How My Favorite Tool Supporting OCL Must Look Like

At this time, to decide on which tool supporting OCL to use, is a difficult task. This is influenced by a number of objective factors, including: the user's needs, knowledge of existing tools, knowledge of the Object Constraint Language and of the various possibilities of using it. Today, each tool maker states about implementing new features compared with the existent tools; moreover, different tools return different results when evaluating identical OCL specifications in the same context. A reason of this state of facts is due to the concepts which are incomplete or ambiguous specified in the standard. Therefore, before describing the criteria proposed for assessing tools supporting OCL, the following topics are examined: features that distinguish OCL within the modeling languages family, some aspects incomplet or ambiguous described in the OCL specification, main functionalities that a tool supporting OCL should implement, the universe of tools supporting OCL. In the end, five representative tools are characterized with respect to the functionalities proposed to be implemented by an ideal tool

Uncovering the Holistic Pathways to Circular Cities—The Case of Alberta, Canada

The notion of circularity has gained significant attention from governments of many cities across the world. The approaches to circular cities may range from narrower perspectives that see a circular city as the simple sum of circular economy initiatives to those more holistic that aim to integrate the whole urban system. Several researchers proposed frameworks that would guide cities to take a holistic perspective. This manuscript selects two frameworks and examines through them whether and to what extent broader and more holistic approaches to circular cities are being developed in practice. First, circularity principles, the scope of circular activities, and the concrete circular actions developed in the case study are read through Williams's approach to circular resource management. Second, the spatial circularity drivers framework of Marin and De Meulder is used to elucidate different sustainability framings and spatial practices that dominate contemporary conceptualisations of circularity. These two lenses are applied to five municipalities in Alberta (Canada) that have decided to develop strategies for 'shifting the paradigm' and transitioning to circular cities in 2018. Our study aims to investigate how holistic their roadmaps to circular cities are, and what changes are necessary to move towards more integrated approaches

Circular economy practices and strategies in public sector organizations: An integrative review

The concept of the Circular Economy (CE) is an increasingly attractive approach to tackling current sustainability challenges and facilitating a shift away from the linear “take-make-use-dispose” model of production and consumption. The public sector is a major contributor to the CE transition not only as a policy-maker but also as a significant purchaser, consumer, and user of goods and services. The circularization of the public sector itself, however, has received very little attention in CE research. In order to explore the current state of knowledge on the implementation of CE practices and strategies within Public Sector Organizations (PSOs), this research aims to develop an overview of the existing literature. The literature review was designed combining a systematic search with a complementary purposive sampling. Using organizational sustainability as a theoretical perspective, the main results showed a scattered landscape, indicating that the limited research on CE practices and strategies in PSOs has focused so far on the areas of public procurement, internal operations and processes, and public service delivery. As a result of this literature review, an organizational CE framework of a PSO is proposed providing a holistic view of a PSO as a system with organizational dimensions that are relevant for the examination and analysis of the integration process of CE practices and strategies. This innovative framework aims to help further CE research and practice to move beyond current sustainability efforts, highlighting that public procurement, strategy and management, internal processes and operations, assessment and communication, public service delivery, human resources dimensions, collaboration with other organizations, and various external contexts are important public sector areas where the implementation of CE has the potential to bring sustainability benefits

A Comparative Study on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines

[EN] Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) and Software Product Lines (SPL) are two software development paradigms that emphasize reusing. The former reuse domain knowledge is represented as models and model transformations for product development, and the latter reuse domain knowledge is represented as core assets to produce a family of products in a given domain. The adequate combination of both paradigms can bring together important advantages to the software development community. However, how to manage requirements during a model-driven product line development remains an open challenge. In particular, the Requirements Engineering (RE) activity must deal with specific properties such as variability and commonality for a whole family of products. This paper presents a comparative study of eleven approaches that perform a MDE strategy in the RE activity for SPL, with the aim of identify ing current practices and research gaps. In summary, most of the approaches are focused on the Domain Engineering phase of the SPL development, giving less attention to the Application Engineering phase. Moreover there is a lack of coverage of the Scoping activity, which defines the SPL boundaries. Several approaches apply some model transformations to obtain architectural and application requirements artifacts. Regarding the tool support for requirements specification and management, we found that most of the approaches use only academic prototypes. Regarding the validation of the approaches, the use of Case Studies as a proof of concept was the most commonly used method; however, there is a lack of well-defined case studies and empirical studies to improve the proposals.This research is part of the MULTIPLE project (with ref. TIN2009-13838).Blanes Domínguez, D.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2012). A Comparative Study on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines. Revista de Sistemas e Computação. 2(1):3-13. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/43841S3132

Assessing the role of big data and the Internet of things on the transition to circular economy: part I: an extension of the ReSOLVE framework proposal through a literature review

