IT process architectures for enterprises development: A survey from a maturity model perspective

During the last years much has been published about IT governance. Close to the success of many governance efforts are the business frameworks, quality models, and technology standards that help enterprises improve processes, customer service, quality of products, and control. In this paper we i) survey existing frameworks, namely ITIL, ASL and BiSL, ii) find relations with the IT Governance framework CobiT to determine if the maturity model of CobiT can be used by ITIL, ASL and BiSL, and (iii) provide an integrated vista of IT processes viewed from a maturity model perspective. This perspective can help us understand the importance of maturity models for increasing the efficiency of IT processes for enterprises development and business-IT alignment

A multi-agent platform for auction-based allocation of loads in transportation logistics

This paper describes an agent-based platform for the allocation of loads in distributed transportation logistics, developed as a collaboration between CWI, Dutch National Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam and Vos Logistics Organizing, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The platform follows a real business scenario proposed by Vos, and it involves a set of agents bidding for transportation loads to be distributed from a central depot in the Netherlands to different locations across Germany. The platform supports both human agents (i.e. transportation planners), who can bid through specialized planning and bidding interfaces, as well as automated, software agents. We exemplify how the proposed platform can be used to test both the bidding behaviour of human logistics planners, as well as the performance of automated auction bidding strategies, developed for such settings. The paper first introduces the business problem setting and then describes the architecture and main characteristics of our auction platform. We conclude with a preliminary discussion of our experience from a human bidding experiment, involving Vos planners competing for orders both against each other and against some (simple) automated strategies

A Framework for Integrating Transportation Into Smart Cities

In recent years, economic, environmental, and political forces have quickly given rise to “Smart Cities” -- an array of strategies that can transform transportation in cities. Using a multi-method approach to research and develop a framework for smart cities, this study provides a framework that can be employed to: Understand what a smart city is and how to replicate smart city successes; The role of pilot projects, metrics, and evaluations to test, implement, and replicate strategies; and Understand the role of shared micromobility, big data, and other key issues impacting communities. This research provides recommendations for policy and professional practice as it relates to integrating transportation into smart cities

KEMNAD: A Knowledge Engineering Methodology for Negotiating Agent Development

Automated negotiation is widely applied in various domains. However, the development of such systems is a complex knowledge and software engineering task. So, a methodology there will be helpful. Unfortunately, none of existing methodologies can offer sufficient, detailed support for such system development. To remove this limitation, this paper develops a new methodology made up of: (1) a generic framework (architectural pattern) for the main task, and (2) a library of modular and reusable design pattern (templates) of subtasks. Thus, it is much easier to build a negotiating agent by assembling these standardised components rather than reinventing the wheel each time. Moreover, since these patterns are identified from a wide variety of existing negotiating agents(especially high impact ones), they can also improve the quality of the final systems developed. In addition, our methodology reveals what types of domain knowledge need to be input into the negotiating agents. This in turn provides a basis for developing techniques to acquire the domain knowledge from human users. This is important because negotiation agents act faithfully on the behalf of their human users and thus the relevant domain knowledge must be acquired from the human users. Finally, our methodology is validated with one high impact system

Project Controls and Management Systems : current practice and how it has changed over the past decade

Project Controls and Management System (PCMS) refers to an ecosystem of processes, tools and personnel required for the proper planning and execution of capital projects throughout the different phases of design, procurement, construction and startup. This can be divided into different focus areas (functions) that would include Estimating, Planning, Scheduling, Cost Control, Change Management, Progressing, and Forecasting. Various trends such as globalization, contractor specialization and information technology developments have impacted the way PCMS are implemented and made it the subject of extensive research over the past years to investigate how to best utilize those trends. Replicating the research methodology used in a 2011 report published by the Construction Research Institute (CII), this work aims to investigate the current status of PCMS implementation and how it has changed over the past decade. It was concluded that while the original PCMS principles are still valid, adoption has drastically changed in terms of efficiency for the majority of the functions. The research also identifies areas of potential concerns and provides recommendations for further improvement.Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin