Standardisation of enterprise architecture development for smart cities

Managing the complexity of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services in smart cities raises a need to use enterprise architecture frameworks to solve the complexity issues. However, the majority of the existing enterprise architecture frameworks have been developed to address the concerns and issues of the stakeholders in their associated world. To address challenges including complexity, multi-stakeholders and the service oriented nature of smart cities, this paper presents an enterprise architecture framework that can be used as a way to manage enterprise architectures in smart cities. This framework focuses on establishing contextual requirements and definitions for smart city systems and services. In contrast to other approaches, in this paper we focus on two important layers, i.e., context layer and service layer, as well as their relationships. The framework is valuable in developing smart services. It also contributes to the understanding of smart city enterprise architectures

Cyber-physical business systems modelling : advancing Industry 4.0

Abstract: The dynamic digital age drives contemporary multinationals to focus on delivering world-class business solutions with the use of advanced technology. Contemporary multinationals relate to a present-day business primarily engaged to generate profits. These complex multinationals offer value through the manufacture, sale, and management of products and services. Disruptive strategies in operations driven by emerging technological innovations demand continuous business improvements. These insightful opportunities are inclusive of operations, enterprise systems, engineering management, and research. Business sustainability is a strategic priority to deliver exceptional digital solutions. The Fourth Industrial Revolutions (4IR) offer significant technological advancements for total business sustainability. The underlying 4IR technologies include Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). The collective challenges of a large global business are not easy to predict. CPS protocols deliver sustainable prospects required to integrate and model physical systems in real-time driven by the 4IR implementations. The goal of this thesis is to develop a model (CPS) suitable for self-predicting and to determine ideal operational practice driven by technologies of the 4IR. The model (CPS) seeks a novel tool effective for comprehensive business evaluation and optimisation. The competence of the anticipated tool includes suitability to collaborate current operations and predict the impact of change on a complex business. ..D.Phil. (Engineering Management

A Data Quality aware Enterprise Service Bus for e-Health Integration Platforms

The integration of software systems running in different healthcare organizations is increasingly required in order exchange data and carrying out healthcare processes in coordinated ways. This integration is usually supported by integration platforms which are based on advanced middleware technologies, like the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). In addition, data quality in the healthcare area is critical to take timely and accurate decisions for the health and well-being of patients. This paper proposes a data quality aware ESB (DQ-ESB) for e-Health integration platforms which allows assessing and enforcing data quality within inter-organizational data exchanges. DQ-ESB handles an extensible data quality model which includes quality characteristics identified within the Uruguayan e-Health context. DQ-ESB provides data quality solutions based on native ESB mechanisms (e.g. data transformation) and it was implemented leveraging the Switchyard ESB product.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

A Data Quality aware Enterprise Service Bus for e-Health Integration Platforms

The integration of software systems running in different healthcare organizations is increasingly required in order exchange data and carrying out healthcare processes in coordinated ways. This integration is usually supported by integration platforms which are based on advanced middleware technologies, like the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). In addition, data quality in the healthcare area is critical to take timely and accurate decisions for the health and well-being of patients. This paper proposes a data quality aware ESB (DQ-ESB) for e-Health integration platforms which allows assessing and enforcing data quality within inter-organizational data exchanges. DQ-ESB handles an extensible data quality model which includes quality characteristics identified within the Uruguayan e-Health context. DQ-ESB provides data quality solutions based on native ESB mechanisms (e.g. data transformation) and it was implemented leveraging the Switchyard ESB product.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

A Data Quality aware Enterprise Service Bus for e-Health Integration Platforms

The integration of software systems running in different healthcare organizations is increasingly required in order exchange data and carrying out healthcare processes in coordinated ways. This integration is usually supported by integration platforms which are based on advanced middleware technologies, like the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). In addition, data quality in the healthcare area is critical to take timely and accurate decisions for the health and well-being of patients. This paper proposes a data quality aware ESB (DQ-ESB) for e-Health integration platforms which allows assessing and enforcing data quality within inter-organizational data exchanges. DQ-ESB handles an extensible data quality model which includes quality characteristics identified within the Uruguayan e-Health context. DQ-ESB provides data quality solutions based on native ESB mechanisms (e.g. data transformation) and it was implemented leveraging the Switchyard ESB product.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Arquitectura de microservicios para plataformas de integración