The debate about circular economy (CE) is increasingly present in the strategic agenda of organisations around the world, being driven by government agencies and general population pressures, or by organisations’ own vision for sustainable future. This is due in part to the increasing possibility of turning original theoretical CE proposals into real economically viable initiatives, now possible with modern technology applications such as big data and the internet of things (IoT). Information technology (IT) professionals have been called upon to incorporate technology projects into their strategic plans to support their organisations’ transition to CE, but a structured framework with the necessary IT capabilities still lacks. This study focuses on taking the first step towards this path, by extending the technology attributes present on the existing Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) Regenerate, Share, Optimise, Loop, Virtualise and Exchange (ReSOLVE) framework. The research was conducted based on an extensive literature review through 226 articles retrieved from Scopus® and Web of ScienceTM databases, which were triangulated, validated and complemented with content analysis using the ‘R’ statistical tool, grey literature research and inputs from specialists. Part I describes the introduction and methods used in this study.Indisponível

The Train Benchmark: cross-technology performance evaluation of continuous model queries

In model-driven development of safety-critical systems (like automotive, avionics or railways), well- formedness of models is repeatedly validated in order to detect design flaws as early as possible. In many indus- trial tools, validation rules are still often implemented by a large amount of imperative model traversal code which makes those rule implementations complicated and hard to maintain. Additionally, as models are rapidly increas- ing in size and complexity, efficient execution of validation rules is challenging for the currently available tools. Checking well-formedness constraints can be captured by declarative queries over graph models, while model update operations can be specified as model transformations. This paper presents a benchmark for systematically assessing the scalability of validating and revalidating well-formedness constraints over large graph models. The benchmark defines well-formedness validation scenarios in the railway domain: a metamodel, an instance model generator and a set of well- formedness constraints captured by queries, fault injection and repair operations (imitating the work of systems engi- neers by model transformations). The benchmark focuses on the performance of query evaluation, i.e. its execution time and memory consumption, with a particular empha- sis on reevaluation. We demonstrate that the benchmark can be adopted to various technologies and query engines, including modeling tools; relational, graph and semantic databases. The Train Benchmark is available as an open- source project with continuous builds from https://github. com/FTSRG/trainbenchmark

Evolution of ecosystems for Language-Driven Engineering

Language-Driven Engineering (LDE) is a means to model-driven software development by creating Integrated Modeling Environments (IMEs) with Domain/Purpose-Specific Languages (PSLs), each tailored towards a specific aspect of the respective system to be modeled, thereby taking the specific needs of developers and other stakeholders into account. Combined with the powerful potential of full code generation, these IMEs can generate complete executable software applications from descriptive models. As these products themselves may again be IMEs, this approach leads to LDE Ecosystems of modeling environments with meta-level dependencies. This thesis describes new challenges emerging from changes that affect single components, multiple parts or even the whole LDE ecosystem. From a top-down perspective, this thesis discusses the necessary support by language definition technology to ensure that corresponding IMEs can be validated, generated and tested on demand. From a bottom-up perspective, the formulation of change requests, their upwards propagation and generalization is presented. Finally, the imposed cross-project knowledge sharing and transfer is motivated, fostering interdisciplinary teamwork and cooperation. Based on multifaceted contributions to full-blown projects on different meta-levels of an exemplary LDE ecosystem, this thesis presents specific challenges in creating and continuously evolving LDE ecosystems and deduces a concept of PUTD effects to systematically address various dynamics and appropriate actions to manage both product-level requests that propagate upwards in the meta-level hierarchy as well as the downward propagation of changes to ensure product quality and adequate migration of modeled artifacts along the dependency paths. Finally, the effect of language-driven modeling on the increasingly blurred line between building and using software applications is illustrated to emphasize that the distinction between programming and modeling becomes a mere matter of perspective

Reverse remanufacturing of electrical and electronic equipment and the circular economy

Purpose – The purpose of the article is to analyze the chain of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) and itswaste (WEEE), within the product chain of Recicladora Urbana (Reurbi), and its interaction with the circulareconomy.Design/methodology/approach – Exploratory research with a qualitative approach, based on the studycase method, was conducted. The following stages were carried out: definition of the study object; bibliographicsurvey; documentary survey; technical visit to Reurbi; contacts with experts; creation of research instrumentsand research execution.Findings – The main recipients of remanufactured EEE are third sector organizations that run socialprograms and schools with few financial resources. Recycling firms receive parts and components from theWEEE handled by Reurbi.Research limitations/implications – The authors only addressed the WEEE reverse remanufacturingchain of Reurbi; therefore, the authors cannot extend the results to an industrial sector.Practical implications – One practical contribution is disclosing the remanufacturing processes of EEE andthe recycling processes of its waste, fostered by the National Solid Waste Policy (PNRS), under a circulareconomy policy.Social implications – There is a large market potential for reverse logistics of WEEE and end-of-life EEE asa source of raw material, which is yet to be explored in Brazil, for creating new jobs and revenue.Originality/value – The publication of articles with the main reflections from the results can pro