Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table

Managing Interacting Criteria: Application to Environmental Evaluation Practices

The need for organizations to evaluate their environmental practices has been recently increasing. This fact has led to the development of many approaches to appraise such practices. In this paper, a novel decision model to evaluate company’s environmental practices is proposed to improve traditional evaluation process in different facets. Firstly, different reviewers’ collectives related to the company’s activity are taken into account in the process to increase company internal efficiency and external legitimacy. Secondly, following the standard ISO 14031, two general categories of environmental performance indicators, management and operational, are considered. Thirdly, since the assumption of independence among environmental indicators is rarely verified in environmental context, an aggregation operator to bear in mind the relationship among such indicators in the evaluation results is proposed. Finally, this new model integrates quantitative and qualitative information with different scales using a multi-granular linguistic model that allows to adapt diverse evaluation scales according to appraisers’ knowledge

Air Quality Prediction in Smart Cities Using Machine Learning Technologies Based on Sensor Data: A Review

The influence of machine learning technologies is rapidly increasing and penetrating almost in every field, and air pollution prediction is not being excluded from those fields. This paper covers the revision of the studies related to air pollution prediction using machine learning algorithms based on sensor data in the context of smart cities. Using the most popular databases and executing the corresponding filtration, the most relevant papers were selected. After thorough reviewing those papers, the main features were extracted, which served as a base to link and compare them to each other. As a result, we can conclude that: (1) instead of using simple machine learning techniques, currently, the authors apply advanced and sophisticated techniques, (2) China was the leading country in terms of a case study, (3) Particulate matter with diameter equal to 2.5 micrometers was the main prediction target, (4) in 41% of the publications the authors carried out the prediction for the next day, (5) 66% of the studies used data had an hourly rate, (6) 49% of the papers used open data and since 2016 it had a tendency to increase, and (7) for efficient air quality prediction it is important to consider the external factors such as weather conditions, spatial characteristics, and temporal features

A Survey on the Contributions of Software-Defined Networking to Traffic Engineering

Since the appearance of OpenFlow back in 2008, software-defined networking (SDN) has gained momentum. Although there are some discrepancies between the standards developing organizations working with SDN about what SDN is and how it is defined, they all outline traffic engineering (TE) as a key application. One of the most common objectives of TE is the congestion minimization, where techniques such as traffic splitting among multiple paths or advanced reservation systems are used. In such a scenario, this manuscript surveys the role of a comprehensive list of SDN protocols in TE solutions, in order to assess how these protocols can benefit TE. The SDN protocols have been categorized using the SDN architecture proposed by the open networking foundation, which differentiates among data-controller plane interfaces, application-controller plane interfaces, and management interfaces, in order to state how the interface type in which they operate influences TE. In addition, the impact of the SDN protocols on TE has been evaluated by comparing them with the path computation element (PCE)-based architecture. The PCE-based architecture has been selected to measure the impact of SDN on TE because it is the most novel TE architecture until the date, and because it already defines a set of metrics to measure the performance of TE solutions. We conclude that using the three types of interfaces simultaneously will result in more powerful and enhanced TE solutions, since they benefit TE in complementary ways.European Commission through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GN4) under Grant 691567 Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Secure Deployment of Services Over SDN and NFV-based Networks Project S&NSEC under Grant TEC2013-47960-C4-3-

Economic evaluation in decision models: a critical review and methodological propositions

International audienceDecision models of industrial management articles are often based on an economic criterion to find the proposed solution. They use economic parameters that are generally imported from the firm cost accounting system. When cost information is not adapted to the decision, the obtained solution of the model may be invalid. In this article, we deal with a critical literature review to report the methodological problems encountered in industrial management articles vis-à-vis the used costs. Finally we suggest methodological propositions to be kept in mind by authors when they are using costs in decision models

A Review on Information Accessing Systems Based on Fuzzy Linguistic Modelling

This paper presents a survey of some fuzzy linguistic information access systems. The review shows information retrieval systems, filtering systems, recommender systems, and web quality evaluation tools, which are based on tools of fuzzy linguistic modelling. The fuzzy linguistic modelling allows us to represent and manage the subjectivity, vagueness and imprecision that is intrinsic and characteristic of the processes of information searching, and, in such a way, the developed systems allow users the access to quality information in a flexible and user-adapted way.European Union (EU) TIN2007-61079 PET2007-0460Ministry of Public Works 90/07Excellence Andalusian Project TIC529