A Framework for the Design of Service Maps

The concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is recognized as an important enabler for business transformation and application integration. Service maps emerge when individual services are (pre)configured on various architectural levels. For example, business-oriented service maps sustain the communication and coordination among participants within and between businesses. Difficulties occur when, based on different service design strategies, heterogeneous service maps are created which need to be aligned. A methodological approach to establish a systematic design process for such service maps within companies or business networks is needed

0023/2009 - Metodologia para Análise e Projeto de Serviços em uma abordagem SOA

Serviços devem ter descrição bem definida e serem publicados em um repositório, permitindo serem facilmente localizados. Aplicações baseadas em serviços são desenvolvidas como conjuntos independentes de serviços oferecendo interfaces bem definidas para seus usuários potenciais utilizando o princípio de baixo acoplamento. Métodos tradicionais, tais como “orientado a objeto” e “baseado em componentes” especialmente nos aspectos de análise e projeto são inadequados para os desafios e características necessárias para a construção de serviços. Portanto, um importante desafio em SOA é a definição de uma metodologia de análise e projeto de serviços que seja adequada às características da organização. Este trabalho tem o objetivo de propor uma metodologia para análise e projeto de serviços considerando como base a identificação de serviços a partir da modelagem de processos de negócio

Integrating gamification to modern web fitness services

Gamification has been widely applied to information technologies industry, especially to fields where motivation and user engagement are difficult to maintain. Thus, many fitness providers have integrated gamification to their own services. However, due to lacking unified gamification convention in Fitness convention, choosing what game-like elements to integrate seems like an impossible task. In addition, there is no valid guideline available for integrating gamification to web fitness application for the industry to follow. Aiming at these questions this thesis summarizes thirteen most commonly used game-like elements in different web fitness services, and generates guidelines for implementing gamified web fitness services. Results from validating the guidelines to three example fitness services indicate promising percentages of gamification integration, although future work on the topic would significantly increase the validity of the guidelines

Agenttipohjaisen arkkitehtuurin suunnittelu ja toteutus prosessitukijärjestelmälle

Tool integration is an important aspect of software development process support. In such systems it should be possible to integrate tools flexibly and incrementally. In addition, for performance and usability reasons, it should be possible to use the tools both on local and remote computers. To address this problem of flexible tool integration, an agent-based architecture style was designed. The architecture strives to attain the needed flexibility by few simple design rules. One of the rules is to divide the functionality to agents and locations. The locations work as adapters to tools and provide basic infrastructure of the system. The agents move among the locations and implement the high level business logic of the system by using the methods of the locations. A general principle is that each agent implements a single business case. This makes it easy to view, control, and adapt the high level business logic as the logic is located in one place. The architecture style is not tied to any specific programming language. However, for the purposes of this thesis an agent-based software framework was implemented using C++. A distributed process support system was then implemented by specializing the agent framework. The process support domain provides a good case study for the validity of the agent-based architecture as the process support system needs to integrate various tools supporting the process. As a result of this thesis, an agent-based architecture style was designed and prototyped. The implementation of the process support system was used to evaluate the agent-based architecture style and to find out the challenges in building systems using the principles of the agent-based architecture. The architecture could be extended in many ways, but it was shown to be usable in the domain of tool integration. In addition, the implemented process support system fulfilled the quality requirements laid out for it. /Kir1

Digital ecosystems

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems, which are considered to be robust, self-organising and scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic problems. So, this work is concerned with the creation, investigation, and optimisation of Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. First, we created the Digital Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. We then investigated its self-organising aspects, starting with an extension to the definition of Physical Complexity to include the evolving agent populations of our Digital Ecosystem. Next, we established stability of evolving agent populations over time, by extending the Chli-DeWilde definition of agent stability to include evolutionary dynamics. Further, we evaluated the diversity of the software agents within evolving agent populations, relative to the environment provided by the user base. To conclude, we considered alternative augmentations to optimise and accelerate our Digital Ecosystem, by studying the accelerating effect of a clustering catalyst on the evolutionary dynamics of our Digital Ecosystem, through the direct acceleration of the evolutionary processes. We also studied the optimising effect of targeted migration on the ecological dynamics of our Digital Ecosystem, through the indirect and emergent optimisation of the agent migration patterns. Overall, we have advanced the understanding of creating Digital Ecosystems, the self-organisation that occurs within them, and the optimisation of their Ecosystem-Oriented Architecture

Architectural Design Decision Documentation through Reuse of Design Patterns

While design decisions on the application of architectural design patterns involve complex trade-offs between functionality and quality properties, such decisions are often spontaneous, and documentation of decisions and trace links to related artefacts is usually insufficient. The approach proposed in this thesis provides a support to overcome these problems. It combines support for evaluation of design pattern application, and semi-automated documentation of decisions and trace links