A HOLISTIC APPROACH FOR MANAGING REQUIREMENTS OF DATA WAREHOUSE SYSTEMS

Quantitive evaluations show that many data warehouse projects fail at an alarming rate, wasting all the time, money, and effort spent on them. Cost overruns and schedule delays are attributed in large part, to problems associated with requirements. Therefore, a crucial success factor for the implementation of data warehouse systems is efficient requirements management. In this paper we introduce the easyREMOTE (easy Requirements Modeling Technique for Data WareHouses) requirements management approach, which facilitates an incremental and iterative development of complete, correct, feasible, necessary, prioritized, unambiguous, and verifiable data warehouse requirements. As a foundation we present a requirements specification template with consideration of different stakeholder perspectives and the typical characteristics of data warehouse systems. We discuss traditional requirements management activities (change control, version control, status tracking, requirements tracing) in the context of data warehouse environments and extend these traditional activities to support more efficient requirements documentation and visibility. Keywords: Data warehousing, requirements engineering, requirements managemen

Using Ontologies for the Design of Data Warehouses

Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on our experience, we have detected a set of situations we have faced up with in real-world projects in which we believe that the use of ontologies will improve several aspects of the design of data warehouses. The aim of this article is to describe several shortcomings of current data warehouse design approaches and discuss the benefit of using ontologies to overcome them. This work is a starting point for discussing the convenience of using ontologies in data warehouse design.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

The Role of Maintenance and Facility Management in Logistics: A Literature Review

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide a literature review on the different ways of carrying out Facility Management and related topics in order to uncover that there is limited research regarding the impact of Facility Management on the logistics and operational performance of warehouses. Design/methodology/approach - Four different focus areas have been identified and for each one different methodologies and streams of research have been studied. Findings - The study underlines the importance of Facility Management for the logistics operations; therefore it supports the notion that investments aiming at preserving the status of the building and service components of warehouses are crucial. Originality/value - This paper aims to suggest to Facility Management managers that they can contribute to enhance business performance by designing effective Facility Management strategie

Quality measures for ETL processes: from goals to implementation

Extraction transformation loading (ETL) processes play an increasingly important role for the support of modern business operations. These business processes are centred around artifacts with high variability and diverse lifecycles, which correspond to key business entities. The apparent complexity of these activities has been examined through the prism of business process management, mainly focusing on functional requirements and performance optimization. However, the quality dimension has not yet been thoroughly investigated, and there is a need for a more human-centric approach to bring them closer to business-users requirements. In this paper, we take a first step towards this direction by defining a sound model for ETL process quality characteristics and quantitative measures for each characteristic, based on existing literature. Our model shows dependencies among quality characteristics and can provide the basis for subsequent analysis using goal modeling techniques. We showcase the use of goal modeling for ETL process design through a use case, where we employ the use of a goal model that includes quantitative components (i.e., indicators) for evaluation and analysis of alternative design decisions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Using Fuzzy Linguistic Representations to Provide Explanatory Semantics for Data Warehouses

A data warehouse integrates large amounts of extracted and summarized data from multiple sources for direct querying and analysis. While it provides decision makers with easy access to such historical and aggregate data, the real meaning of the data has been ignored. For example, "whether a total sales amount 1,000 items indicates a good or bad sales performance" is still unclear. From the decision makers' point of view, the semantics rather than raw numbers which convey the meaning of the data is very important. In this paper, we explore the use of fuzzy technology to provide this semantics for the summarizations and aggregates developed in data warehousing systems. A three layered data warehouse semantic model, consisting of quantitative (numerical) summarization, qualitative (categorical) summarization, and quantifier summarization, is proposed for capturing and explicating the semantics of warehoused data. Based on the model, several algebraic operators are defined. We also extend the SQL language to allow for flexible queries against such enhanced data warehouses

Linear integrated location-inventory models for service parts logistics network design

We present two integrated network design and inventory control problems in service-parts logistics systems. Such models are complicated due to demand uncertainty and highly nonlinear time-based service level constraints. Exploiting unique properties of the nonlinear constraints, we provide an equivalent linear formulation under part-warehouse service requirements, and an approximate linear formulation under part service requirements. Computational results indicate the superiority of our approach over existing approaches in the literature

Optimization on emergency materials dispatching considering the characteristics of integrated emergency response for large-scale marine oil spills

Many governments have been strengthening the construction of hardware facilities and equipment to prevent and control marine oil spills. However, in order to deal with large-scale marine oil spills more efficiently, emergency materials dispatching algorithm still needs further optimization. The present study presents a methodology for emergency materials dispatching optimization based on four steps, combined with the construction of Chinese oil spill response capacity. First, the present emergency response procedure for large-scale marine oil spills should be analyzed. Second, in accordance with different grade accidents, the demands of all kinds of emergency materials are replaced by an equivalent volume that can unify the units. Third, constraint conditions of the emergency materials dispatching optimization model should be presented, and the objective function of the model should be postulated with the purpose of minimizing the largest sailing time of all oil spill emergency disposal vessels, and the difference in sailing time among vessels that belong to the same emergency materials collection and distribution point. Finally, the present study applies a toolbox and optimization solver to optimize the emergency materials dispatching problem. A calculation example is presented, highlighting the sensibility of the results at different grades of oil spills. The present research would be helpful for emergency managers in tackling an efficient materials dispatching scheme, while considering the integrated emergency response procedure.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version