A catalogue of non-technical requirement patterns

© 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Software Requirement Patterns (SRP) have been proposed as an artifact for fostering requirements reuse. PABRE is a framework that promotes the use of SRP as a means for requirements elicitation, validation and documentation in the context of IT procurement projects. In this paper, we present a catalogue of non-technical SRP included in the framework and present in detail some of them. We also introduce the motivation to arrive to these patterns.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Constructing and using software requirement patterns

Software requirement reuse strategies are necessary to capitalize and reuse knowledge in the requirement engineering phase. The PABRE framework is designed to support requirement reuse through the use of software requirement patterns. It consists of a meta-model that describes the main concepts around the notion of pattern, a method to conduct the elicitation and documentation processes, a catalogue of patterns, and a tool that supports the catalogue’s management and use. In this chapter all these elements are presented in detail making emphasis on the construction, use and evolution of software requirement patterns. Furthermore, the chapter includes the construction of a catalogue of nontechnical software requirement patterns for illustration purposes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Interested in improving your requirements engineering process? Try requirement patterns!

Requirement elicitation is the process of acquiring the system requirements from the system stakeholders. This process is critical in all software projects: if not all the requirements are elicited, or if some elicited requirements do not describe real stakeholder needs, or if the quality of the requirements is poor (e.g., they suffer from ambiguities), the chance of project failure increases. Techniques supporting requirements elicitation (interviews, meetings, storyboards...) are mostly oriented to obtain requirements from scratch and they may hardly take advantage of a fundamental observation: When specifying a system, it is quite usual that a significant proportion of requirements is recurrent and belongs to a relatively small number of categories, especially in the case of non-functional requirements. Our motivation is to consider this observation for improving the effectiveness of the requirement elicitation process. We are using the concept of software requirement pattern [1] (SRP). An SRP basically consists of a template that generates one or more requirements, and some information to identify its need in a particular project, and how it may be tailored to this project. The main benefits of using SRPs may be summarized as: 1) more effective requirement elicitation (requirements are not built from scratch; a process guides the engineer by giving advices, suggesting information, ...); 2) improved quality and consistency of requirements documents (by using a uniform style); 3) improved requirements management (e.g., clear traceability from requirements to goals).Postprint (author’s final draft

An assessment framework to support collective decision making on urban freight transport

This paper proposes a framework that supports the collection and classification of information about the features of a city relevant to Urban Freight Transport (UFT). The information is organized in a framework of 28 different layers that are then stored in a Geographic Information System (GIS) tool to enable efficient data retrieval and effective information graphical display. The resulting GIS tool thus represents a decision support system for UFT problems, providing decision makers and stakeholders with a wide range of easy to understand information aimed to support the identification and preliminary evaluation of UFT solutions. Moreover, by providing a standardized set of features and sources of information, the framework enables the comparison of different cities. To illustrate the benefits, prototypical real-scale tests based on the framework have been realized in two mid-sized European cities: Bergamo (North of Italy) and Luxembourg. For both cities, data were mainly collected from publicly available sources and organized according to the framework. The data and information collected have been used in collaboration with the stakeholders in order to identify the priorities of intervention and evaluate alternative UFT solutions. The real-scale applications confirmed the usability and effectiveness of the framework in engaging stakeholders and support the process of envisioning shared UFT solutions

Understanding Construction Logistics in Urban Areas and Lowering Its Environmental Impact: A Focus on Construction Consolidation Centres

A lot of attention has been paid in the last years to urban freight transport (UFT) activities generated by specific market segments such as food, retail, or home deliveries, while relatively little attention has been paid to the transport of goods to and from construction sites in urban areas. Although transport of construction materials represents up to 30% of freight movements in cities and even more in terms of pollutant emissions. Using data collected over eight months in four construction sites, this paper provides a better understanding of the urban freight transport activity related to construction and presents the potential benefits of the implementation of construction consolidation centres (CCCs). A CCC is an innovative approach, which aims at increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of logistics processes by reducing the number of deliveries. Consequently, the use of a CCC in urban areas can reduce congestion and pollutant emissions due to construction freight movements. This paper presents results of CCC usage simulations for the four construction sites mentioned above. The results suggest that the distribution of goods to and from construction sites is peculiar as compared to other, better-known, urban supply chains and reinforce the call to researchers and decision makers from both private and public sides to devote more attention to this market segment

Urban Freight: What about construction logistics?

This paper aims to improve the knowledge and understanding of urban freight distribution related to the"br" construction sector. The contribution highlights the specificities of the chain which supplies construction sites in"br" urban areas as compared to other, well studied, supply chains such as retail, HoReCa (hotels-restaurants-cafes)"br" and home deliveries. The paper also tries to identify the barriers against and the triggers towards a more sustainable"br" urban freight transport for the construction sector. In conclusion, experiences from the ongoing CIVITAS Horizon"br" 2020 project “SUCCESS”, aiming at identifying the costs and benefits associated with the introduction of a number"br" of optimization strategies, including but not limited to Construction Consolidation Centres, are used to identify"br" potential ways to make urban construction logistics more sustainable

Etude de faisabilite d'un centre de distribution inter urbain Luxembourgeois

Confidential report to the Ministry of Sustainable Development, Luxembour

Decision Support Systems for Smarter and Sustainable Logistics of Construction Sites

Efficient logistics in urban areas is crucial for construction companies since building materials account for 30–40% of all construction costs and the space on site is highly constrained. To face these challenges, actions coming from both public and private decision-makers to find more sustainable solutions related to the distribution of building materials in urban areas become urgent. Although barely used in such contexts, can decision support systems be of support, and for who and for which purpose? This paper proposes a set of decision support systems addressing public and private decision-makers to improve the construction logistics and supply chain with evidence-based decision-making mechanisms. Those systems are, in particular, a public participatory geographical information system for determining the impact of policy measures, a consolidation center locator, a consolidation center planner, and an innovation measures selector. The paper explains how these decision support systems are settled and experimented from the analysis of pilot sites in European cities and in collaboration with the companies. Our diverse experiments demonstrate that data-driven decision-making is worth it to trigger thought on improvement measures for construction freight transport in urban area. We conclude that additional attention should be devoted to this specific sector

Integrating Connected and Automated Shuttles With Other Mobility Systems: Challenges and Future Directions

Connected and Automated Shuttles (CAS) are emerging technologies recently introduced into urban intelligent transport systems to enhance their efficiency. However, the majority of existing studies primarily concentrate on their design and public acceptance, while their integration to complement more conventional mobility systems is largely ignored. Indeed, the integration of CAS with existing transport systems represents a promising opportunity to improve the overall efficiency and safety of existing mobility services, be it offered to citizens or companies. However, this integration presents significant challenges for mobility service operators, who must consider the potential impact of these new technologies on traffic patterns, infrastructure investments, and travel behavior. This paper reviews the current state of connected and automated shuttle’s technologies, including the different experiments and pilot projects in Europe for the transport of people, goods or both, in addition to the scientific efforts to build new services (e.g., optimisation and AI-based models). We discuss the challenges that mobility service providers face when planning for the long-term integration of CAS, and propose a digital twin approach to help overcome these challenges. The proposed approach is based on advanced simulation and modeling software that can create realistic 3D representations of transport systems and has the potential to simulate the impact of CAS on traffic patterns and infrastructure investments. This paper serves as a starting point for future investigations on the integration of CAS with the existing mobility systems by identifying research gaps, limitations and challenges, and potential areas of research to overcome these challenges and improve the effectiveness of future mobility services