A survey of smart product-service systems: Key aspects,challenges and future perspectives

The rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) has enabled the prevailing digital transformation (i.e. digitalization), where physical products can be readily digitized in the virtual space and seamlessly interconnected. Meanwhile, industries are ever increasingly adopting service business models (i.e. servitization), so as to offer not only physical products but also services as a solution bundle to meet individual customer needs. Such convergence of both digitalization and servitization (i.e. digital servitization) has triggered an emerging IT-driven business paradigm, smart product-service systems (Smart PSS). As a novel paradigm coined in 2014, to the authors’ knowledge, only 2 conference papers have provided some literature review to date, and many issues remain uncovered or not comprehensively investigated. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper has conducted a systematic review of Smart PSS or related papers published ever since its first brought up to date (30/06/2019), and selected 97 representative items together with other 37 supplementary works to summarize the tendency towards Smart PSS, its business and technical aspects, current challenges, and future perspectives. From the survey, it is found that several hybrid concerns are the key challenges faced, and self-adaptiveness with sustainability, advanced IT infrastructure, human-centric perspectives, and circular lifecycle management are the core future perspectives to explore. It is hoped that this work can attract more open discussions and provide useful insights to both academics and industries in their exploration and implementation of Smart PSS.     

Empirical studies in reverse engineering: state of the art and future trends

Starting with the aim of modernizing legacy systems, often written in old programming languages, reverse engineering has extended its applicability to virtually every kind of software system. Moreover, the methods originally designed to recover a diagrammatic, high-level view of the target system have been extended to address several other problems faced by programmers when they need to understand and modify existing software. The authors’ position is that the next stage of development for this discipline will necessarily be based on empirical evaluation of methods. In fact, this evaluation is required to gain knowledge about the actual effects of applying a given approach, as well as to convince the end users of the positive cost–benefit trade offs. The contribution of this paper to the state of the art is a roadmap for the future research in the field, which includes: clarifying the scope of investigation, defining a reference taxonomy, and adopting a common framework for the execution of the experiments.     

Enterprise information systems state of the art: Past,present and future trends

This state-of-the-art paper is intended to set the scene for a special issue of the Computers in Industry Journal on “Future Perspectives on Next Generation Enterprise Information Systems”. It gives a brief history of Enterprise Information Systems (EISs) and discusses various aspects of EISs, including EIS design and engineering, the impact of enterprise modelling, enterprise architecture, enterprise integration and interoperability and enterprise networking on EISs before concluding.     

Past, present and future of mobile payments research: A literature review

The mobile payment services markets are currently under transition with a history of numerous tried and failed solutions, and a future of promising but yet uncertain possibilities with potential new technology innovations. At this point of the development, we take a look at the current state of the mobile payment services market from a literature review perspective. We review prior literature on mobile payments, analyze the various factors that impact mobile payment services markets, and suggest directions for future research in this still emerging field. To facilitate the analysis of literature, we propose a framework of four contingency and five competitive force factors, and organize the mobile payment research under the proposed framework. Consumer perspective of mobile payments as well as technical security and trust are best covered by contemporary research. The impacts of social and cultural factors on mobile payments, as well as comparisons between mobile and traditional payment services are entirely uninvestigated issues. Most of the factors outlined by the framework have been addressed by exploratory and early phase studies.     

Social relationship and its role in knowledge management systems usage

The KMS has been widely implemented in organizations. However, its availability does not guarantee that employees have been willing to spend time and effort using it. We explored the use of KMS with emphasis on social relationship. Specifically, social capital theory was employed to establish the social relationship construct and its three dimensions: tie strength, shared norms, and trust. By studying a company that had implemented a KMS, we explored the dimensions of social relationship and its importance in the use of a KMS by employees. A theoretical framework was used to depict the antecedents of employee's usage behavior. Implications for both researchers and practitioners are discussed, especially for companies expecting to exploit knowledge sharing in the Chinese business environment.     

Knowledge management systems and organizational knowledge processing challenges: A field experiment

This paper investigates the appropriateness of knowledge management system (KMS) designs for different organizational knowledge processing challenges. Building on the theory of task-technology fit (TTF), we argue that different KMS designs are more effective for different knowledge tasks. An exploratory field experiment was conducted in the context of Internet-based knowledge sharing services to provide empirical support for our hypotheses. The results of our experiment show that a KMS designed to support the goal GENERATE is more appropriate for divergent type knowledge problems because of its affordances for iterative brainstorming processes. Conversely, for convergent type knowledge processing challenges, a KMS with the goal CHOOSE that supports the ability to clarify and to analyze is more effective.     

