Maintaining Requirements Using Web Usage Data

AbstractThe use of the World Wide Web has had a huge growth and there is a greater variety of web applications with an increasing importance in society and in supporting the development to all kinds of business. Often, most of websites are providing support services that must be maintained and improved over time. This maintenance and upgrade can be difficult because frequently the requirements are no longer actual and/or often not even exist documented. Websites are increasingly monitoring usage data, and this type of information is increasingly abundant. Analyzing the usage of the websites can help identify improvements and help to maintain the website and its software requirements. This paper presents REQAnalytics, a recommender system that collects the information about the usage of a website, processes it and generates recommendations to the requirements specification of the website. This research work also presents an experimental evaluation of a case study based on an online newspaper website. The results showed that REQAnalytics can produce reports in a language closer to the business, identify most and less used functionalities, requirements that can be split in two or more requirements and give support to the maintenance of requirements of the website being analyzed

Boosting Regional Socioeconomic Development through Logistics Activities: A Conceptual Model

Background: Regional Development (RD) allows countries to balance regional differences by providing economic and social benefits to communities. This research highlights the importance of logistics activities to regional social development, and a framework to assess these connections is proposed. Objectives: How to boost regional socioeconomic development through logistics. Methods/Approach: The contributions of logistics to socioeconomic development are analysed based on the previous research, and the case of the Alto Minho (AM) region in Portugal was used to illustrate the connection between logistics and regional development. Results showed that logistics had created jobs, increased company turnover and exports, and increased GDP growth in several regions. For the AM region, results indicate that many companies are operating in this area, contributing to supporting municipalities to reduce regional disparities. Conclusions: A framework for assessing regional logistics performance is proposed together with several logistics performance indicators. This approach is essential for future developments integrating logistics into socioeconomic development

Using EPP Boxes in a Dark Store: A New Approach to Simplify Food Retail E-Commerce Deliveries

Background: E-commerce has emerged as a good response to the pandemic of COVID-19. However, the costs of providing a service, which includes a driver and a vehicle, in a regular vehicle that can transport goods that need positive cold (0° to 5°C) are very high. Objectives: This paper aims to investigate how a big Portuguese retailer company can reduce its dependence on refrigerated vehicles, simplifying operations and reducing the costs of transporting positive and negative cold food. Methods/Approach: This research was carried out in a food retailer Portuguese company, more precisely in a Dark Store dedicated to the online channel. The study was developed based on the AS-IS/TO-BE process analysis methodology, starting with the analysis of the current situation, giving rise to the so-called AS-IS model. Results: It was possible to reduce costs associated with transporting positive cold goods. As a result, there are 30% fewer costs associated with order transportation. With an additional 10% in space optimization with the gain of space within the galley of each vehicle. Conclusions: The costs of transporting positive and negative cold foods were decreased, and substituting vehicles with room temperature transport reduced the need for refrigerated vehicles

Mining goal refinement patterns: Distilling know-how from data

Goal models play an important role by providing a hierarchic representation of stakeholder intent, and by providing a representation of lower-level subgoals that must be achieved to enable the achievement of higher-level goals. A goal model can be viewed as a composition of a number of goal refinement patterns that relate parent goals to subgoals. In this paper, we offer a means for mining these patterns from enterprise event logs and a technique to leverage vector representations of words and phrases to compose these patterns to obtain complete goal models. The resulting machinery can be quiote powerful in its ability to mine know-how or constitutive norms. We offer an empirical evaluation using both real-life and synthetic datasets