Intelligent Products: Shifting the Production Control Logic in Construction (With Lean and BIM)

Production management and control in construction has not been addressed/updated ever since the introduction of Critical Path Method and the Last Planner® system. The predominant outside-in control logic and a fragmented and deep supply chain in construction significantly affect the efficiency over a lifecycle. In a construction project, a large number of organisations interact with the product throughout the process, requiring a significant amount of information handling and synchronisation between these organisations. However, due to the deep supply chains and problems with lack of information integration, the information flow down across the lifecycle poses a significant challenge. This research proposes a product centric system, where the control logic of the production process is embedded within the individual components from the design phase. The solution is enabled by a number of technologies and tools such as Building Information Modelling, Internet of Things, Messaging Systems and within the conceptual process framework of Lean Construction. The vision encompasses the lifecycle of projects from design to construction and maintenance, where the products can interact with the environment and its actors through various stages supporting a variety of actions. The vision and the tools and technologies required to support it are described in this pape

An Ontology for Product-Service Systems

Industries are transforming their business strategy from a product-centric to a more service-centric nature by bundling products and services into integrated solutions to enhance the relationship between their customers. Since Product- Service Systems design research is currently at a rudimentary stage, the development of a robust ontology for this area would be helpful. The advantages of a standardized ontology are that it could help researchers and practitioners to communicate their views without ambiguity and thus encourage the conception and implementation of useful methods and tools. In this paper, an initial structure of a PSS ontology from the design perspective is proposed and evaluated

Semantic business process management: a vision towards using semantic web services for business process management

Business process management (BPM) is the approach to manage the execution of IT-supported business operations from a business expert's view rather than from a technical perspective. However, the degree of mechanization in BPM is still very limited, creating inertia in the necessary evolution and dynamics of business processes, and BPM does not provide a truly unified view on the process space of an organization. We trace back the problem of mechanization of BPM to an ontological one, i.e. the lack of machine-accessible semantics, and argue that the modeling constructs of semantic Web services frameworks, especially WSMO, are a natural fit to creating such a representation. As a consequence, we propose to combine SWS and BPM and create one consolidated technology, which we call semantic business process management (SBPM

Web Engineering Security (WES) Methodology

The impact of the World Wide Web on basic operational economical components in global information-rich civilizations is significant. The repercussions force organizations to provide justification for security from a business-case perspective and to focus on security from a Web application development environment standpoint. The need for clarity promoted an investigation through the acquisition of empirical evidence from a high level Web survey and a more detailed industry survey to analyze security in the Web application development environment ultimately contributing to the proposal of the Essential Elements (EE) and the Security Criteria for Web Application Development (SCWAD). The synthesis of information provided was used to develop the Web Engineering Security (WES) methodology. WES is a proactive, flexible, process neutral security methodology with customizable components that is based on empirical evidence and used to explicitly integrate security throughout an organization’s chosen application development process

Towards a Secure DevOps Approach for Cyber-Physical Systems: An Industrial Perspective

Peer reviewe

Towards developing an intergrated maturity model framework for managing an enterprise business intelligence

There has been a great deal of recent interest that is driving research and development in the area of Business Intelligence (BI),but the issues regarding the implementation of enterprise scale of BI is still concern among BI academics and practitioners.Therefore, an Enterprise Business Intelligence Maturity Model(EBI2M) is proposed to serve as useful guideline for enterprises which are planning or undertaking large scale BI initiatives.In this paper, the author utilizes a Delphi study to conduct two stages of enquiries with a panel of BI experts, and then refines the research into a preliminary EBI2M model

Lifecycle management in government-driven open source projects – practical framework

In many parts of the world, public sector organizations are increasingly interested in collaborating across organizational (and even national) boundaries to develop software solutions under an open licence. However, without sound lifecycle management practices, the full benefits of open collaboration are not achieved and projects fail to achieve sustained success. This paper introduces a lifecycle management model and framework for government-driven open-source projects and reports about its use in a real-life case study. Our focus is on lifecycle management activities which take place between deployment and end-of-life. The framework was developed iteratively through a series of focus group discussions with representatives of public sector organizations. After the framework had been taken into use in our real-life case project, individual qualitative interviews were conducted to collect experiences on its benefits and weaknesses. According to the initial evidence, the deployment of the framework seems to have brought concrete benefits to the project, e.g. by contributing positively to community growth, software quality and inter-organizational learning

Lifecycle management in government-driven open source projects – practical framework

In many parts of the world, public sector organizations are increasingly interested in collaborating across organizational (and even national) boundaries to develop software solutions under an open licence. However, without sound lifecycle management practices, the full benefits of open collaboration are not achieved and projects fail to achieve sustained success. This paper introduces a lifecycle management model and framework for government-driven open-source projects and reports about its use in a real-life case study. Our focus is on lifecycle management activities which take place between deployment and end-of-life. The framework was developed iteratively through a series of focus group discussions with representatives of public sector organizations. After the framework had been taken into use in our real-life case project, individual qualitative interviews were conducted to collect experiences on its benefits and weaknesses. According to the initial evidence, the deployment of the framework seems to have brought concrete benefits to the project, e.g. by contributing positively to community growth, software quality and inter-organizational learning

DEVELOPING A RISK MANAGEMENT PROCESS AND RISK TAXONOMY FOR MEDIUM-SIZED IT SOLUTION PROVIDERS

To differentiate from competitors, some organizations are transforming their business models from offering single products or services to providing IT solutions. In an IT solution, the provider and the customer co-operate in integrating hardware, software and service components to fulfil customer-specific needs. The new business model, however, presents new risk management challenges. First, IT solution providers need to understand additional risks of IT solutions, e.g., risks engendered by operating the IT solution on behalf of the customer and by integrating modules from third-party providers. Second, risk management must account for special IT solution characteristics, e.g., supporting the whole lifecycle from planning to end-of-life and accounting for customer-specific risk profiles. In this paper, we present the results of our design science research with a medium-sized IT solution provider. We developed two artifacts. First, we cooperatively developed a risk management process that could be generalized to other solution providers of similar size. Second, we derived a taxonomy of IT solution risks to provide a foundation for the risk management process. We describe the process by which our research partner transformed the risk management and discuss implications for medium-sized IT solution providers