Evidence management for compliance of critical systems with safety standards: A survey on the state of practice

ContextDemonstrating compliance of critical systems with safety standards involves providing convincing evidence that the requirements of a standard are adequately met. For large systems, practitioners need to be able to effectively collect, structure, and assess substantial quantities of evidence.ObjectiveThis paper aims to provide insights into how practitioners deal with safety evidence management for critical computer-based systems. The information currently available about how this activity is performed in the industry is very limited.MethodWe conducted a survey to determine practitioners’ perspectives and practices on safety evidence management. A total of 52 practitioners from 15 countries and 11 application domains responded to the survey. The respondents indicated the types of information used as safety evidence, how evidence is structured and assessed, how evidence evolution is addressed, and what challenges are faced in relation to provision of safety evidence.ResultsOur results indicate that (1) V&V artefacts, requirements specifications, and design specifications are the most frequently used safety evidence types, (2) evidence completeness checking and impact analysis are mostly performed manually at the moment, (3) text-based techniques are used more frequently than graphical notations for evidence structuring, (4) checklists and expert judgement are frequently used for evidence assessment, and (5) significant research effort has been spent on techniques that have seen little adoption in the industry. The main contributions of the survey are to provide an overall and up-to-date understanding of how the industry addresses safety evidence management, and to identify gaps in the state of the art.ConclusionWe conclude that (1) V&V plays a major role in safety assurance, (2) the industry will clearly benefit from more tool support for collecting and manipulating safety evidence, and (3) future research on safety evidence management needs to place more emphasis on industrial applications.     

Architectures for the future networks and the next generation Internet: A survey

Networking research funding agencies in USA, Europe, Japan, and other countries are encouraging research on revolutionary networking architectures that may or may not be bound by the restrictions of the current TCP/IP based Internet. We present a comprehensive survey of such research projects and activities. The topics covered include various testbeds for experimentations for new architectures, new security mechanisms, content delivery mechanisms, management and control frameworks, service architectures, and routing mechanisms. Delay/disruption tolerant networks which allow communications even when complete end-to-end path is not available are also discussed.     

The evolving factory of the future: Integrating manufacturing and information systems

In recent years there have been rapid developments in both manufacturing and information technologies and their systems. Advances have occured so rapidly that often the results has been “islands” of automation and information subsystems, such as CAD/CAM, robotics, group technology, and office automation. Some recent developments, however, provide capabilities for integrating these “islands” into systems which both improve manufacturing productivity and produce more meaningful management information. Integrated systems seem imminent. Suggestions that could help ensure a smooth evolution toward these systems are made and some conclusions are drawn.     

Review of literature on decision support systems for natural hazard risk reduction: Current status and future research directions

Natural hazard risk is largely projected to increase in the future, placing growing responsibility on decision makers to proactively reduce risk. Consequently, decision support systems (DSSs) for natural hazard risk reduction (NHRR) are becoming increasingly important. In order to provide directions for future research in this growing area, a comprehensive classification system for the review of NHRR-DSSs is introduced, including scoping, problem formulation, the analysis framework, user and organisational interaction with the system, user engagement, monitoring and evaluation. A review of 101 papers based on this classification system indicates that most effort has been placed on identifying areas of risk and assessing economic consequences resulting from direct losses. However, less effort has been placed on testing risk-reduction options and considering future changes to risk. Furthermore, there was limited evidence within the reviewed papers on the success of DSSs in practice and whether stakeholders participated in DSS development and use.     

