Model Based Development of Quality-Aware Software Services

Modelling languages and development frameworks give support for functional and structural description of software architectures. But quality-aware applications require languages which allow expressing QoS as a first-class concept during architecture design and service composition, and to extend existing tools and infrastructures adding support for modelling, evaluating, managing and monitoring QoS aspects. In addition to its functional behaviour and internal structure, the developer of each service must consider the fulfilment of its quality requirements. If the service is flexible, the output quality depends both on input quality and available resources (e.g., amounts of CPU execution time and memory). From the software engineering point of view, modelling of quality-aware requirements and architectures require modelling support for the description of quality concepts, support for the analysis of quality properties (e.g. model checking and consistencies of quality constraints, assembly of quality), tool support for the transition from quality requirements to quality-aware architectures, and from quality-aware architecture to service run-time infrastructures. Quality management in run-time service infrastructures must give support for handling quality concepts dynamically. QoS-aware modeling frameworks and QoS-aware runtime management infrastructures require a common evolution to get their integration

A Requirement-centric Approach to Web Service Modeling, Discovery, and Selection

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has gained considerable popularity for implementing Service-Based Applications (SBAs) in a flexible\ud and effective manner. The basic idea of SOC is to understand users'\ud requirements for SBAs first, and then discover and select relevant\ud services (i.e., that fit closely functional requirements) and offer\ud a high Quality of Service (QoS). Understanding users’ requirements\ud is already achieved by existing requirement engineering approaches\ud (e.g., TROPOS, KAOS, and MAP) which model SBAs in a requirement-driven\ud manner. However, discovering and selecting relevant and high QoS\ud services are still challenging tasks that require time and effort\ud due to the increasing number of available Web services. In this paper,\ud we propose a requirement-centric approach which allows: (i) modeling\ud users’ requirements for SBAs with the MAP formalism and specifying\ud required services using an Intentional Service Model (ISM); (ii)\ud discovering services by querying the Web service search engine Service-Finder\ud and using keywords extracted from the specifications provided by\ud the ISM; and(iii) selecting automatically relevant and high QoS services\ud by applying Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). We validate our approach\ud by performing experiments on an e-books application. The experimental\ud results show that our approach allows the selection of relevant and\ud high QoS services with a high accuracy (the average precision is\ud 89.41%) and efficiency (the average recall is 95.43%)

Ergonomics-based Kansei Engineering and Kano Model for Public Services Excellence

Emotion is found to be stronger than cognition in human and system interaction. Kansei Engineering has been extensively used to capture customer emotions and translate them into product characteristics since 1980s. Ergonomics in Kansei Engineering is dealing with user and customer capability and limitation in terms of emotional aspects. Customer emotion and expression resulted from both products and services interaction. However, research of Kansei Engineering in services is still relatively less explored. Since service industries are growing significantly as one of the contributors for today’s economy, it is a calling for ergonomics-based Kansei Engineering methodology in understanding, modeling and fulfilling what the emotional needs as a function of service attributes. In this study, Kano model has been proposed to Kansei Engineering methodology as a quality tool in screening which service attributes are sensitive to emotional satisfaction, so that more focused-improvements on services are highly expected. Public service sector has been chosen as an empirical study to verify the proposed model. An interview followed by face to face questionnaire which involved 100 subjects has been conducted to explore and investigate what the critical emotional needs related to service attributes in the public service sector. The findings were deemed to be important for local government in prioritizing which services need to be improved. More importantly, it is hoped that both parties (i.e., public and local government) will experience the public service offerings in more effective and efficient way

