Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approach for Container-based Cloud Applications: The SWITCH and ENTICE Workbenches

Many emerging smart applications rely on the Internet of Things (IoT) to provide solutions to time-critical problems. When building such applications, a software engineer must address multiple Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), including requirements for fast response time, low communication latency, high throughput, high energy efficiency, low operational cost and similar. Existing modern container-based software engineering approaches promise to improve the software lifecycle; however, they fail short of tools and mechanisms for NFRs management and optimisation. Our work addresses this problem with a new decision-making approach based on a Pareto Multi-Criteria optimisation. By using different instance configurations on various geo-locations, we demonstrate the suitability of our method, which narrows the search space to only optimal instances for the deployment of the containerised microservice.This solution is included in two advanced software engineering environments, the SWITCH workbench, which includes an Interactive Development Environment (IDE) and the ENTICE Virtual Machine and container images portal. The developed approach is particularly useful when building, deploying and orchestrating IoT applications across multiple computing tiers, from Edge-Cloudlet to Fog-Cloud data centres

Business Integration as a Service

This paper presents Business Integration as a Service (BIaS) which enables connections between services operating in the Cloud. BIaS integrates different services and business activities to achieve a streamline process. We illustrate this integration using two services; Return on Investment (ROI) Measurement as a Service (RMaaS) and Risk Analysis as a Service (RAaaS) in two case studies at the University of Southampton and Vodafone/Apple. The University of Southampton case study demonstrates the cost-savings and the risk analysis achieved, so two services can work as a single service. The Vodafone/Apple case study illustrates statistical analysis and 3D Visualisation of expected revenue and associated risk. These two cases confirm the benefits of BIaS adoption, including cost reduction and improvements in efficiency and risk analysis. Implementation of BIaS in other organisations is also discussed. Important data arising from the integration of RMaaS and RAaaS are useful for management of University of Southampton and potential and current investors for Vodafone/Apple

A Case Study for Business Integration as a Service

This paper presents Business Integration as a Service (BIaaS) to allow two services to work together in the Cloud to achieve a streamline process. We illustrate this integration using two services; Return on Investment (ROI) Measurement as a Service (RMaaS) and Risk Analysis as a Service (RAaaS) in the case study at the University of Southampton. The case study demonstrates the cost-savings and the risk analysis achieved, so two services can work as a single service. Advanced techniques are used to demonstrate statistical services and 3D Visualisation services under the remit of RMaaS and Monte Carlo Simulation as a Service behind the design of RAaaS. Computational results are presented with their implications discussed. Different types of risks associated with Cloud adoption can be calculated easily, rapidly and accurately with the use of BIaaS. This case study confirms the benefits of BIaaS adoption, including cost reduction and improvements in efficiency and risk analysis. Implementation of BIaaS in other organisations is also discussed. Important data arising from the integration of RMaaS and RAaaS are useful for management and stakeholders of University of Southampton

Toward a conceptual framework for designing sustainable cyber-physical system architectures: A systematic mapping study

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) represent devices whose components enable interaction between machines and processes. One of the biggest challenges of these systems today is the ability to adjust to changes at the time of execution as they are implemented in environments with a multidimensional complexity, this challenge is currently addressed from the design of the systems themselves by integrating sustainability. With this problem in mind, the present document describes a systematic mapping study of the literature with the goal of demonstrating the current panorama of the frameworks, designs, and/or models used at the time of initiating the development of a cyber-physical system. As a result, it has been concluded that there is a lack of guidelines to construct sustainable, and evolvable cyber-physical systems. To address these issues, a framework for designing sustainable CPS architectures is outlined

Supply Chain (micro)TMS development

Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementThe rise of technology across many verticals has necessitated the company’s move to digitalization. Despite “XPTO” company a well know player on the retail and success on e‐commerce internal market, they aimed at the strategy of continuous innovation to drive business growth and strengthen their position as a premium brand. They decided to move forward into digitalism inside cloud based solutions to get all the advantages of microservices architecture: optimize logistics and supply chain management, speed up the workflow and maximize service efficiency. An agile organization is not achieved purely by shifting the focus from traditional functional/ technological oriented organizations. The new way to organize teams must reflect all the principles and right segregations of roles, which will be the most immediate and visible disruption and cutover from the traditional way of managing the IT. In this project we aim to use agile framework with development based in house cloud microservice solution for a (micro)TMS solution/system that address the immediate needs imposed by the market in order to use it has competitive advantage

Desing and Validation of a Light Inference System to Support Embedded Context Reasoning

Embedded context management in resource-constrained devices (e.g. mobile phones, autonomous sensors or smart objects) imposes special requirements in terms of lightness for data modelling and reasoning. In this paper, we explore the state-of-the-art on data representation and reasoning tools for embedded mobile reasoning and propose a light inference system (LIS) aiming at simplifying embedded inference processes offering a set of functionalities to avoid redundancy in context management operations. The system is part of a service-oriented mobile software framework, conceived to facilitate the creation of context-aware applications—it decouples sensor data acquisition and context processing from the application logic. LIS, composed of several modules, encapsulates existing lightweight tools for ontology data management and rule-based reasoning, and it is ready to run on Java-enabled handheld devices. Data management and reasoning processes are designed to handle a general ontology that enables communication among framework components. Both the applications running on top of the framework and the framework components themselves can configure the rule and query sets in order to retrieve the information they need from LIS. In order to test LIS features in a real application scenario, an ‘Activity Monitor’ has been designed and implemented: a personal health-persuasive application that provides feedback on the user’s lifestyle, combining data from physical and virtual sensors. In this case of use, LIS is used to timely evaluate the user’s activity level, to decide on the convenience of triggering notifications and to determine the best interface or channel to deliver these context-aware alerts.

Chapter Securing the Home Energy Management Platform

Recently, many efforts have been done to chemically functionalize sensors surface to achieve selectivity towards diagnostics targets, such as DNA, RNA fragments and protein tumoural biomarkers, through the surface immobilization of the related specific receptor. Especially, some kind of sensors such as microcantilevers (gravimetric sensors) and one-dimensional photonics crystals (optical sensors) able to couple Bloch surface waves are very sensitive. Thus, any kind of surface modifications devoted to functionalize them has to be finely controlled in terms of mass and optical characteristics, such as refractive index, to minimize the perturbation, on the transduced signal, that can affect the response sensitivity towards the detected target species