacy. Concomitantly, the paper presents a review of sustainability issues related to these two city centres and analyses the strategies that have been used through various urban regeneration projects and development plans. The paper particularly focuses on investigating the strategic plans and attempts that have been made at urban regeneration level by the Barcelona City Council and the Greater Municipality of Istanbul for the revitalization of their core areas

Component-based software engineering: a quantitative approach

Dissertação apresentada para a obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Informática pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaBackground: Often, claims in Component-Based Development (CBD) are only supported by qualitative expert opinion, rather than by quantitative data. This contrasts with the normal practice in other sciences, where a sound experimental validation of claims is standard practice. Experimental Software Engineering (ESE) aims to bridge this gap. Unfortunately, it is common to find experimental validation efforts that are hard to replicate and compare, to build up the body of knowledge in CBD. Objectives: In this dissertation our goals are (i) to contribute to evolution of ESE, in what concerns the replicability and comparability of experimental work, and (ii) to apply our proposals to CBD, thus contributing to its deeper and sounder understanding. Techniques: We propose a process model for ESE, aligned with current experimental best practices, and combine this model with a measurement technique called Ontology-Driven Measurement (ODM). ODM is aimed at improving the state of practice in metrics definition and collection, by making metrics definitions formal and executable,without sacrificing their usability. ODM uses standard technologies that can be well adapted to current integrated development environments. Results: Our contributions include the definition and preliminary validation of a process model for ESE and the proposal of ODM for supporting metrics definition and collection in the context of CBD. We use both the process model and ODM to perform a series experimental works in CBD, including the cross-validation of a component metrics set for JavaBeans, a case study on the influence of practitioners expertise in a sub-process of component development (component code inspections), and an observational study on reusability patterns of pluggable components (Eclipse plug-ins). These experimental works implied proposing, adapting, or selecting adequate ontologies, as well as the formal definition of metrics upon each of those ontologies. Limitations: Although our experimental work covers a variety of component models and, orthogonally, both process and product, the plethora of opportunities for using our quantitative approach to CBD is far from exhausted. Conclusions: The main contribution of this dissertation is the illustration, through practical examples, of how we can combine our experimental process model with ODM to support the experimental validation of claims in the context of CBD, in a repeatable and comparable way. In addition, the techniques proposed in this dissertation are generic and can be applied to other software development paradigms.Departamento de Informática of the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCT/UNL); Centro de Informática e Tecnologias da Informação of the FCT/UNL; Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through the STACOS project(POSI/CHS/48875/2002); The Experimental Software Engineering Network (ESERNET);Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets (AITO); Association forComputing Machinery (ACM

Design management in the toy industry: Case studies on design insertion for the development process in Brazilian toy companies

Design is assuming more strategic roles in the industry, bringing different approaches to the development of new products that enables innovations and higher acceptance. Like other segments, the toy industry is also modifying to meet new demands, seeking to develop games and toys aligned with the contemporary child. To improve the quality of the national toy, design insertion has been stated as a desired goal. However, there are not significant reports in the literature about how it is integrated in the segment. This study aimed to evaluate the integration of designers in the development process of new products of three different Brazilian toy companies that acted as case studies. Based on Design Management (DM) and Product Development Process (PDP) Models, we implemented a new model that aided in organizing and analyzing records of the companies’ structures and development processes. Results indicated the difficulties and improvement points to insert Designers in a formalized process, being those located mostly on the initial planning, product prototyping, and post launch stages. A recent increase in design acceptance and usage, however, was noted, with Design being considered as directly related with the quality increase of the company’s products.Keywords: design management, toy industry, development of new product, Brazilian industry, industrial design

Legal compliance by design (LCbD) and through design (LCtD) : preliminary survey

1st Workshop on Technologies for Regulatory Compliance co-located with the 30th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2017). The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) carrying out a preliminary survey of the literature and research projects on Compliance by Design (CbD); and (ii) clarifying the double process of (a) extending business managing techniques to other regulatory fields, and (b) converging trends in legal theory, legal technology and Artificial Intelligence. The paper highlights the connections and differences we found across different domains and proposals. We distinguish three different policydriven types of CbD: (i) business, (ii) regulatory, (iii) and legal. The recent deployment of ethical views, and the implementation of general principles of privacy and data protection lead to the conclusion that, in order to appropriately define legal compliance, Compliance through Design (CtD) should be differentiated from CbD

