TOWARD A SMART ECOSYSTEM WITH AUTOMATED SERVICES

New ICT architectures enable a better response to constant pressure on the industry and services to improve their business performance and productivity, especially in data processing. At the same time, due to the growing number of sensor modules, the amount of data that needs to be processed, in real time, is growing. Delays in communication with the cloud environment can lead to poor management decisions or user dissatisfaction. In automation and services, one of the new ICT architectures is Edge computing in the data processing. Edge computing is a networking architecture that brings computing close to the source of data in order to reduce latency and bandwidth use. Edge computing brings new power to data processing and the ability to process large amounts of data in real time. This is essential for predicting the behavior of machines, systems, or customers in order to detect errors or provide personalized service as in the case of smart vending machines. In that way, Edge computing enables taking steps toward establishing a smart ecosystem in automation and services

Customer participation in retail - focus on automated services

Self-service technologies in retail have not been studied on a large scale despite their increasing importance. The major aim of this article is to increase our understanding of automated processes in retail by employing an in-depth analysis of one case. The object of study is a fully automated food shop in Western Finland,in a small village. After a brief review of customer participation and self-service technologies in general, the object of study is analyzed by means of a survey. A total of 82 persons (= 27.3 % of the village population) took part in the survey. The findings indicate that the automated concept has great relevance for the customers. Customers were committed to the service concept and the general perception of quality is rather high. Lack of personal service is not generally perceived as an issue, but according to this study, age seems to have a weak impact on the customers’ perceived difficulty of use of the vending machines. Managerially it has become clear that traditional retail research does not provide sufficient information for automated stores. In terms of further research, a study on automated stores in urban surroundings and an in-depth analysis of the ways of communication between vending machines and customers are suggested.©2012 The Authors. Published by Centre for Business & Economic Research. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License version "CC BY 3.0" https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ (this allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and the place of first publication)fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Personal Health Manager – Designing an intermediary sys-tem supporting health education and exercise programs

The Personal Health Manager (PHM) is an IT-based product-service system (combining face to face, automated and computer-mediated services, hardware, software) supporting health exercise programs in workplace health promotion. Major HCI design challenges are different target groups, unstructured tasks, various hardware and service components, and finding the limit between face to face and automated services –ranging from top quality human supervision to cheap, scalable automated services in hedonic systems. We present an iterative development and test design as well as first design ideas. Through this case we try to highlight that traditional MIS and HCI approaches „as is‟ are hardly applicable for designing IT-based product-service systems and that new approaches are necessary

Top-Funded Digital Health Companies Offering Services for Type-1 Diabetes Patients: Business Models and Scalability Considerations

This paper aims to assess how the top-funded digital health companies in T1DM can create value for customers and which implications this has in terms of scalability. Med tech companies, academia, and policymakers should be able to make better strategic decisions based on the findings provided. Companies were identified using a leading venture capital database, PitchBook. Our analysis revealed that 50% of the thirty top-funded companies pursue a Layer Player strategy to generate value for T1DM patients. We recommend that companies in T1DM focus more on automated services such as conversational agents to improve scalability. In terms of scalability, many companies have room for improvement by increasingly relying on automated services, among other things

A case study on the transformation of context-aware domain data onto XML schemas

In order to accelerate the development of context-aware applications, it would be convenient to have a smooth path between the context models and the automated services that support these models. This paper discusses how MDA technology (metamodelling and the QVT standard) can support the transformation of high-level models of context-aware services onto the implementation of these services using web services. The total transformation process from context-aware services onto web services involves the following aspects: 1. service signatures, which should be translated onto WSDL definitions; 2. context-aware domain data used as input and output data in service operations, which should be translated onto XML schemas; and 3. service behaviours, which should be used to generate the service implementation. This paper concentrates on the modelling and transformation of the context-aware domain data. The results of this paper are generally applicable to the transformation of elements of any domain-specific language expressed in terms of a metamodel onto XML Schema data

Impact of Automation on Users’ Perception of Library Services

The critical destinations of this study were to inspect the impact of Automation on users\u27 perception of library services at Government College University Faisalabad. The present study has three research objectives including (a)To assess the user\u27s perception regarding library automation at GCU Faisalabad, (b)To check the level of satisfaction of the users regarding library services at GCU Faisalabad, and (e)To measure the problem faced by the users after automation of library services at GCU Faisalabad. To meet the objectives, the investigator used a quantitative research approach and developed a questionnaire for the data collection instrument. The convenience sampling technique was used for collecting data from the target population. There were 16570 students enrolled in BS, Master, M.Phil, and Ph.D. degree programs. The sample size was 391(2.35 % of the total population) students. There were 375 out of 391 students who filled the questionnaire. Hence, the response rate was 95.9 %. The results revealed that more than 75% percent of the participants like to support and use automated library services and hybrid services. Further respondents gave their points of view that they had a trend to use automated services to save time. Moreover, the result of this study revealed that the participants were well aware of the library automated services, offered by GCU libraries. This research points out that most of the total participants were satisfied by the automated services, offered by the GCU library

Encapsulation as a Key Concern in Analysis and Design for Service Systems

Concepts related to sociotechnical and totally automated services should play a role in systems analysis and design because every organization operates through internally directed service systems and because much the world GDP involves services for customers. This paper explains how the concept of encapsulation proves a crucial design variable for both sociotechnical and automated services. This paper defines the term service and explains how the degree of encapsulation is related to structures for delivering services, using outsourcing as an illustrative example. It shows how encapsulation-related design decisions appear in a service life cycle model. It presents a detailed operational metamodel that describes service systems and shows how aspects of the metamodel provide operational interpretations of ideas that are important in service system design. The implication is that the concept of encapsulation should be included in analysis and design methods and tools