3rd Annual Meeting of the Portuguese Association of Energy Economics & 5th Meeting of Environmental and Energy Economics

The 3rd Annual Conference of the Portuguese Association of Energy Economics – APEEN and the International Meeting on Energy and Environmental Economics – ME3 took place on the 18-19 October 2018 in Braga, Portugal. The event was hosted by the Universidade do Minho and gathered the contributions of specialists in Energy and Environmental Economics to enrich the debate about the many issues raised by the management of resources and waste. The main topic was Managing Resources and Waste: challenges for Energy and Environmental Economics beyond 2030. ​Natural resources are the keystone in environmental and energy economics. Nowadays, resource management cannot ignore waste, traditionally seen as a by-product of consumption and production decisions, but increasingly recognized as a source of energy or as new type of resource

SERVICE-BASED AUTOMATION OF SOFTWARE CONSTRUCTION ACTIVITIES

The reuse of software units, such as classes, components and services require professional knowledge to be performed. Today a multiplicity of different software unit technologies, supporting tools, and related activities used in reuse processes exist. Each of these relevant reuse elements may also include a high number of variations and may differ in the level and quality of necessary reuse knowledge. In such an environment of increasing variations and, therefore, an increasing need for knowledge, software engineers must obtain such knowledge to be able to perform software unit reuse activities. Today many different reuse activities exist for a software unit. Some typical knowledge intensive activities are: transformation, integration, and deployment. In addition to the problem of the amount of knowledge required for such activities, other difficulties also exist. The global industrial environment makes it challenging to identify sources of, and access to, knowledge. Typically, such sources (e.g., repositories) are made to search and retrieve information about software unitsand not about the required reuse activity knowledge for a special unit. Additionally, the knowledge has to be learned by inexperienced software engineers and, therefore, to be interpreted. This interpretation may lead to variations in the reuse result and can differ from the estimated result of the knowledge creator. This makes it difficult to exchange knowledge between software engineers or global teams. Additionally, the reuse results of reuse activities have to be repeatable and sustainable. In such a scenario, the knowledge about software reuse activities has to be exchanged without the above mentioned problems by an inexperienced software engineer. The literature shows a lack of techniques to store and subsequently distribute relevant reuse activity knowledge among software engineers. The central aim of this thesis is to enable inexperienced software engineers to use knowledge required to perform reuse activities without experiencing the aforementioned problems. The reuse activities: transformation, integration, and deployment, have been selected as the foundation for the research. Based on the construction level of handling a software unit, these activities are called Software Construction Activities (SCAcs) throughout the research. To achieve the aim, specialised software construction activity models have been created and combined with an abstract software unit model. As a result, different SCAc knowledge is described and combined with different software unit artefacts needed by the SCAcs. Additionally, the management (e.g., the execution of an SCAc) will be provided in a service-oriented environment. Because of the focus on reuse activities, an approach which avoids changing the knowledge level of software engineers and the abstraction view on software units and activities, the object of the investigation differs from other approaches which aim to solve the insufficient reuse activity knowledge problem. The research devised novel abstraction models to describe SCAcs as knowledge models related to the relevant information of software units. The models and the focused environment have been created using standard technologies. As a result, these were realised easily in a real world environment. Softwareengineers were able to perform single SCAcs without having previously acquired the necessary knowledge. The risk of failing reuse decreases because single activities can be performed. The analysis of the research results is based on a case study. An example of a reuse environmenthas been created and tested in a case study to prove the operational capability of the approach. The main result of the research is a proven concept enabling inexperienced software engineers to reuse software units by reusing SCAcs. The research shows the reduction in time for reuse and a decrease of learning effort is significant

Derivation and consistency checking of models in early software product line engineering

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia InformáticaSoftware Product Line Engineering (SPLE) should offer the ability to express the derivation of product-specific assets, while checking for their consistency. The derivation of product-specific assets is possible using general-purpose programming languages in combination with techniques such as conditional compilation and code generation. On the other hand, consistency checking can be achieved through consistency rules in the form of architectural and design guidelines, programming conventions and well-formedness rules. Current approaches present four shortcomings: (1) focus on code derivation only, (2) ignore consistency problems between the variability model and other complementary specification models used in early SPLE, (3) force developers to learn new, difficult to master, languages to encode the derivation of assets, and (4) offer no tool support. This dissertation presents solutions that contribute to tackle these four shortcomings. These solutions are integrated in the approach Derivation and Consistency Checking of models in early SPLE (DCC4SPL) and its corresponding tool support. The two main components of our approach are the Variability Modelling Language for Requirements(VML4RE), a domain-specific language and derivation infrastructure, and the Variability Consistency Checker (VCC), a verification technique and tool. We validate DCC4SPL demonstrating that it is appropriate to find inconsistencies in early SPL model-based specifications and to specify the derivation of product-specific models.European Project AMPLE, contract IST-33710; Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - SFRH/BD/46194/2008

Linguistic Refactoring of Business Process Models

In the past decades, organizations had to face numerous challenges due to intensifying globalization and internationalization, shorter innovation cycles and growing IT support for business. Business process management is seen as a comprehensive approach to align business strategy, organization, controlling, and business activities to react flexibly to market changes. For this purpose, business process models are increasingly utilized to document and redesign relevant parts of the organization's business operations. Since companies tend to have a growing number of business process models stored in a process model repository, analysis techniques are required that assess the quality of these process models in an automatic fashion. While available techniques can easily check the formal content of a process model, there are only a few techniques available that analyze the natural language content of a process model. Therefore, techniques are required that address linguistic issues caused by the actual use of natural language. In order to close this gap, this doctoral thesis explicitly targets inconsistencies caused by natural language and investigates the potential of automatically detecting and resolving them under a linguistic perspective. In particular, this doctoral thesis provides the following contributions. First, it defines a classification framework that structures existing work on process model analysis and refactoring. Second, it introduces the notion of atomicity, which implements a strict consistency condition between the formal content and the textual content of a process model. Based on an explorative investigation, we reveal several reoccurring violation patterns are not compliant with the notion of atomicity. Third, this thesis proposes an automatic refactoring technique that formalizes the identified patterns to transform a non-atomic process models into an atomic one. Fourth, this thesis defines an automatic technique for detecting and refactoring synonyms and homonyms in process models, which is eventually useful to unify the terminology used in an organization. Fifth and finally, this thesis proposes a recommendation-based refactoring approach that addresses process models suffering from incompleteness and leading to several possible interpretations. The efficiency and usefulness of the proposed techniques is further evaluated by real-world process model repositories from various industries. (author's abstract