A Review on the Application of Natural Computing in Environmental Informatics

Natural computing offers new opportunities to understand, model and analyze the complexity of the physical and human-created environment. This paper examines the application of natural computing in environmental informatics, by investigating related work in this research field. Various nature-inspired techniques are presented, which have been employed to solve different relevant problems. Advantages and disadvantages of these techniques are discussed, together with analysis of how natural computing is generally used in environmental research.Comment: Proc. of EnviroInfo 201

Determining Training Needs for Cloud Infrastructure Investigations using I-STRIDE

As more businesses and users adopt cloud computing services, security vulnerabilities will be increasingly found and exploited. There are many technological and political challenges where investigation of potentially criminal incidents in the cloud are concerned. Security experts, however, must still be able to acquire and analyze data in a methodical, rigorous and forensically sound manner. This work applies the STRIDE asset-based risk assessment method to cloud computing infrastructure for the purpose of identifying and assessing an organization's ability to respond to and investigate breaches in cloud computing environments. An extension to the STRIDE risk assessment model is proposed to help organizations quickly respond to incidents while ensuring acquisition and integrity of the largest amount of digital evidence possible. Further, the proposed model allows organizations to assess the needs and capacity of their incident responders before an incident occurs.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, 5th International Conference on Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime; Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime, pp. 223-236, 201

A Softcomputing Knowledge Areas Model

Recently, ten knowledge areas (KAs) of project management have been published by the PMBOK® Guide. They comprise specific skills and experiences to ensure accomplishing project goals, and include management of: integration, scope, cost, time, quality, communications, procurement, risk, human resources and stakeholders. This research paper focuses on the ten required KAs for a project manager or a project to be successful. It aims at applying the Softcomputing modeling techniques to describe the relations between the 47 processes and the KAs. Such a model will enable users to predict the overall competencies of the project management. Thus, it provides an assessment tool to envisage, visualize and indicate the overall performance and competency of a project. The proposed Softcomputing Knowledge Areas Model (SKAM) is a two-stage model. The first stage involves ten models. Each model describes relations between a specific KA and its related processes. The outputs of these ten models will feed into the second stage that will represent the relationship between all the ten KAs and the overall predicted competencies of a project. A combination of Subtractive Clustering and Neurofuzzy modeling techniques are used. Three measures are used to validate the adequacy of the models: the mean average percentage errors, the correlation coefficient and the maximum percentage errors. The highest achieved values for these measures are 0.5751, 0.9999 and 4.7283, respectively. However, although the preliminary findings of the proposed SKAM model are promising, more testing is still required before declaring the adequacy of applying the Softcomputing modeling approach in the project management field

Make-or-buy configurational approaches in product-service ecosystems and performance

This research examines firm boundary configurations for manufacturers' product-service offerings. We argue that the building of a product-service ecosystem through collaboration with service providers in certain types of business services can increase performance as a result of the superior knowledge-based resources coming from specialized partners. By using fuzzy set qualitative analysis on a sample of 370 multinational manufacturing enterprises (MMNEs), the results reveal that effective servitization is heterogeneous across manufacturing industries and across business service offerings. The findings indicate that most industries achieve their highest performance through collaborations with value-added service providers in two out of three of the service continuum stages (Base and Intermediate services); while keeping the development of Advanced services in-house. The results help to contextualize the best practices for implementing service business models in MMNEs by detailing which service capabilities should be retained in-house and which should be outsourced to specialized partners in various industrial contexts.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Security Enhanced Applications for Information Systems

Every day, more users access services and electronically transmit information which is usually disseminated over insecure networks and processed by websites and databases, which lack proper security protection mechanisms and tools. This may have an impact on both the users’ trust as well as the reputation of the system’s stakeholders. Designing and implementing security enhanced systems is of vital importance. Therefore, this book aims to present a number of innovative security enhanced applications. It is titled “Security Enhanced Applications for Information Systems” and includes 11 chapters. This book is a quality guide for teaching purposes as well as for young researchers since it presents leading innovative contributions on security enhanced applications on various Information Systems. It involves cases based on the standalone, network and Cloud environments

An information model for lean, agile, resilient and green supply chain management

Dissertação para a obtenção de Grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão IndustrialIn modern business environments, an effective Supply Chain Management (SCM) is crucial to business continuity. In this context, Lean, Agile, Resilient and Green (LARG), are advocated as the fundamental paradigm for a competitive Supply Chain (SC) as a whole. In fact, competition between supply chains (SC) has replaced the traditional competition between companies. To make a supply chain more competitive, capable of responding to the demands of customers with agility, and capable of responding effectively to unexpected disturbance, in conjugation with environmental responsibilities, and the necessity to eliminate processes that add no value, companies must implement a set of LARG SCM practices and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure their influence on the SC performance. However, the selection of the best LARG SCM practices and KPIs is a complex decision-making problem, involving dependencies and feedbacks. Still, any decision-making must be supported by real and transparent data. This dissertation intends to provide two integrated models to assist the information management and decision-making. The first is an information model to support a LARG SCM, allowing the exchange and storage of data/information through a single information platform. In this model three types of diagrams are developed, Business Process Diagram (BPD), Use Cases Diagram and Class Diagram to assist the information platform design. The second is a decision-making model, designated LARG Analytical Network Process (ANP) to select the best LARG SCM practices/KPI to be implemented in SCs. Both models are developed and validated within the automotive SC, namely in Volkswagen Autoeuropa