Industrialising Software Development in Systems Integration

Compared to other disciplines, software engineering as of today is still dependent on craftsmanship of highly-skilled workers. However, with constantly increasing complexity and efforts, existing software engineering approaches appear more and more inefficient. A paradigm shift towards industrial production methods seems inevitable. Recent advances in academia and practice have lead to the availability of industrial key principles in software development as well. Specialization is represented in software product lines, standardization and systematic reuse are available with component-based development, and automation has become accessible through model-driven engineering. While each of the above is well researched in theory, only few cases of successful implementation in the industry are known. This becomes even more evident in specialized areas of software engineering such as systems integration. Today’s IT systems need to quickly adapt to new business requirements due to mergers and acquisitions and cooperations between enterprises. This certainly leads to integration efforts, i.e. joining different subsystems into a cohesive whole in order to provide new functionality. In such an environment. the application of industrial methods for software development seems even more important. Unfortunately, software development in this field is a highly complex and heterogeneous undertaking, as IT environments differ from customer to customer. In such settings, existing industrialization concepts would never break even due to one-time projects and thus insufficient economies of scale and scope. This present thesis, therefore, describes a novel approach for a more efficient implementation of prior key principles while considering the characteristics of software development for systems integration. After identifying the characteristics of the field and their affects on currently-known industrialization concepts, an organizational model for industrialized systems integration has thus been developed. It takes software product lines and adapts them in a way feasible for a systems integrator active in several business domains. The result is a three-tiered model consolidating recurring activities and reducing the efforts for individual product lines. For the implementation of component-based development, the present thesis assesses current component approaches and applies an integration metamodel to the most suitable one. This ensures a common understanding of systems integration across different product lines and thus alleviates component reuse, even across product line boundaries. The approach is furthermore aligned with the organizational model to depict in which way component-based development may be applied in industrialized systems integration. Automating software development in systems integration with model-driven engineering was found to be insufficient in its current state. The reason herefore lies in insufficient tool chains and a lack of modelling standards. As an alternative, an XML-based configuration of products within a software product line has been developed. It models a product line and its products with the help of a domain-specific language and utilizes stylesheet transformations to generate compliable artefacts. The approach has been tested for its feasibility within an exemplarily implementation following a real-world scenario. As not all aspects of industrialized systems integration could be simulated in a laboratory environment, the concept was furthermore validated during several expert interviews with industry representatives. Here, it was also possible to assess cultural and economic aspects. The thesis concludes with a detailed summary of the contributions to the field and suggests further areas of research in the context of industrialized systems integration

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Heritage and Resilience: Issues and Opportunities for Reducing Disaster Risks

This paper examines the unique role of cultural heritage in disaster risk reduction. Itintroduces various approaches to protect heritage from irreplaceable loss and considers ways to draw upon heritage as an asset in building the resilience of communities and nations to disasters. The paper proposes ways forward and builds on the current momentum provided by the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters” (HFA) and the advancement of a post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction (HFA2) and the post-2015 development agenda. Cultural heritage is often associated with grandiose monuments and iconic archaeological sites that can hold us in awe of their beauty, history and sheer scale. However, the understanding of cultural heritage has undergone a marked shift during the last few decades in terms of what it is, why it is important, why it is at risk and what can be done to protect it. Cultural heritage today encompasses a broader array of places such as historic cities, living cultural landscapes, gardens or sacred forests and mountains, technological or industrial achievements in the recent past and even sites associated with painful memories and war. Collections of movable and immoveable items within sites, museums, historic properties and archives have also increased significantly in scope, testifying not only to the lifestyles of royalty and the achievements of great artists, but also to the everyday lives of ordinary people. At the same time intangibles such as knowledge, beliefs and value systems are fundamental aspects of heritage that have a powerful influence on people’s daily choices and behaviors. Heritage is at risk due to disasters, conflict, climate change and a host of other factors.At the same time, cultural heritage is increasingly recognized as a driver of resilience that can support efforts to reduce disaster risks more broadly. Recent years have seen greater emphasis and commitment to protecting heritage and leveraging it for resilience;but initiatives, such as the few examples that are presented here, need to be encouraged and brought more fully into the mainstream of both disaster risk reduction and heritage management. These are issues that can be productively addressed in a post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction and, likewise, in the post-2015 development agenda