Decision support framework for risk management on sea ports and terminals using fuzzy set theory and evidential reasoning approach

As sea ports and terminals are valuable assets, in today’s uncertain and complex environment further refinements are needed to assess risks and prioritise protective measures for these critical pieces of logistics infrastructure. The major problem that port professionals (e.g. port risk managers and port auditors) are facing is the lack of an appropriate methodology and evaluation techniques to support their risk management (RM) cycle. Therefore in response to the uncertainties and to provide continuous risk control assurance in port industry, this paper uses fuzzy set theory (FST) to describe and evaluate the associated risk factors within the ports and terminals operations and management (PTOM). An evidential reasoning (ER) approach is employed to synthesise the information produced. These processes constitute a decision support framework that will be used to conduct port-to-port risk evaluations or to assess a whole port’s and terminal’s overall risk level in order to facilitate continuous improvement strategies. The proposed framework along with a generic methodology and a risk evaluation model is tested by a case study. The case study analyses pieces of three Southern Iranian ports by using an illustrative operational risk hierarchy. The sensitivity analysis carried out in this paper prove pieces of the applicability of the proposed methodology and model for risk evaluation of the sea ports and terminals in real situations.     

Comparison criteria for GDMO-based network management information models: A step towards the integration of management systems

The integration of Management Information Bases (MIBs) is one of the challenges of integrated network management. This is made more difficult by the existence of many different ways for structuring the MIB and defining managed objects. This paper addresses the issue of integrating GDMO-based MIBs created on the basis of different Management Information Models (MIMs). Three MIMs (NMF Library Release 1. 1, ITU-T M. 3100 and ETSI GOM) are analyzed with the help of a simple network configuration, and some MIM comparison criteria are proposed. The criteria can be used to assess the dificulty of integrating MIBs based on those models.     

Design of a bilinear fault detection observer for singular bilinear systems

A bilinear fault detection observer is proposed for a class of continuous time singular bilinear systems subject to unknown input disturbance and fault. By singular value decomposition on the original system, a bilinear fault detection observer is proposed for the decomposed system via an algebraic Riccati equation, and the domain of attraction of the state estimation error is estimated. A design procedure is presented to determine the fault detection threshold. A model of flexible joint robot is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Workflow Systems: Occasions for Success and Failure

Workflow technologies have created considerable discussion within the computer supported cooperative work community. Although a number of theoretical and empirical warnings about the difficulties of workflow systems have appeared, the technologies continue to be built and sold. This paper examines the use of one workflow-like system and outlines three cases when the technology supported the work of its users. Comparing these successful occasions with some reports of difficulties, this paper draws conclusions about the circumstances that led to tool usage.     

Customer relationship management mechanisms: A systematic review of the state of the art literature and recommendations for future research

In the information systems, customer relationship management (CRM) is the overall process of building and maintaining profitable customer relationships by delivering superior customer value and satisfaction with the goal of improving the business relationships with customers. Also, it is the strongest and the most efficient approach to maintaining and creating the relationships with customers. However, to the best of our knowledge and despite its importance, there is not any comprehensive and systematic study about reviewing and analyzing its important techniques. Therefore, in this paper, a comprehensive study and survey on the state of the art mechanisms in the scope of the CRM are done. It follows this goal by looking at five categories in which CRM plays a significant role: E-CRM, knowledge management, data mining, data quality and, social CRM. In each category, a couple of studies are presented and determinants of CRM are described and discussed. The major development in these five categories is reviewed and the new challenges are outlined. Also, a systematic literature review (SLR) in each of these five categories is provided. Furthermore, insights into the identification of open issues and guidelines for future research are provided.     

Semantic-based QoS management in cloud systems: Current status and future challenges

Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architectures have seen a dramatic increase of the amount of applications, services, management platforms, data, etc. gaining momentum for the necessity of new complex methods and techniques to deal with the vast heterogeneity of data sources or services. In this sense Quality of Service (QoS) seeks for providing an intelligent environment of self-management components based on domain knowledge in which cloud components can be optimized easing the transition to an advanced governance environment. On the other hand, semantics and ontologies have emerged to afford a common and standard data model that eases the interoperability, integration and monitoring of knowledge-based systems. Taking into account the necessity of an interoperable and intelligent system to manage QoS in cloud-based systems and the emerging application of semantics in different domains, this paper reviews the main approaches for semantic-based QoS management as well as the principal methods, techniques and standards for processing and exploiting diverse data providing advanced real-time monitoring services. A semantic-based framework for QoS management is also outlined taking advantage of semantic technologies and distributed datastream processing techniques. Finally a discussion of existing efforts and challenges is also provided to suggest future directions.     

