Plataforma de serviços para monitorização da cadeia de valor do pescado

Traceability in the food value chain is a topic of interest due to the advantages it brings to both the consumers, producers and regulatory authorities. This thesis describes my contributions during the design and implementation of a microservice based middleware for the Portuguese fish value chain considering current practices in the industry and the requirements of the stakeholders involved in the project, with the goal of integrating all the traceability information available from each operator to provide customers with the full story of the products they purchase. During this project I assumed many roles such as development, operations and even some security allowing me to improve my skills in all these fields and experimenting with the latest cloud native technologies such as containers and with DevOps practices.A rastreabilidade na cadeia de valor alimentar é um tema de interesse pelas vantagens que traz aos consumidores, produtores e autoridades reguladoras. Esta dissertação descreve as minhas contribuições durante a conceção e implementação de um middleware baseado em micro-serviços para a cadeia de valor do pescado portuguesa considerando as práticas atuais da indústria e os requisitos das partes interessadas envolvidas no projeto, com o objetivo de integrar toda a informação de rastreabilidade disponível de cada um dos operadores para fornecer aos clientes a história completa dos produtos que adquirem. Durante este projeto, assumi muitas funções, como desenvolvimento, operações e até mesmo alguma segurança, o que me permitiu melhorar as minhas capacidades em todos essas disciplinas e experimentar as mais recentes tecnologias nativas da nuvem, como contentores e práticas de DevOps.Mestrado em Engenharia Informátic

Service-oriented design of environmental information systems

Service-orientation has an increasing impact upon the design process and the architecture of environmental information systems. This thesis specifies the SERVUS design methodology for geospatial applications based upon standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium. SERVUS guides the system architect to rephrase use case requirements as a network of semantically-annotated requested resources and to iteratively match them with offered resources that mirror the capabilities of existing services

Structural Transformation in South Africa

Taking South Africa as an important case study of the challenges of structural transformation, the book offers a new micro-meso level framework and evidence linking country-specific and global dynamics of change, with a focus on the current challenges and opportunities faced by middle-income countries. Detailed analyses of industry groupings and interests in South Africa reveal the complex set of interlocking country-specific factors which have hampered structural transformation over several decades, but also the emerging productive areas and opportunities for structural change. The structural transformation trajectory of South Africa presents a unique country case, given its industrial structure, concentration, and highly internationalized economy, as well as the objective of black economic empowerment. The book links these micro-meso dynamics to the global forces driving economic, institutional, and social change. These include digital industrialization, global value-chain consolidation, financialization, and environmental and other sustainability challenges which are reshaping structural transformation dynamics across middle-income countries like South Africa. While these new drivers of change are disrupting existing industries and interests in some areas, in others they are reinforcing existing trends and configurations of power. The book analyses the ways in which both the domestic and global drivers of structural transformation shape—and, in some cases, are shaped by—a country’s political settlement and its evolution. By focusing on the political economy of structural transformation, the book disentangles the specific dynamics underlying the South African experience of the middle-income country conundrum. In so doing, it brings to light the broader challenges faced by similar countries in achieving structural transformation via industrial policies

Structural Transformation in South Africa: The Challenges of Inclusive Industrial Development in a Middle-Income Country

Taking South Africa as an important case study of the challenges of structural transformation, the book offers a new micro-meso level framework and evidence linking country-specific and global dynamics of change, with a focus on the current challenges and opportunities faced by middle-income countries. Detailed analyses of industry groupings and interests in South Africa reveal the complex set of interlocking country-specific factors which have hampered structural transformation over several decades, but also the emerging productive areas and opportunities for structural change. The structural transformation trajectory of South Africa presents a unique country case, given its industrial structure, concentration, and highly internationalized economy, as well as the objective of black economic empowerment. The book links these micro-meso dynamics to the global forces driving economic, institutional, and social change. These include digital industrialization, global value-chain consolidation, financialization, and environmental and other sustainability challenges which are reshaping structural transformation dynamics across middle-income countries like South Africa. While these new drivers of change are disrupting existing industries and interests in some areas, in others they are reinforcing existing trends and configurations of power. The book analyses the ways in which both the domestic and global drivers of structural transformation shape—and, in some cases, are shaped by—a country’s political settlement and its evolution. By focusing on the political economy of structural transformation, the book disentangles the specific dynamics underlying the South African experience of the middle-income country conundrum. In so doing, it brings to light the broader challenges faced by similar countries in achieving structural transformation via industrial policies

