Quality of (Digital) Services in e-Government

Internet growth in the nineties supported government ambition to provide better services to citizens through the development of Information and Communication Technologies based solutions. Thanks to the Lisbon conference, which in 2000 covered and investigated this topic, e-government has been recognized as one of the major priorities in Public Administration innovation process. As a matter of\ud fact in the last 10 years the number of services provided to citizens through Information and Communication Technologies has increased rapidly. Nevertheless the increasing rate, the access and usage of digital services do not follow the same trend. Nowadays Public Administrations deliver many electronic services which\ud are seldom used by citizens. Different reasons contribute to the highlighted situation.\ud The main assumption of the thesis is that quality of e-government digital services strongly affects real access to services by citizens. According to the complexity of quality in e-government, one of the main challenges was to define a suitable quality model. To reach such aim, domain-dependent characteristics on the services delivery have been investigated. The defined model refers to citizen,\ud technology and service related quality characteristics. Correspondingly a suitable way to represent, assess, and continuously improve services quality according to\ud such domain requirements has been introduced.\ud Concerning the service related quality aspects a methodology and a tool permitting to formally and automatically assess the quality of a designed service with\ud respect to the quality model has been defined. Starting from an user friendly notation, both for service and quality requirements, the proposed methodology has\ud been implemented as an user friendly tool supported by a mapping from user friendly notations to formal language. The tool allows to verify formally via model checking, if the given service satisfies one by one the quality requirements addressed by the quality model.\ud Additionally in some case an unique view on e-government service quality is quite useful. A mathematical model provides a single value for quality starting from the assessment of all the requirements defined in the quality model. It relies on the following activities: homogeneity, interaction and grouping.\ud A set of experiments has been performed in order to validate the goodness of the work. Services already implemented in a local Public Administration has\ud been considered. Literature review and domain experts knowledge were the main drivers of this work. It proofs the goodness of the quality model, the application of formal techniques in the complex field of study such as e-government and the quality aggregation via the mathematical model.\ud This thesis introduces advance research in e-government by providing the contributions that quality oriented service delivery in Public Administration promotes services used by the citizens. Further applications of the proposed approaches could be investigated in the areas of practical benchmarking and Service Level Agreement specification

Numerical simulation of weakly compressible multiphase flows with a baer-nunziato type model

We present the results of the simulation of two-phase CO2 flows at low-Mach number, obtained through a pressure-based Baer-Nunziato type model. The underlying full non-equilibrium model enables the description of each phase with its own thermodynamic model, so it circumvents the requirement of the definition of the speed of sound of the vapor-liquid mixture. The primitive formulation, combined with a special pressure scaling to correctly capture the behavior in the zero-Mach limit, is well-suited to model weakly compressible flows, and makes easier the use of arbitrary thermodynamic models. At the interfaces, the phasic velocity and pressure are driven toward the equilibrium by means of relaxation processes, whose velocities are controlled by user-defined parameters. The set of seven partial differential equations describing the flow evolution is discretized through a finite-volume scheme in space and an hybrid implicit-explicit time discretization, to avoid the stringent time step limitation imposed by the acoustics. We compare the results of a shock-tube problem, initially containing saturated CO2, obtained according to the stiffened gas model and to the Peng-Robinson equation of state. 1 INTRODUCTION Among the technologies able to contrast the global warning, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is regarded as a crucial and effective approach. Consequently, the numerical investigation of carbon dioxide (CO2) flows under the different conditions we can encounter within the CCS framework is becoming more and more important. In this work, we focus in particular in unsteady weakly compressible twophase flows. Such kind of flows may occur in the transport pipelines, because of fluctuating in the CO2 supply, impurities, or during transient events, such as start-up, shut-down or depressurization [1]. From a numerical point of view, these flows present different challenging aspects. First of all, the weak compressibility—that is the condition where the flow velocity is considerably smaller than the speed of sound but compressibility effects cannot be neglected—makes inefficient and inaccurate the standard compressible solvers. Second, the multitude of spatial scales and the presence of dynamic interfaces that separate the different phases call for an effective modeling that avoids the full resolution of the flow field but takes into consideration the relevant flow features. Third, a flexible implementation of the thermodynamic modeling for the CO2 is recommended to be able to customize it according to the different applications

Formal methods to improve public administration business processes

Starting from late 90’s the public administration has started to employ a quite relevant amount of its budget in develop ing ICT solutions to better deliver services to citizens. In spite of this effort many statistics show that the mere availability of ICT based services does not guarantee per se their usage. Citizens have continued to largely access services through “traditional” means. In our study we suggest that the highlighted situation is partly due to the fact that relevant domain dependent requirements, mainly related to the delivery process of e-government digital services, are often ignored in the development of e-government solutions. We provide here a domain related quality framework and encoded it in a set of formal statements, so that we can apply automatic verification techniques to assess and improve ICT solutions adopted by public administrations. The paper discusses both the defined quality framework and the tool chain we developed to enable automatic assessment of ICT solutions. The tool chain is based on a denotational mapping of business process modeling notation elements into process algebraic descriptions and to the encoding of quality requirements in linear temporal logic formulas. The resulting approach has been applied to real case studies with encouraging results

A Study on the Usage of the BPMN Notation for Designing Process Collaboration, Choreography, and Conversation Models

Being widely accepted by industries and academia, Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the de facto standard for business process modeling. However, the large number of notation elements it introduces makes its use quite complex. This work investigates the usage of the BPMN notation by analyzing 54,500 models harvested from seven online collections. The study considers different model types introduced by the standard, such as process collaboration, choreography, and conversation. The analyses focus on the syntactic dimension of BPMN, investigating the usage of BPMN elements and their combinations. Syntactic violations of the standard, and of good modeling practices, are also investigated as well as possible relations with BPMN elements and modeling tools. The results of the study can guide further activities of educators, practitioners, researchers, and standardization bodies

Cloud for eGov: the state of the art

Specifically, the paper provides a detailed analysis of the state of the art regarding technological, regulatory and interoperability aspects, devoting particular attention to those projects (and related experience) in the field of cloud and distributed computing. The paper's aim is to evaluate benefits and risks of the applicability of solutions that are already in place for the specified areas of interest. The key factors that determine relevant regulations, with particular emphasis on the European target, have been listed in the paper. Finally, the main Italian projects and the situation in some European countries have also been mentioned