A MDD Strategy for developing Context-Aware Pervasive Systems

This master thesis proposes a methodological approach to develop context-aware pervasive systems based on ontologies and the Model-Driven Development (MDD) guidelines.Serral Asensio, E. (2008). A MDD Strategy for developing Context-Aware Pervasive Systems. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/12446Archivo delegad

Kind mobile notifications for healthcare professionals

[EN] The inclusion of the Internet of Things in healthcare is producing numerous automatic notifications for health professionals. These notifications must be delivered in the right moment and in the right way to be appropriately attended, and at the same time, ensuring no important task is interrupted. In this work, we have applied a human-centred design method to deal with this issue. By collaborating with health professionals in Belgium, we have designed and validated DELICATE, a conceptual framework that categorizes the different attention needs for each notification, and links them with the delivery mechanisms that are more appropriate for each particular context. As an aid for designers, we also define methodological guidelines to clearly determine how DELICATE can be used to develop a notification system. Finally, as a proof-of-concept validation of the framework, we have implemented it in an Android application and tested it using real scenarios. This validation has shown that DELICATE can be used to design a notification system that delivers kind healthcare notifications.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Pedro Valderas's work has been developed with the financial support of the Spanish State Research Agency under the project TIN2017-84094-R and co-financed with ERDF. Estefania Serral and Jan Derboven's work has been supported by IMEC funding.Serral, E.; Valderas, P.; Derboven, J. (2020). Kind mobile notifications for healthcare professionals. Health Informatics Journal. 26(3):1516-1537. https://doi.org/10.1177/1460458219884184S15161537263Sasangohar, F., Donmez, B., Trbovich, P., & Easty, A. C. (2012). Not All Interruptions are Created Equal: Positive Interruptions in Healthcare. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 56(1), 824-828. doi:10.1177/1071181312561172McFarlane DC. Interruption of people in human-computer interaction: a general unifying definition of human interruption and taxonomy. Technical report, Office of Naval Research, Arlington VA, 31 December 1997.Ross, D. T., & Schoman, K. E. (1977). Structured Analysis for Requirements Definition. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, SE-3(1), 6-15. doi:10.1109/tse.1977.229899Gulliksen, J., Göransson, B., Boivie, I., Blomkvist, S., Persson, J., & Cajander, Å. (2003). Key principles for user-centred systems design. Behaviour & Information Technology, 22(6), 397-409. doi:10.1080/01449290310001624329Beyer, H. R., & Holtzblatt, K. (1995). Apprenticing with the customer. Communications of the ACM, 38(5), 45-52. doi:10.1145/203356.203365Christel, M. G., & Kang, K. C. (1992). Issues in Requirements Elicitation. doi:10.21236/ada25893

Context-Adaptive Coordination of Pervasive Services by Interpreting Models during Runtime

[EN] One of the most important goals of pervasive systems is to help users in their daily life by automating their behaviour patterns. To achieve this, pervasive services must be dynamically coordinated, executed and adapted to context according to user behaviour patterns. In this work, we propose a model-driven solution to meet this challenge. We propose a task model and a context ontology to design context-adaptive coordination of services at a high level of abstraction. This design facilitates the coordination analysis at design time and is also reused at runtime. We propose a software architecture that interprets the models at runtime in order to coordinate the service execution that is required to support user behaviour patterns. This coordination is done in a context-adaptive way and decoupled from service implementation. This approach makes the models the only representation of service coordination, which facilitates the maintenance and evolution of the executed service coordination after deployment.This work has been developed with the support of (a) MICINN under the project EVERYWARE TIN2010-18011 and (b) MITYC under the project LIFEWEAR TSI-020400-2010-100 co-funded with ERDF.Serral Asensio, E.; Valderas Aranda, PJ.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2013). Context-Adaptive Coordination of Pervasive Services by Interpreting Models during Runtime. Computer Journal. 56(1):87-114. https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxs019S8711456