A platform-independent domain-specific modeling language for multiagent systems

Associated with the increasing acceptance of agent-based computing as a novel software engineering paradigm, recently a lot of research addresses the development of suitable techniques to support the agent-oriented software development. The state-of-the-art in agent-based software development is to (i) design the agent systems basing on an agent-based methodology and (ii) take the resulting design artifact as a base to manually implement the agent system using existing agent-oriented programming languages or general purpose languages like Java. Apart from failures made when manually transform an abstract specification into a concrete implementation, the gap between design and implementation may also result in the divergence of design and implementation. The framework discussed in this dissertation presents a platform-independent domain-specific modeling language for MASs called Dsml4MAS that allows modeling agent systems in a platform-independent and graphical manner. Apart from the abstract design, Dsml4MAS also allows to automatically (i) check the generated design artifacts against a formal semantic specification to guarantee the well-formedness of the design and (ii) translate the abstract specification into a concrete implementation. Taking both together, Dsml4MAS ensures that for any well-formed design, an associated implementation will be generated closing the gap between design and code.Aufgrund wachsender Akzeptanz von Agentensystemen zur Behandlung komplexer Problemstellungen wird der Schwerpunkt auf dem Gebiet der agentenorientierten Softwareentwicklung vor allem auf die Erforschung von geeignetem Entwicklungswerkzeugen gesetzt. Stand der Forschung ist es dabei das Agentendesign mittels einer Agentenmethodologie zu spezifizieren und die resultierenden Artefakte als Grundlage zur manuellen Programmierung zu verwenden. Fehler, die bei dieser manuellen Überführung entstehen, machen insbesondere das abstrakte Design weniger nützlich in Hinsicht auf die Nachhaltigkeit der entwickelten Softwareapplikation. Das in dieser Dissertation diskutierte Rahmenwerk erörtert eine plattformunabhängige domänenspezifische Modellierungssprache für Multiagentensysteme namens Dsml4MAS. Dsml4MAS erlaubt es Agentensysteme auf eine plattformunabhängige und graphische Art und Weise darzustellen. Die Modellierungssprache umfasst (i) eine abstrakte Syntax, die das Vokabular der Sprache definiert, (ii) eine konkrete Syntax, die die graphische Darstellung spezifiziert sowie (iii) eine formale Semantik, die dem Vokabular eine präzise Bedeutung gibt. Dsml4MAS ist Bestandteil einer (semi-automatischen) Methodologie, die es (i) erlaubt die abstrakte Spezifikation schrittweise bis hin zur konkreten Implementierung zu konkretisieren und (ii) die Interoperabilität zu alternativen Softwareparadigmen wie z.B. Dienstorientierte Architekturen zu gewährleisten

Automated Injection of Curated Knowledge Into Real-Time Clinical Systems: CDS Architecture for the 21st Century

abstract: Clinical Decision Support (CDS) is primarily associated with alerts, reminders, order entry, rule-based invocation, diagnostic aids, and on-demand information retrieval. While valuable, these foci have been in production use for decades, and do not provide a broader, interoperable means of plugging structured clinical knowledge into live electronic health record (EHR) ecosystems for purposes of orchestrating the user experiences of patients and clinicians. To date, the gap between knowledge representation and user-facing EHR integration has been considered an “implementation concern” requiring unscalable manual human efforts and governance coordination. Drafting a questionnaire engineered to meet the specifications of the HL7 CDS Knowledge Artifact specification, for example, carries no reasonable expectation that it may be imported and deployed into a live system without significant burdens. Dramatic reduction of the time and effort gap in the research and application cycle could be revolutionary. Doing so, however, requires both a floor-to-ceiling precoordination of functional boundaries in the knowledge management lifecycle, as well as formalization of the human processes by which this occurs. This research introduces ARTAKA: Architecture for Real-Time Application of Knowledge Artifacts, as a concrete floor-to-ceiling technological blueprint for both provider heath IT (HIT) and vendor organizations to incrementally introduce value into existing systems dynamically. This is made possible by service-ization of curated knowledge artifacts, then injected into a highly scalable backend infrastructure by automated orchestration through public marketplaces. Supplementary examples of client app integration are also provided. Compilation of knowledge into platform-specific form has been left flexible, in so far as implementations comply with ARTAKA’s Context Event Service (CES) communication and Health Services Platform (HSP) Marketplace service packaging standards. Towards the goal of interoperable human processes, ARTAKA’s treatment of knowledge artifacts as a specialized form of software allows knowledge engineers to operate as a type of software engineering practice. Thus, nearly a century of software development processes, tools, policies, and lessons offer immediate benefit: in some cases, with remarkable parity. Analyses of experimentation is provided with guidelines in how choice aspects of software development life cycles (SDLCs) apply to knowledge artifact development in an ARTAKA environment. Portions of this culminating document have been further initiated with Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) intended to ultimately produce normative standards, as have active relationships with other bodies.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Biomedical Informatics 201

Applying model-based systems engineering to architecture optimization and selection during system acquisition

2018 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.The architecture selection process early in a major system acquisition is a critical step in determining the overall affordability and technical performance success of a program. There are recognized deficiencies that frequently occur in this step such as poor transparency into the final selection decision and excessive focus on lowest cost, which is not necessarily the best value for all of the stakeholders. This research investigates improvements to the architecture selection process by integrating Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) techniques, enforcing rigorous, quantitative evaluation metrics with a corresponding understanding of uncertainties, and stakeholder feedback in order to generate an architecture that is more optimized and trusted to provide better value for the stakeholders. Three case studies were analyzed to demonstrate this proposed process. The first focused on a satellite communications System of Systems (SoS) acquisition to demonstrate the overall feasibility and applicability of the process. The second investigated an electro-optical remote sensing satellite system to compare this proposed process to a current architecture selection process typified by the United States Department of Defense (U.S. DoD) Analysis of Alternatives (AoA). The third case study analyzed the evaluation of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) providing satellite command and control with cyber security protections in order to demonstrate rigorous accounting of uncertainty through the architecture evaluation and selection. These case studies serve to define and demonstrate a new, more transparent and trusted architecture selection process that consistently provides better value for the stakeholders of a major system acquisition. While the examples in this research focused on U.S. DoD and other major acquisitions, the methodology developed is broadly applicable to other domains where this is a need for optimization of enterprise architectures as the basis for effective system acquisition. The results from the three case studies showed the new process outperformed the current methodology for conducting architecture evaluations in nearly all criteria considered and in particular selects architectures of better value, provides greater visibility into the actual decision making, and improves trust in the decision through a robust understanding of uncertainty. The primary contribution of this research then is improved information support to an architecture selection in the early phases of a system acquisition program. The proposed methodology presents a decision authority with an integrated assessment of each alternative, traceable to the concerns of the system's stakeholders, and thus enables a more informed and objective selection of the preferred alternative. It is recommended that the methodology proposed in this work is considered for future architecture evaluations

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation