Data Sovereignty for AI Pipelines: Lessons Learned from an Industrial Project at Mondragon Corporation

The establishment of collaborative AI pipelines, in which multiple organizations share their data and models, is often complicated by lengthy data governance processes and legal clarifications. Data sovereignty solutions, which ensure data is being used under agreed terms and conditions, are promising to overcome these problems. However, there is limited research on their applicability in AI pipelines. In this study, we extended an existing AI pipeline at Mondragon Corporation, in which sensor data is collected and subsequently forwarded to a data quality service provider with a data sovereignty component. By systematically reflecting and generalizing our experiences during the twelve-month action research project, we formulated ten lessons learned, four benefits, and three barriers to data-sovereign AI pipelines that can inform further research and custom implementations. Our results show that a data sovereignty component can help reduce existing barriers and increase the success of collaborative data science initiatives

The district energy-efficient retrofitting of Torrelago (Laguna de Duero - Spain)

The urban growth is estimated to reach up the 66 % by 2050 and consequently the need of resources within the cities will increase significantly. This, combined with the 40 % of energy consumption and 36 % of CO2 emissions of the building sector, makes necessary to accelerate the transition towards more sustainable cities. The CITyFiED project contributes to this transition, aiming to develop an innovative and holistic methodological approach for energy-efficient district renovation and deliver three large scale demonstration cases in the cities of Lund (Sweden), Laguna de Duero (Spain) and Soma (Turkey). CITyFiED methodology consists of several phases that ease the decision-making tasks towards the district renovation, considering the energy efficiency as the main pillar and local authorities as clients. For the case of Torrelago district (Spain) the intervention consists of a set of energy conservative measures including the façade retrofitting of 143.025 m2 of living space in 31 twelve-storey buildings; the renovation of the district heating network with a new biomass thermal plant; the integration of renewable energy sources, including a micro-cogeneration system, and the installation of individual smart meters. After the renovation action, one-year monitoring campaign is ongoing. The CITyFiED monitoring platform will collect information from the energy systems and deliver environmental, technical, economic and social key performance indicators by March 2019. At the end of the project the achievement of the predefined goals will be verified: up to 36 % of energy saving and 3,429 tons-CO2/yr emissions saving covering the 59,4 % of the energy consumption with renewable source

Context-awareness for the design of Smart-product service systems: Literature review

Smart-Product Service Systems (S-PSS) emerge as a novel strategy to integrate smart products with advanced digital capabilities and their related e-services to satisfy user’s needs in highly context-dependent environments. S-PSS has the potential to generate a transition towards more economically, ecologically and socially sustainable practices and business models due to its adaptive capacities. However, being able to exploit the digital capabilities of smart products and their services is still limited in design and even more to improve the user experience. For this reason, this study will focus on the Context-awareness capability that has been defined by multiple scholars as one of the most relevant properties that defines the smartness of a product. Following a systematic literature review approach, this work makes the following contributions: (1) it provides a bibliometric analysis using a cluster keyword map to analyze the most researched topics in S-PSS relevant to the design, user experience and analyze their connections; (2) an analysis of the case studies presented in the literature according to the life cycle of context-aware applications; and (3) establishes a research direction for the user experience and design of the S-PSS

UX-for Smart-PSS: Towards a Context-Aware Framework

Smart-product service systems are a business strategy that combines product and service into one value proposition. The user experience of digital services and the smart product can be a clear differentiator among competitors to achieve economically sustainable solutions. Hence, offering a more personalized experience is an important aspect of S-PSS. This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework for a context-aware user experience in S-PSS by providing adaptive and personalized services to the users according to their needs in a given context, by exploiting the digital capabilities of smart products and referring to the use of recommendation systems. The paper presents an application scenario using a smart-wearable as an example of a product-oriented PSS to better describe the framework and each component while stating the future challenges

A case study on the use of machine learning techniques for supporting technology watch

Technology Watch human agents have to read many documents in order to manually categorize and dispatch them to the correct expert, that will later add valued information to each document. In this two step process, the first one, the categorization of documents, is time consuming and relies on the knowledge of a human categorizer agent. It does not add direct valued information to the process that will be provided in the second step, when the document is revised by the correct expert. This paper proposes Machine Learning tools and techniques to learn from the manually pre-categorized data to automatically classify new content. For this work a real industrial context was considered. Text from original documents, text from added value information and Semantic Annotations of those texts were used to generate different models, considering manually pre-established categories. Moreover, three algorithms from different approaches were used to generate the models. Finally, the results obtained were compared to select the best model in terms of accuracy and also on the reduction of the amount of document readings (human workload)

Web Augmentation as a Technique to Diminish User Interactions in Repetitive Tasks

The use of the World Wide Web has experienced extraordinary growth in the last decades. The Web has become the main source of information for millions of users. The number of websites offering content to users is countless. In order to personalise information according to their needs, users often have to visit multiple, unconnected pages. Users perform a number of actions to collect that information that requires concentration. If the number of Web resources is large, the activity becomes unpleasant. The problem increases when these tasks are performed frequently and repetitively. These tasks are time-consuming and lead users to experience frustration and disorientation during the activity, causing a loss of concentration that prolongs the activity over time. Web Augmentation combines different Web technologies to improve user experience on existing pages by adding content from different pages among other benefits. This article proposes Web Augmentation as a technique to reduce user interactions in repetitive tasks. To support the proposal, the paper introduces Excore, a browser extension for Web Augmentation that allows end-users to add content from different resources automatically. The article presents the benefits introduced by this approach as a response to the drawbacks experienced by users while performing their activities on the Web. The architecture of the platform and its operations are described by means of an example. A double evaluation of the extension is addressed, one qualitative and one quantitative. The results show that Excore reduces the number of interactions by 94.45% and the time to complete a task by 80.75%

A Holistic and Interoperable Approach towards the Implementation of Services for the Digital Transformation of Smart Cities: The Case of Vitoria-Gasteiz

Cities in the 21st century play a major role in the sustainability and climate impact reduction challenges set by the European agenda. As the population of cities grows and their environmental impact becomes more evident, the European strategy aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—the main cause of climate change. Measures to reduce the impact of climate change include reducing energy consumption, improving mobility, harnessing resources and renewable energies, integrating nature-based solutions and efficiently managing infrastructure. The monitoring and control of all this activity is essential for its proper functioning. In this context, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays a key role in the digitisation, monitoring, and managing of these different verticals. Urban data platforms support cities on extracting Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in their efforts to make better decisions. Cities must be transformed by applying efficient urban planning measures and taking into account not only technological aspects, but also by applying a holistic vision in building solutions where citizens are at the centre. In addition, standardisation of platforms where applications are integrated as one is necessary. This requires interoperability between different verticals. This article presents the information platform developed for the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz in Spain. The platform is based on the UNE 178104 standard to provide a holistic architecture that integrates information from the different urban planning measures implemented in the city. The platform was constructed in the context of the SmartEnCity project following the urban transformation strategy established by the city. The article presents the value-added solutions implemented in the platform. These solutions have been developed by applying co-creation techniques in which stakeholders have been involved throughout the process. The platform proposes a step forward towards standardization, harmonises the integration of data from multiple vertical, provides interoperability between services, and simplifies scalability and replicability due to its microservice architecture

Architecture for managing AAS-based business processes

Industries frequently encounter the need to orchestrate services provided by devices as business processes. These industrial business process models need to meet Industry 4.0 (I4.0) specifications to handle unpredictable scenarios in the manufacturing process. Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is considered the cornerstone of interoperability between machines and applications that compose manufacturing systems. AAS facilitates the digitization of physical things (assets) for virtual representation, turning an object into an I4.0 component. This paper investigates the usage of AAS in the context of business process orchestration and a proposal is presented based on those drawbacks. The contributions of this paper are 1) Present an architecture for the management of AAS-based business processes. 2) Introduce an AAS Submodel template that enables the description and registration of the RestServices of an asset. 3) Present a plugin for Camunda Modeler that enables the Service-Discovery mechanism from a chosen AAS repository and maps assets services into BPMN Service-Tasks. And, 4) Outline opportunities for future work between AAS and business process management systems with a primary focus on context-aware capabilities for enhancing the dynamicity of workflows

CRESCO Framework and Checker: Automatic Generation of Reflective UML State Machine's C++ Code and Checker

Software Systems are becoming increasingly complex leading to new Validation & Verification challenges. Model checking and testing techniques are used at development time while runtime verification aims to verify that a system satisfies a given property at runtime. This second technique complements the first one. This paper presents a tool that enables the developers to generate automatically reflective UML State Machine controllers and the Runtime Safety Properties Checker (RSPC) which checks a component-based software system's safety properties defined at design phase. We address embedded systems whose software components are designed by Unified Modelling Language-State Machines (UML-SM) and their internal information can be observed in terms of model elements at runtime. RESCO (REflective State Machines-based observable software COmponents) framework, generates software components that provide this runtime observability. The checker uses software components' internal status information to check system level safety properties. The checker detects when a system safety property is violated and starts a safe adaptation process to prevent the hazardous scenario. Thus, as demonstrated in the evaluated experiment but not shown in the paper due to the space limitation, the safety of the system is enhanced