La integración de sistemas heterogéneos se apoya comúnmente en Plataformas de Integración (PI). Estas plataformas consisten en infraestructura especializada, que provee mecanismos para resolver incompatibilidades entre sistemas con el fin de posibilitar su comunicación. En este ámbito, el avance y la expansión de la computación en la nube ha generado nuevos escenarios y requerimientos sobre las PIs en términos de escalabilidad y eficiencia, entre otros. Por otro lado, la arquitectura de microservicios ha surgido recientemente impulsada por la industria, y está ganando creciente popularidad. Esta posee ventajas como el escalamiento independiente y la mantenibilidad que podrían beneficiar a las PIs en distintos escenarios. Por tanto, resulta de interés explorar las ventajas, desafíos y alternativas que introduce la arquitectura de microservicios en estas plataformas. Esta tesis estudia la aplicabilidad de la arquitectura de microservicios para la construcción de PIs. Para esto se analiza, por un lado, el impacto de utilizar dicha arquitectura en PIs, determinando escenarios en los cuales es propicia su aplicación. Por otro lado, se proponen alternativas de arquitectura y diseño para la construcción de PIs basadas en microservicios, las cuales son evaluadas en base a distintos factores. En relación al análisis de impacto, se plantea una metodología para determinar cómo es afectada una PI en base a sus atributos de calidad, obteniéndose del análisis dos resultados principales. Por un lado, se determina cómo impacta aplicar una arquitectura de microservicios en la calidad de la plataforma. Por otro, se determina un conjunto de características de los escenarios de integración (p. ej. cantidad alta de sistemas a integrar), que permite identificar si un escenario se beneficia al utilizar una PI basada en microservicios. En relación a las propuestas de arquitectura y diseño, se presenta una propuesta principal aplicable a diversos escenarios, así como variantes aplicables a contextos específicos. La propuesta principal se evalúa en base a tres factores: i) patrones y buenas prácticas de microservicios, ii) atributos de calidad de la PI, y iii) la construcción de un prototipo. Se concluye en este trabajo que la arquitectura de microservicios es aplicable para la construcción de PIs en escenarios con determinadas características y que las propuestas de arquitectura planteadas siguiendo este enfoque son técnicamente viables

ArchiSmartCity: Modelling the Alignment of Services and Information in Smart City Architectures

Digital transformation in the public sector describes the shift from traditional creation and delivery of services, into the massive use of digital technologies to enhance public services. The digitalisation of public administration presents significant challenges for many municipalities in the social, economic, environmental, and sustainable dimensions. Cities take advantage of the rapid advances in information and communication technologies capabilities to make the provision of city services (e.g., health service, transport service, air-quality service, education service) more efficient. These modern urban environments are commonly referred to as Smart Cities, where advanced and innovative services are offered to improve the overall quality of life for the citizens. Smart Cities are complex systems that involve diverse stakeholders and concerns, use heterogeneous information systems and technologies, and aim to fulfill multiple and conflicting goals. Such complexity challenges the provision of services that may fail to achieve city goals and meet the needs of citizens due to the lack of alignment between city services and the information systems that support them. Evidence of this is the existence of city services and systems that fail to address the real needs of stakeholders, and are not perceived as valuable by them because they do not interoperate, leading to duplication of work and incompatible solutions. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an established planning and governance approach to manage the complexity of corporate systems. EA presents a holistic view of organisational business strategies and IT initiatives to achieve organisational goals by adopting a comprehensive perspective on the overall architecture. Smart Cities can be seen as urban enterprises with more complex and multi-dimensional systems that require integration among smarter services from different domains (e.g., mobility, energy, public safety, emergency, education, culture, etc.) to respond to diverse interests and objectives from a range of stakeholders. Existing research on EAs for Smart Cities uses the concept of layers and views to describe architecture content and guide its implementation. However, these approaches do not identify the concepts to describe and model the relationships between the service and information layers which are essential to address the strategic alignment. Furthermore, there is an absence of such concepts in languages and metamodels for Enterprise Modelling. These architectures and metamodels mostly emphasize technical aspects that constitute Smart Cities and they rarely focus on city services and their strategic aspects towards delivering the cities vision and objectives. This research introduces ArchiSmartCity, a metamodel that addresses the alignment between city services and information systems according to Smart City strategies to assist in the digitalisation of public city services. In this thesis, design principles and design requirements are defined and instantiated by designing the ArchiSmartCity metamodel that explicitly expresses this alignment, following a design science research approach. Further, ArchiSmartCity is developed and implemented as a coherent extension of an EA metamodel to describe an expository instantiation and its application. ArchiSmartCity is evaluated in an iterative manner within multiple-case studies, by creating real-world services models that are validated by Smart City domain experts. Moreover, this thesis demonstrates and evaluates ArchiSmartCity by developing a computer-based solution for semantic alignment analysis. Ex-post evaluation results demonstrate the quality and practical relevance of the developed metamodel extension for cities and municipalities. This study contributes to the current understanding of how city strategies should be aligned with Smart City implementations by providing a prescriptive view and metamodel to guide coherent and unambiguous architecture design in the Smart Cities field

