Testing the methodology to generate Design for Product Service Supportability (DfPSS) Guidelines and Rules: an application case

The industrial world is today navigating from a traditional product-based business to a new more complex solution-based orientation, pushed by new technologies, a multiple functionalities demand and a change in the customer value perception. Several are the methods and tools proposed in literature to aid manufacturers to design those solutions in an integrated and systematized way but none of them is really able to consider together product and service components, according to both company and customer views. In this context, a methodology generating new Design for X (DfX) guidelines to support the early integration of service features already in the product design of PSS has been proposed by the authors. This methodology can raise engineers’ consciousness in designing PSSs in a systematic and integrated way and provides insights into the link between the design process of PSS and the design knowledge generation in terms of guidelines and rules. In particular, the objective of this paper is to test this methodology through an application case. The test, following a theory building procedure, contributes to obtain the final methodology design, providing a double result: industrial experts’ feedbacks, giving to the authors a major awareness of its strengths and weaknesses, and new industry-specific PSS design guidelines and rules

Query Stability in Monotonic Data-Aware Business Processes [Extended Version]

Organizations continuously accumulate data, often according to some business processes. If one poses a query over such data for decision support, it is important to know whether the query is stable, that is, whether the answers will stay the same or may change in the future because business processes may add further data. We investigate query stability for conjunctive queries. To this end, we define a formalism that combines an explicit representation of the control flow of a process with a specification of how data is read and inserted into the database. We consider different restrictions of the process model and the state of the system, such as negation in conditions, cyclic executions, read access to written data, presence of pending process instances, and the possibility to start fresh process instances. We identify for which facet combinations stability of conjunctive queries is decidable and provide encodings into variants of Datalog that are optimal with respect to the worst-case complexity of the problem.Comment: This report is the extended version of a paper accepted at the 19th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2016), March 15-18, 2016 - Bordeaux, Franc

Rule-based Test Generation with Mind Maps

This paper introduces basic concepts of rule based test generation with mind maps, and reports experiences learned from industrial application of this technique in the domain of smart card testing by Giesecke & Devrient GmbH over the last years. It describes the formalization of test selection criteria used by our test generator, our test generation architecture and test generation framework.Comment: In Proceedings MBT 2012, arXiv:1202.582

Organizational culture, internal marketing, and perceived organizational support in portuguese higher education institutions

Changes imposed on public higher education institutions try to adopt some management practices in public organizations. In this study, we intend to understand how organizational culture (support, innovation, goals, rules) and internal marketing can contribute to the organizational support of employees of higher education institutions. The study was developed with a sample of 635 employees. The results show that organizational culture and internal marketing contribute to the explanation of perceived organizational support (POS). Then, through a structural equation model, it was possible to confirm the contribution of support culture and internal marketing to the explanation of POS. More studies are necessary taking students' point of view into account. These results reveal the importance of the fact that organizations need to implement a culture of support and appropriate internal communication networks that allow employees to perceive social support.FCT-Foundation for Science and Technology [UID/SOC/04020/2013

Introducing Inventiveness into the Patent System: Submission to the Review of the National Innovation System

Because of the potential impact of the patent system on innovation diffusion, particularly on continuous and/or incremental innovation, patent policy should be of central importance to the review of the national innovation system. Substantial empirical evidence shows that most industrial innovations are not induced by the patent system. Even in very large markets, such as the USA, only a minority of patents are likely to be induced by the patent system. To the extent that patents do induce innovations, it is the inventiveness of the innovation which gives rise to possible social benefits (externalities, mainly in the form of knowledge spillovers) which may offset the costs of a patent system and thus give rise to a net economic benefit. On the basis of this evidence about the inducement effect of the patent system, and evidence on the current very low inventiveness standard for patent grant, policy proposals are put forward to re-introduce inventiveness into the patent system, thus making it potentially welfare-enhancing. These proposed changes would also have a major impact in ameliorating the negative impact of the patent system on continuous/incremental innovation