Information systems management and strategy formulation: the 'stages of growth' model revisited

Abstract. The original 'stages of growth' model, as applied to the field of Information Systems (Gibson & Nolan, 1974), may be viewed as seminal, given the influence it has had on both theory and practice (Nolan, 1984; Sullivan, 1985; Ward, et al., 1990). This is so, despite the model's lack of substantiation based on empirical evidence, the overly simplistic assumptions on which it is based, and the limited focus of the original concept (Benbasat, et al., 1984; King & Kraemer, 1984).
Since its first appearance, the model has been refined following many applications (Nolan, 1979, 1984). In addition, others have developed 'stages of growth' models of their own. For example, Somogyi & Galliers, (1987a, b)provide a model depicting the move from basic data processing systems to strategic information systems, tracing the early days of commercial applications of computing through to the present day (Ward et al. 1990). Earl (1983, 1986, 1988, 1989) proposes a stages-model for information systems planning, as does Bhabuta (1988), while Hirschheim, et al. (1988) have developed a more broadly focused model associated with the development of the information-systems management function.
As a result of a review of the above and of a case study research undertaken in Perth, Western Australia, a revised model was developed, which takes account of current thinking and past experience in the application of the various 'stages of growth' models (Sutherland & Galliers, 1989).
This paper sets out to review some of these models and proceeds to describe the process of developing, testing and applying the revised 'stages of growth' model. The model is more broadly focused than the original concept, incorporating strategic, organizational, human resource and management considerations. As a result, it is argued that this model has greater utility than its predecessors.     

Forgetting curve models: A systematic review aimed at consolidating the main models and outlining possibilities for future research in production

This research surveys current knowledge about forgetting curves and their application in production, aiming to identify the main characteristics and tendencies and research gaps on this topic. Faced with the need to improve tools that allow production planners to predict programmed batches with greater precision, it was found that there are still gaps to be filled that allow the application of learning and forgetting techniques in the production process. To compose the scope of this research, a systematization of the existing literature was carried out, using the keywords ‘forgetting curves’, ‘total forgetting’, ‘learning and forgetting curve’ and ‘forgetting effects’, in the databases of Science Direct, Scielo, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Academics, which allowed classifying and organizing the developed models into 3 groups: Deterministic models, Statistical models and Functional models. This systematic process consisted of selecting databases, filtering publications, reviewing information, and analysing models, providing a detailed analysis on a topic that, despite being promising, is poorly explored in the industry, demonstrating and indicating gaps in research and application. To be filled.     

Modeling complex socio‐technical systems using the FRAM: A literature review

This is a review paper of studies that have employed the functional resonance analysis method (FRAM). FRAM is a relatively new systemic method for modeling and analyzing complex socio‐technical systems. This review aims to address the following research questions: (a) Why is FRAM used? (b) To what domains has FRAM been applied? (c) What are the appropriate data collection approaches in practice? (d) What are the deficiencies of FRAM? A review of 52 FRAM‐related studies published between 2010 and 2020 revealed that FRAM‐based models can be used as a basis for improving safety management, accident/incident investigation, hazard identification/risk management, and complexity management in complex socio‐technical systems. The outcomes also showed that healthcare was the most common domain that employed FRAM (31% of the investigated studies). The results of exploring data collection methods indicated a mixed method (interview, focus group, observation) was employed in 52% of the analyzed studies, and the accident investigation report was the most popular approach in aviation‐related studies. An investigation of the deficiencies of the FRAM showed that it should be upgraded by exploiting supplementary methods to enhance its analytical and computational capacity to help risk analysts and safety managers in complex socio‐technical systems.     

Searching for management information systems: coherence and change in the discipline

Abstract. The now familiar and longstanding discussion on the status of the field of management information systems (MIS) consists of at least two themes – the lack of coherence in MIS and the question of rigour vs. relevance (academic vs. practical concerns). The research questions we pose here ask: what themes or ideas represent the centre of MIS or its zones of coherence – or is diversity and fragmentation the rule? and will the centre or zones change over time? Within MIS research, is there evidence of theory building that contributes to a cumulative research tradition? Using a co‐word analysis approach – to analyse the patterns in discourse by measuring the association strengths of terms representative of relevant publications – the researchers found 62 specific centres of coherence. The data documented a high degree of change in centres of coherence over time. Evidence of theory building was extremely weak. A cumulative research tradition remains elusive. MIS centres of coherence change over time – we think, partly in response to practical pressures. We suggest that MIS opens a richer and more difficult debate on its theory, practice, and identity as a discipline in the 21st century university.