A goal-oriented requirements modelling language for enterprise architecture

Methods for enterprise architecture, such as TOGAF, acknowledge the importance of requirements engineering in the development of enterprise architectures. Modelling support is needed to specify, document, communicate and reason about goals and requirements. Current modelling techniques for enterprise architecture focus on the products, services, processes and applications of an enterprise. In addition, techniques may be provided to describe structured requirements lists and use cases. Little support is available however for modelling the underlying motivation of enterprise architectures in terms of stakeholder concerns and the high-level goals that address these concerns. This paper describes a language that supports the modelling of this motivation. The definition of the language is based on existing work on high-level goal and requirements modelling and is aligned with an existing standard for enterprise modelling: the ArchiMate language. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how enterprise architecture can benefit from analysis techniques in the requirements domain

Architectural implications for context adaptive smart spaces

Buildings and spaces are complex entities containing complex social structures and interactions. A smart space is a composite of the users that inhabit it, the IT infrastructure that supports it, and the sensors and appliances that service it. Rather than separating the IT from the buildings and from the appliances that inhabit them and treating them as separate systems, pervasive computing combines them and allows them to interact. We outline a reactive context architecture that supports this vision of integrated smart spaces and explore some implications for building large-scale pervasive systems

Model-driven design of context-aware applications

In many cases, in order to be effective, software applications need to allow sensitivity to context changes. This implies however additional complexity associated with the need for applications’ adaptability (being capable of capturing context, interpreting it and reacting on it). Hence, we envision 3 ‘musts’ that, in combination, are especially relevant to the design of context-aware applications. Firstly, at the business modeling level, it is considered crucial that the different possible context states can be properly captured and modeled, states that correspond to certain desirable behaviors. Secondly, it must be known what are the dependencies between the two, namely between states and behaviors. And finally, what is valid for application design in general, business needs are to be aligned to application solutions. In this work, we address the mentioned challenges, by approaching the notion of context and extending from this perspective a previously proposed business-software alignment approach. We illustrate our achieved results by means of a small example. It is expected that this research contribution will be useful as an additional result concerning the alignment between business modeling and software design

Using problem descriptions to represent variabilities for context-aware applications

This paper investigates the potential use of problem descriptions to represent and analyse variability in context-aware software products. By context-aware, we refer to recognition of changes in properties of external domains, which are recognised as affecting the behaviour of products. There are many reasons for changes in the operating environment, from fluctuating resources upon which the product relies, to different operating locations or the presence of objects. There is an increasing expectation for software intensivedevices to be context-aware which, in turn, adds further variability to problem description and analysis. However, we argue in this paper that the capture of contextual variability on current variability representations and analyses has yet to be explored. We illustrate the representation of this type of variability in a pilot study, and conclude with lessons learnt and an agenda for further work

Connected systems in smart cities: use-cases of integration of buildings information with smart systems

Realisation of smart cities is highly dependent on innovative connections between the deployed systems in the cities. This implies that successfully deployment of individual smart systems which meet citizens’ needs, is not sufficient to make a city smart. Indeed, the smart cities require to innovate and connect establish infrastructures for the citizens and organisations. To enable connected systems in smart cities, the possibilities to exchange and integration information between different systems is essential. Construction industry is one of the domains which owns huge amount of valuable information asset. Buildings information can be utilised to create initiatives associated with various domains like, urban and infrastructure planning, maintenance/facility management, and energy monitoring. However, there are some barriers to realise these initiatives. This paper introduces and elaborates the details about three use-cases which need to utilise buildings information to present innovative smart services. The three use cases are: 1) Energy Usage Monitoring for positive energy usage district areas in Smart Cities (a use case from River City-anonymous name of the city); 2) Services for Facility Management Industry (a use-case from Estates office in Quay University); 3) Safety & risk management for buildings in 3D Hack event in Dublin. Each use-case considers various stakeholders’ perspectives. Also they include elaborated details related to the barriers and challenges associated with utilisation and integration of buildings information. This paper concludes by the detailed barriers to benefit from valuable buildings information to create innovative smart services. Further, recommendations are provided to overcome the presented challenges