Reference architecture for integration platforms

\u3cp\u3eIn addition to in-house applications, networked enterprises are increasingly using data and services from various external sources. Conversion of data to useful information and IT alignment with business goals are big challenges faced by these enterprises. Integration platforms (IPs) aid enterprises in solving such challenges. However, the large number of commercial and academic IPs currently available have created a new problem for enterprises, namely whether to build their own IP or buy/rent a existing IP. Also, how to choose from the plethora of different design/solution options that are available? This paper presents a study and analysis of 31 IPs to bring out best practices in IP design. Following a commonality analysis of IPs from different research domains, an IP reference architecture is proposed. The reference architecture will aid enterprises in making better IP design/solution choices. It can also contribute to IP research by acting as a common reference point for future IP analysis.\u3c/p\u3

An integration platform for synchromodal transport

Transportation sector plays an important role in the growth of national economies. Advances in information technology have facilitated newcollaboration opportunities among transport companies. Ubiquitous and faster internet now enables transport companies to access real time data about events in a transport network. New collaboration opportunities and access to real time data, have given rise to new transport practices. Synchromodal Transport (SmT) or Synchromodality, is a new transport practice, where the route and transport mode for transporting cargo is chosen dynamically, i.e., while the cargo is in-transit. If a disruption event occurs, causing a delay in transportation, the cargo may be shifted to another transport mode. Existing research over SmT is biased towards routing and capacity planning challenges posed by SmT. Data integration challenges posed by SmT, have not received their due attention from researchers. The primary data integration challenge is the integration of contextual events data and transport planning data. This dissertation provides a solution to data integration challenges posed by SmT, by designing a Synchromodal Transport Integration Platform (SmTIP). I, designed SmTIP based on the results of three research activities. The first research activity is SmT stakeholders’ interview, which resulted in a list of requirements for SmTIP. The second research activity is analysis of SmT practices, which resulted in a list of relevant contextual events and processes for a SmT scenario. The third research activity is studying the state-of-the-art in integration platform design, which resulted in a reference architecture for integration platforms. I, then, developed a prototype based on SmTIP. The prototype integrates transport data and contextual events data, enables dynamic transport planning and in case of a disruption event, changing the transport mode of cargo. When representatives from transport companies used SmTIP prototype, their responses induced improvements in SmTIP design. This dissertation is useful for transport companies, researchers in transportation sector and information technology sector. Transport companies can get acquainted with, SmT processes, relevant contextual events, data integration challenges posed by SmT and how to overcome them. Researchers in transportation sector, can use this dissertation as an introduction to SmT. It will help them understand SmT scenario, SmT processes and relevant disruption events. Documented responses of transport companies’ representatives during SmTIP validation will help researchers in the future improvement of SmTIP and in designing validation experiment setups. This dissertation enhances SmT research. It fills the research gap of SmT data integration challenges by: (1) identifying the data integration challenges, (2) listing the requirements for SmTIP, and (3) designing SmTIP to overcome them. Researchers and practitioners in information technology, can use the reference architecture for integration platforms to address data integration challenges in different application domains. For that purpose, the refinement of the reference architecture to SmT domain, as shown in this dissertation, may be used as a guide. v Summary of PhD thesis P.M.Sing