Domain analysis for supporting commercial off-the-shelf components selection

Though new technological trends and paradigms arise for developing complex software systems, systematic reuse continues to be an elusive goal. As a consequence, the need for designing effective strategies for enabling large-scale reuse, whilst overcoming the risks involved in the use of a particular technology, still remains. In this context, the adoption of the Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technology introduces many challenges that still have not been fully overcome, such as the lack of comprehensive mechanisms to record and manage the required information for supporting COTS components selection. In this paper we present a domain analysis strategy for gathering the information needed to describe COTS market segments in a way that COTS components selection becomes more effective and efficient. Due to the diversity of the information to capture, we propose different dimensions of interest for COTS selection that are covered by different domain models. These models are articulated by means of a single framework based on a widespread software quality standard.Postprint (published version

Semantic web services for simulation component reuse and interoperability: An ontology approach

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry primarily due to economic factors associated with developing proprietary software platforms. Regardless of their widespread use, CSPs have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. The limited reuse and interoperability of CSPs are affected by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of software components and web services. The current representations of Web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging Semantic Web. The authors present new research that partially alleviates the problem of limited semantic reuse and interoperability of simulation components in CSPs. Semantic models, in the form of ontologies, utilized by the authors’ Web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through a simulation component ontology that is used to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (i.e. including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The research presented here is based on the development of an ontology, connector software, and a Web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, by adopting a less intrusive interface between participants Although specific to CSPs this work has wider implications for the simulation community. The reason being that the community as a whole stands to benefit through from an increased awareness of the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering (for example, ontology-supported component discovery and reuse, and service-oriented computing), and it is expected that this will eventually lead to the development of a unique Software Engineering-inspired methodology to build simulations in future

Analysis of the “make or buy” decision process in a research and development sme

Start-up SMEs face various challenges and difficulties during their existence and due to their nature they often lack knowledge and resources to fully address these challenges. Unlike large companies which have access to various resources, those resources are a significant gap for SMEs and the business owners have to rely on their own limited knowledge. The “Make or buy” decision is a critical decision in an organisation. This decision can affect current and future costs, capability and competences in the company and by taking best practice approaches and measures towards the decision making, extensive costs can be potentially saved. In this study, literature best practices have been reviewed. In addition a small company has been studied and the current practices of the company have been compared to academic best practices. The result of the study will be used to improve the “Make or buy” decision process in the company

KRATOS: An Open Source Hardware-Software Platform for Rapid Research in LPWANs

Long-range (LoRa) radio technologies have recently gained momentum in the IoT landscape, allowing low-power communications over distances up to several kilometers. As a result, more and more LoRa networks are being deployed. However, commercially available LoRa devices are expensive and propriety, creating a barrier to entry and possibly slowing down developments and deployments of novel applications. Using open-source hardware and software platforms would allow more developers to test and build intelligent devices resulting in a better overall development ecosystem, lower barriers to entry, and rapid growth in the number of IoT applications. Toward this goal, this paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of KRATOS, a low-cost LoRa platform running ContikiOS. Both, our hardware and software designs are released as an open- source to the research community.Comment: Accepted at WiMob 201