Monitoring the service-based system lifecycle with SALMon

Los Sistemas Basados en Servicios (SBS) son sistemas software altamente dinámicos compuestos por un conjunto de servicios web provenientes de distintos, y posiblemente heterogéneos, proveedores. En contraste con otros sistemas software tradicionales, el comportamiento dinámico de los SBS requiere de información actualizada sobre la calidad de servicio (QoS) para poder actuar i administrar correctamente las actividades en las distintas fases del ciclo de vida de los SBS (p.e., selección de servicios, despliegue, evaluación de niveles de acuerdo de servicio –SLA–, y adaptación). [...] Para cubrir esta brecha de investigación, presentamos SALMon, una plataforma de monitorización de servicios versátil que provee información acerca de la QoS según la forma y enfoque adecuado para las distintas actividades del ciclo de vida.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

User involvement in healthcare technology development and assessment: Structured literature review

Purpose – Medical device users are one of the principal stakeholders of medical device technologies. User involvement in medical device technology development and assessment is central to meet their needs. Design/methodology/approach – A structured review of literature, published from 1980 to 2005 in peer-reviewed journals, was carried out from social science perspective to investigate the practice of user involvement in the development and assessment of medical device technologies. This was followed by qualitative thematic analysis. Findings – It is found that users of medical devices include clinicians, patients, carers and others. Different kinds of medical devices are developed and assessed by user involvement. The user involvement occurs at different stages of the medical device technology lifecycle and the degree of user involvement is in the order of design stage > testing and trials stage > deployment stage > concept stage. Methods most commonly used for capturing users’ perspectives are usability tests, interviews and questionnaire surveys. Research limitations/implications – We did not review the relevant literature published in engineering, medical and nursing fields, which might have been useful. Practical implications – Consideration of the users’ characteristics and the context of medical device use is critical for developing and assessing medical device technologies from users’ perspectives. Originality/value – This study shows that users of medical device technologies are not homogeneous but heterogeneous, in several aspects, and their needs, skills and working environments vary. This is important consideration for incorporating users’ perspectives in medical device technologies. Paper type: Literature review

Mercury: using the QuPreSS reference model to evaluate predictive services

Nowadays, lots of service providers offer predictive services that show in advance a condition or occurrence about the future. As a consequence, it becomes necessary for service customers to select the predictive service that best satisfies their needs. The QuPreSS reference model provides a standard solution for the selection of predictive services based on the quality of their predictions. QuPreSS has been designed to be applicable in any predictive domain (e.g., weather forecasting, economics, and medicine). This paper presents Mercury, a tool based on the QuPreSS reference model and customized to the weather forecast domain. Mercury measures weather predictive services' quality, and automates the context-dependent selection of the most accurate predictive service to satisfy a customer query. To do so, candidate predictive services are monitored so that their predictions can be eventually compared to real observations obtained from a trusted source. Mercury is a proof-of-concept of QuPreSS that aims to show that the selection of predictive services can be driven by the quality of their predictions. Throughout the paper, we show how Mercury was built from the QuPreSS reference model and how it can be installed and used.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Assessing open source communities' health using Service Oriented Computing concepts

© 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The quality of Open Source Software products is directly related to its community's health. To date, health analysis is made accessing available data repositories or using software management tools that are often too static or ad hoc. To address this issue, we propose to adopt principles and methods from the Service Oriented Computing field. Particularly, we propose to adapt the concepts of quality service and service level agreement, and propose to reuse the existing body of knowledge and techniques from SOC monitoring. To demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, we use a service monitoring framework called SALMonOSS as a proof of concept to realize the implementation of the proposal.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Wave Energy: a Pacific Perspective

This is the author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by The Royal Society and can be found at: http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/.This paper illustrates the status of wave energy development in Pacific Rim countries by characterizing the available resource and introducing the region‟s current and potential future leaders in wave energy converter development. It also describes the existing licensing and permitting process as well as potential environmental concerns. Capabilities of Pacific Ocean testing facilities are described in addition to the region‟s vision of the future of wave energy

