Sustainability and Resilience in Alliance-Driven Manufacturing Ecosystems: A Strategic Conceptual Modeling Perspective

The challenge of sustainability rests on the ability of organizations to change their practices to meet the needs of current and future generations. To date, most research on organizational change has focused on how to change within a single organization. However, an increasing number of sustainability challenges require changes across multiple organizations. In this paper, we summarize strategic challenges faced in such a setting and outline a conceptual modeling approach for strategic analysis of alliance-driven solutions. We illustrate our ideas with a case study in digital agriculture, a field particularly relevant to sustainability, and end with the identification of issues for further research

Socio-Technical Security Modelling: Analysis of State-of-the-Art, Application, and Maturity in Critical Industrial Infrastructure Environments/Domains

This study explores the state-of-the-art, application, and maturity of socio-technical security models for industries and sectors dependent on CI and investigates the gap between academic research and industry practices concerning the modelling of both the social and technical aspects of security. Systematic study and critical analysis of literature show that a steady and growing on socio-technical security M&S approaches is emerging, possibly prompted by the growing recognition that digital systems and workplaces do not only comprise technologies, but also social (human) and sometimes physical elements

Security Requirements Engineering via Commitments

Security Requirements Engineering (SRE) is concerned with the identification of security needs and the specification of security requirements of the system-to-be. Mainstream approaches to SRE either focus on technical security mechanisms or suggest high-level organizational abstractions that are hard to map to the actual design. Social commitments are a simple yet powerful abstraction to model social interactions and can be used effectively to specify security requirements. In this paper, we build on our previous work proposing a novel goal-oriented modelling language called SecCo—Security via Commitments—where the concept of social commitment between social and technical actors is adopted to specify security requirements. Commitments enable the development of robust applications, wherein security needs are satisfied by assigning contractual validity to interactions

Ontological analysis of means-end links

The i* community has raised several main dialects and dozens of variations in the definition of the i* language. Differences may be found related not just to the representation of new concepts but to the very core of the i* language. In previous work we have tackled this issue mainly from a syntactic point of view, using metamodels and syntactic-based model interoperability frameworks. In this paper, we go one step beyond and consider the use of foundational ontologies in general, and UFO in particular, as a way to clarify the meaning of core i* constructs and as the basis to propose a normative definition. We focus here on one of the most characteristics i* constructs, namely means-end links.Postprint (published version