Reliability prediction in model driven development

Evaluating the implications of an architecture design early in the software development lifecycle is important in order to reduce costs of development. Reliability is an important concern with regard to the correct delivery of software system service. Recently, the UML Profile for Modeling Quality of Service has defined a set of UML extensions to represent dependability concerns (including reliability) and other non-functional requirements in early stages of the software development lifecycle. Our research has shown that these extensions are not comprehensive enough to support reliability analysis for model-driven software engineering, because the description of reliability characteristics in this profile lacks support for certain dynamic aspects that are essential in modeling reliability. In this work, we define a profile for reliability analysis by extending the UML 2.0 specification to support reliability prediction based on scenario specifications. A UML model specified using the profile is translated to a labelled transition system (LTS), which is used for automated reliability prediction and identification of implied scenarios; the results of this analysis are then fed back to the UML model. The result is a comprehensive framework for addressing software reliability modeling, including analysis and evolution of reliability predictions. We exemplify our approach using the Boiler System used in previous work and demonstrate how reliability analysis results can be integrated into UML models

DESIGNING SERVICE-DOMINANT BUSINESS MODELS

The emergence of service-dominant logic has influenced business in many domains. It emphasizes the interaction of the producer, consumer, and other value-network partners as they co-create value through collaborative processes. These processes can be seen as service-for-service exchanges of these actors, which contrasts with the output orientation of the goods-dominant-logic that emphasizes how actors exchange output units. This paradigm transition has significant implications on doing business: the business requirements to services will change faster, and the complexity of valuenetworks required to meet these requirements will increase further. This requires new approaches to business engineering that are grounded in the premises of service-dominant logic. This paper introduces the service-dominant business model radar (SDBM/R) as an integral component of the business engineering framework that we have developed for engineering network-based, service-dominant business. Existing approaches to business model design follow an organization-centric view rooted in goods-dominant-logic, which does not allow adequately modeling the character of service-dominant business. The SDBM/R was developed with close collaboration with industry experts and empirically validated through a series of hands-on workshops with industry professionals from several domains. Thereby, this paper contributes a novel business design approach that has proper academic background and relevant practical embedding

eServices in Retail - An Extended Service Blueprinting Approach

Offering business services is widely considered as a means for superior value creation, and increasing research activities in the emerging disciplines of Service Sciences and Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) can be ascertained. Even so, service research often focuses on analysing the customer interface of service processes while neglecting the back stage of service delivery. Moreover, services in retail with their distinctive characteristics are also seldom addressed. We propose an adapted service blueprinting approach which we designed to support the digitalization of business services in retail. After comparing traditional service blueprinting approaches we reconstruct a meta model to conceptualize the rather non-formalized service blueprinting approach as a modeling language. Consecutively, we extend the meta model for displaying the degree of digitalization in service systems, comprising physical goods suppliers, retailers and customers as stakeholders. By applying the extended blueprinting approach, we propose IT artifacts to facilitate coupon services in retail

The application framework of Kansei Engineering to enhance Customer Relationship Management in services

In order to fit what a customer needs and wants, a product or a service should be qualified. By incorporating Ergonomics/Human Factors and affect, quality of products and services should promote happiness and health to the users. Improved quality and long-lasting products/services make customers happy (Nagamachi & Lokman, 2011). According to Tribus (1990), quality is defined as a condition when customers have a love affair and emotional bondage with particular products and services. It implies that the main concern of qualified products and services is customer emotional experience. This study aims to explore the customer emotional needs (Kansei in Japanese) experienced and encountered in services. As emphasized in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), understanding the customer emotional needs is one succesful key for CRM implementation. Kansei Engineering (KE) methodology that has been widely used for modeling the emotional needs in product design is proposed to support the CRM improvement. Hence, this study has two objectives. The first is to develop an integrative application framework of the contribution of KE to CRM, while the second is to provide an illustrative example of how to apply KE-CRM into service industry. This study is expected to contribute to the theoretical academic literatures on Customer Relationship Management (CRM), marketing management, Ergonomics/Human Factors and Kansei by proposing an application framework and methodology of integrated KE-CRM. In addition, practical contributions will be presented by providing a guidance to service managers in collecting and capturing the emotional needs of customers, using the rich-channel of information for collecting information, and investigating what service attributes that are significantly sensitive to the customer emotions. It is, then, to be used as a prioritization tool for continuous improvement or maintenance on service attributes