Hearing the voice of citizens in smart city design:The CitiVoice framework

In the last few years, smart cities have attracted considerable attention because they are considered a response to the complex challenges that modern cities face. However, smart cities often do not optimally reach their objectives if the citizens, the end-users, are not involved in their design. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework to structure and evaluate citizen participation in smart cities. By means of a literature review from different research areas, the relevant enablers of citizen participation are summarized and bundled in the proposed CitiVoice framework. Then, following the design science methodology, the content and the utility of CitiVoice are validated through the application to different smart cities and through in-depth interviews with key Belgian smart city stakeholders. CitiVoice is used as an evaluation tool for several Belgian smart cities allowing drawbacks and flaws in citizens’ participation to be discovered and analysed. It is also demonstrated how CitiVoice can act as a governance tool for the ongoing smart city design of Namur (Belgium) to help define the citizen participation strategy. Finally, it is used as a comparison and creativity tool to compare several cities and design new means of participation.status: publishe

Ontology-Based Data Integration in Multi-Disciplinary Engineering Environments: A Review

Today's industrial production plants are complex mechatronic systems. In the course of the production plant lifecycle, engineers from a variety of disciplines (e.g., mechanics, electronics, automation) need to collaborate in multi-disciplinary settings that are characterized by heterogeneity in terminology, methods, and tools. This collaboration yields a variety of engineering artifacts that need to be linked and integrated, which on the technical level is reflected in the need to integrate heterogeneous data. Semantic Web technologies, in particular ontologybased data integration (OBDI), are promising to tackle this challenge that has attracted strong interest from the engineering research community. This interest has resulted in a growing body of literature that is dispersed across the Semantic Web and Automation System Engineering research communities and has not been systematically reviewed so far. We address this gap with a survey reflecting on OBDI applications in the context of Multi-Disciplinary Engineering Environment (MDEE). To this end, we analyze and compare 23 OBDI applications from both the Semantic Web and the Automation System Engineering research communities. Based on this analysis, we (i) categorize OBDI variants used in MDEE, (ii) identify key problem context characteristics, (iii) compare strengths and limitations of OBDI variants as a function of problem context, and (iv) provide recommendation guidelines for the selection of OBDI variants and technologies for OBDI in MDEE

Decision as a Service (DaaS):A service-oriented architecture approach for decisions in processes

Separating decision modelling from the processes modelling concern recently gained significant support in literature, as incorporating both concerns into a single model impairs the scalability, maintainability, flexibility and understandability of both processes and decisions. Most notably the introduction of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard by the Object Management Group provides a suitable solution for externalising decisions from processes and automating decision enactments for processes. This paper introduces a systematic way of tackling the separation of the decision modelling concern from process modelling by providing a Decision as a Service (DaaS) layered Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) which approaches decisions as automated and externalised services that processes need to invoke on demand to obtain the decision outcome. The DaaS mechanism is elucidated by a formalisation of DMN constructs and the relevant layer elements. Furthermore, DaaS is evaluated against the fundamental characteristics of the SOA paradigm, proving its contribution in terms of abstraction, reusability, loose coupling, and other pertinent SOA principles. Additionally, the benefits of the DaaS design on process-decision modelling and mining are discussed. Finally, the DaaS design is illustrated on a real-life event log of a bank loan application and approval process, and the SOA maturity of DaaS is assessed.status: Published onlin

Modeling of IoT devices in Business Processes: A Systematic Mapping Study

[EN] The Internet of Things (IoT) enables to connect the physical world to digital business processes (BP). By using the IoT, a BP can, e.g.: 1) take into account real-world data to take more informed business decisions, and 2) automate and/or improve BP tasks. To achieve these benefits, the integration of IoT and BPs needs to be successful. The first step to this end is to support the modeling of IoT-enhanced BPs. Although numerous researchers have studied this subject, it is unclear what is the current state of the art in terms of current modeling solutions and gaps. In this work, we carry out a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) to find out how current solutions are modelling IoT into business processes. After studying 600 papers, we identified and analyzed in depth a total of 36 different solutions. In addition, we report on some important issues that should be addressed in the near future, such as, for instance the lack of standardization.This research has been funded by Internal Funds KU Leuven (Interne Fondsen KU Leuven) and the financial support of the Spanish State Research Agency under the project TIN2017-84094-R and co-financed with ERDF.Torres Bosch, MV.; Serral, E.; Valderas, P.; Pelechano Ferragud, V.; Grefen, P. (2020). Modeling of IoT devices in Business Processes: A Systematic Mapping Study. IEEE. 221-230. https://doi.org/10.1109/CBI49978.2020.00031S22123