Realizing networks of proactive smart products

The sheer complexity and number of functionalities embedded in many everyday devices already exceed the ability of most users to learn how to use them effectively. An approach to tackle this problem is to introduce ‘smart’ capabilities in technical products, to enable them to proactively assist and co-operate with humans and other products. In this paper we provide an overview of our approach to realizing networks of proactive and co-operating smart products, starting from the requirements imposed by real-world scenarios. In particular, we present an ontology-based approach to modeling proactive problem solving, which builds on and extends earlier work in the knowledge acquisition community on problem solving methods. We then move on to the technical design aspects of our work and illustrate the solutions, to do with semantic data management and co-operative problem solving, which are needed to realize our functional architecture for proactive problem solving in concrete networks of physical and resource-constrained devices. Finally, we evaluate our solution by showing that it satisfies the quality attributes and architectural design patterns, which are desirable in collaborative multi-agents systems

Service architecture design for E-Businesses: A pattern-based approach

E-business involves the implementation of business processes over the Web. At a technical level, this imposes an application integration problem. In a wider sense, the integration of software and business levels across organisations becomes a significant challenge. Service architectures are an increasingly adopted architectural approach for solving Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI). The adoption of this new architectural paradigm requires adaptation or creation of novel methodologies and techniques to solve the integration problem. In this paper we present the pattern-based techniques supporting a methodological framework to design service architectures for EAI. The techniques are used for services identification, for transformation from business models to service architectures and for architecture modifications

Measuring the associations between collaborative working and project performance

There is evidence that higher degrees of collaborative working can produce more successful project performance, but there is only limited research to systematically examine the specific associations between collaborative working and project performance. In particular, there is a lack of exploration of appropriate approaches to test these associations. In order to test these associations in an appropriate approach, the concepts of collaborative working and project performance in this research are transformed into a measurable form in terms of the philosophy of AHP (analytic hierarchy process). In the process of measurement design for collaborative working and project performance, a Likert Scale is adopted. After refining the final measures through unidimensionality and reliability testing, as a part of PhD study, this paper presents the results of the association exploration between collaborative working and project performance. The produced conclusion is strongly supporting that there is a strong positive linear relationship between collaborative working and project performance

Two-phased knowledge formalisation for hydrometallurgical gold ore process recommendation and validation

This paper describes an approach to externalising and formalising expert knowledge involved in the design and evaluation of hydrometallurgical process chains for gold ore treatment. The objective was to create a case-based reasoning application for recommending and validating a treatment process of gold ores. We describe a twofold approach. Formalising human expert knowledge about gold mining situations enables the retrieval of similar mining contexts and respective process chains, based on prospection data gathered from a potential gold mining site. Secondly, empirical knowledge on hydrometallurgical treatments is formalised. This enabled us to evaluate and, where needed, redesign the process chain that was recommended by the first aspect of our approach. The main problems with formalisation of knowledge in the domain of gold ore refinement are the diversity and the amount of parameters used in literature and by experts to describe a mining context. We demonstrate how similarity knowledge was used to formalise literature knowledge. The evaluation of data gathered from experiments with an initial prototype workflow recommender, Auric Adviser, provides promising results

Quality-aware model-driven service engineering

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Quality aspects ranging from interoperability to maintainability to performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Architecture models can substantially influence quality attributes of the implemented software systems. Besides the benefits of explicit architectures on maintainability and reuse, architectural constraints such as styles, reference architectures and architectural patterns can influence observable software properties such as performance. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and evaluating the performance of implemented software. We present an approach for addressing the quality of services and service-based systems at the model-level in the context of model-driven service engineering. The focus on architecture-level models is a consequence of the black-box character of services

Tracing the Scenarios in Scenario-Based Product Design: a study to support scenario generation

Scenario-based design originates from the human-computer interaction and\ud software engineering disciplines, and continues to be adapted for product development. Product development differs from software development in the former’s more varied context of use, broader characteristics of users and more tangible solutions. The possible use of scenarios in product design is therefore broader and more challenging. Existing design methods that involve scenarios can be employed in many different stages of the product design process. However, there is no proficient overview that discusses a\ud scenario-based product design process in its full extent. The purposes of creating scenarios and the evolution of scenarios from their original design data are often not obvious, although the results from using scenarios are clearly visible. Therefore, this paper proposes to classify possible scenario uses with their purpose, characteristics and supporting design methods. The classification makes explicit different types of scenarios and their relation to one another. Furthermore, novel scenario uses can be referred or added to the classification to develop it in parallel with the scenario-based design\ud practice. Eventually, a scenario-based product design process could take inspiration for creating scenarios from the classification because it provides detailed characteristics of the scenario