Monitoring the quality of service to support the service based system lifecycle

Service Oriented Computing (SOC) has been established in the last recent years as a successful paradigm in Software Engineering. The systems built under this paradigm, known as Service Based System (SBS), are composed of several services, which are usually third-party software run by external service providers. SBS rely on these service providers to ensure that their services comply with the agreed Quality of Service (QoS). In contrast to other systems, the dynamic behaviour of SBS requires up-to-date QoS information for its proper management in the different stages of its lifecycle, from their initial construction until their decommission. Providing such QoS information has resulted in different technological solutions built around a monitor. Nonetheless, several research challenges in the field remain still open, ranging from theoretical aspects of quality assurance to architectonical challenges in decentralized monitoring. Based on the current research challenges for service monitoring, the research gaps in which we aim to contribute are twofold: - To investigate on the definition and structure of the different quality factors of services, and provide a framework of common understanding for the definition of what to monitor. - To investigate on the different features required to support the activities of the whole SBS lifecycle (i.e. how to monitor), and develop a monitoring framework that accomplishes such features. As a result of this thesis, we provide: What to monitor - A distribution of the quality models along the time dimension and the identification of their relationships. - An analysis of the size and definition coverage of the proposed quality models. - A quantified coverage of the different ISO/IEC 25010 quality factors given by the proposals. - The identification of the most used quality factors, and provided the most consolidated definitions for them. How to monitor - The elicitation of the requirements of the different activities in the SBS lifecycle. - The definition of the set of features that supports the elicited requirements. - A modular service-oriented monitoring framework, named SALMon, implementing the defined features. SALMon has been validated by including it in several frameworks supporting the different activities of the SBS lifecycle. Finally, we have conducted a performance evaluation of SALMon over real web services.La Computació Orientada a Serveis (SOC) ha esdevingut en els darrers anys un paradigma exitós en el camp de l'Enginyeria del Software. Els sistemes construïts sota aquest paradigma, coneguts com Sistemes Basats en Serveis (SBS), estan composats de diversos serveis, que són, usualment, programari de tercers executats per proveïdors de serveis externs. Els SBS depenen dels proveïdors dels serveis per garantir que els serveis compleixen amb la Qualitat del Servei (QoS) acordada. En contrast amb altres sistemes, el comportament dinàmic dels SBS requereix d'informació actualitzada del QoS per a la correcta administració de les diferents etapes del cicle de vida dels SBS: des de la seva construcció inicial fins a la seva clausura. Proveir d'aquesta informació de QoS ha resultat en diferents solucions tecnològiques construïdes al voltant d'un monitor. Malgrat això, diversos reptes de recerca en el camp encara romanen obertes, des d'aspectes teòrics de l'assegurança de qualitat, a reptes arquitectònics en la monitorització descentralitzada. Basat en els reptes de recerca actuals per a la monitorització de serveis, els forats de recerca en els que pretenem contribuir són dobles: - Investigar en la definició i estructura dels diferents factors de qualitat dels serveis, i proveir un marc de treball d'entesa comuna per a la definició de què monitoritzar. - Investigar en les diferents característiques requerides per donar suport a les activitats de tot el cicle de vida dels SBS (i.e. com monitoritzar), i desenvolupar una plataforma de monitorització que acompleixi aquestes característiques. Com a resultats de la tesis, proveïm: Què monitoritzar - Una distribució dels models de qualitat al llarg de la dimensió temporal i la identificació de les seves interrelacions. - Un anàlisi de la mida i definició de la cobertura dels models de qualitat proposats. - Una cobertura quantificada dels diferents factors de qualitat ISO/IEC 25010 donat en les diferents propostes. - La identificació dels factors de qualitat més utilitzats, i la definició dels termes més consolidats. Com monitoritzar - L'elicitació dels requeriments per a les diferents activitats en el cicle de vida dels SBS. - La definició del conjunt de característiques que donen suport als requeriments elicitats. - Una platforma modular orientada a serveis, anomenat SALMon, que implementa les característiques definides. SALMon ha estatvalidat incloent la plataforma en diversos marcs de treball donant suport a les diferents activitat

PICES Press, Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 2013

•2012 PICES Science: A Note from the Science Board Chairman (pp. 1-6) ◾2012 PICES Awards (pp. 7-9) ◾GLOBEC/PICES/ICES ECOFOR Workshop (pp. 10-15) ◾ICES/PICES Symposium on “Forage Fish Interactions” (pp. 16-18) ◾The Yeosu Declaration, the Yeosu Declaration Forum and the Yeosu Project (pp. 19-23) ◾2013 PICES Calendar (p. 23) ◾Why Do We Need Human Dimensions for the FUTURE Program? (pp. 24-25) ◾New PICES MAFF-Sponsored Project on “Marine Ecosystem Health and Human Well-Being” (pp. 26-28) ◾The Bering Sea: Current Status and Recent Trends (pp. 29-31) ◾Continuing Cool in the Northeast Pacific Ocean (pp. 32, 35) ◾The State of the Western North Pacific in the First Half of 2012 (pp. 33-35) ◾New Leadership in PICES (pp. 36-39

An IoT Toolchain Architecture for Planning, Running and Managing a Complete Condition Monitoring Scenario

Condition Monitoring (CM) is an extremely critical application of the Internet of Things (IoT) within Industry 4.0 and Smart City scenarios, especially following the recent energy crisis. CM aims to monitor the status of a physical appliance over time and in real time in order to react promptly when anomalies are detected, as well as perform predictive maintenance tasks. Current deployments suffer from both interoperability and management issues within their engineering process at all phases – from their design to their deployment, to their management –, often requiring human intervention. Furthermore, the fragmentation of the IoT landscape and the heterogeneity of IoT solutions hinder a seamless onboarding process of legacy devices and systems. In this paper, we tackle these problems by first proposing an architecture for CM based on both abstraction layers and toolchains, i.e., automated pipelines of engineering tools aimed at supporting the engineering process. In particular, we introduce four different toolchains, each of them dedicated to a well-defined task (e.g., energy monitoring). This orthogonal separation of concerns aims to simplify both the understanding of a complex ecosystem and the accomplishment of independent tasks. We then illustrate our implementation of a complete CM system that follows said architecture as a real Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) pilot of the Arrowhead Tools project, by describing in detail every single tool that we developed. We finally show how our pilot achieves the main objectives of the project: the reduction of engineering costs, the integration of legacy systems, and the interoperability with IoT frameworks