A pluggable middleware architecture for developing context-aware mobile applications

The proliferation of powerful smartphone devices provides a great opportunity for context-aware mobile applications becoming mainstream. However, we argue that conventional software development techniques suffer because of the added complexity required for collecting and managing context information. This paper presents a component-based middleware architecture which facilitates the development and deployment of context-aware applications via reusable components. The main contribution of this approach is the combination of a development methodology with the middleware architecture, which together bring significant value to developers of context-aware applications. Further contributions include the following: The methodology utilizes separation of concerns, thus decreasing the developmental cost and improving the productivity. The design and implementation of context-aware applications are also eased via the use of reusable components, called context plug-ins. Finally, the middleware architecture facilitates the deployment and management of the context plug-ins in a resource-aware manner. The proposed methodology and middleware architecture are evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively.     

Achieving agility using business model stress testing

Business Model (BM) Innovations aim at making systemic changes in the business logic of companies when they are bringing innovative products and services to the market. Companies should be sensitive to changes in their business environment and able to modify their BMs in an agile way. To assess the agility of BMI during specific market entry situations, this paper uses a method that stress tests the value proposition and the components of a BM against contingent uncertainties. We present three qualitative case studies of companies that differ in their market entry approach. Starting from their strategic orientation, these case companies’ stress test their Business models and BM components, using a scenario-based identification of uncertainties. The BM Stress Test method contributes to a quick understanding of the components their BM needs to monitor, reconsider, or improve. Such stress testing helps enhance business agility. The research contributes to market strategy and business modelling research by introducing BM Stress Testing as a new method that can achieve and maintain agility regarding BM uncertainties.     

Individual empowerment of agile and non-agile software developers in small teams

ContextEmpowerment of employees at work has been known to have a positive impact on job motivation and satisfaction. Software development is a field of knowledge work wherein one should also expect to see these effects, and the idea of empowerment has become particularly visible in agile methodologies, in which proponents emphasise team empowerment and individual control of the work activities as a central concern.ObjectiveThis research aims to get a better understanding of how empowerment is enabled in software development teams, both agile and non-agile, to identify differences in empowering practices and levels of individual empowerment.MethodTwenty-five interviews with agile and non-agile developers from Norway and Canada on decision making and empowerment are analysed. The analysis is conducted using a conceptual model with categories for involvement, structural empowerment and psychological empowerment.ResultsBoth kinds of development organisations are highly empowered and they are similar in most aspects relating to empowerment. However, there is a distinction in the sense that agile developers have more possibilities to select work tasks and influence the priorities in a development project due to team empowerment. Agile developers seem to put a higher emphasis on the value of information in decision making, and have more prescribed activities to enable low-cost information flow. More power is obtained through the achievement of managing roles for the non-agile developers who show interest and are rich in initiatives.ConclusionAgile developers have a higher sense of being able to impact the organisation than non-agile developers and have information channels that is significantly differently from non-agile developers. For non-agile teams, higher empowerment can be obtained by systematically applying low-cost participative decision making practices in the manager–developer relation and among peer developers. For agile teams, it is essential to more rigorously follow the empowering practices already established.     

An evaluation of the degree of agility in six agile methods and its applicability for method engineering

While agile methods are in use in industry, little research has been undertaken into what is meant by agility and how a supposed agile method can be evaluated with regard to its veracity to belong to this category of software development methodological approaches. Here, an analytical framework, called 4-DAT, is developed and applied to six well-known agile methods and, for comparison, two traditional methods. The results indicate the degree of agility to be found in each method, from which a judgement can be made as to whether the appellation of “agile” to that method is appropriate. This information is shown to be useful, for example, when constructing a methodology from method fragments (method engineering) and when comparing agile and traditional methods.     

Holon技术在敏捷制造系统中的应用研究

面对日益多样化的客户需求和市场能够快速响应的生产状况，制造业领域的生产模式也朝着客户化、敏捷化、柔性化的方向发展，敏捷制造模式有望成为21世纪的发展趋势。讨论了将全能体Holon作为实施敏捷制造的现实技术问题，分析比较了目前国内外在此领域的研究现状。通过简单归纳Holon的定义，并对Holon的内部逻辑结构加以分析说明。提出了基于Holon的面向订单生产敏捷制造企业参考模型。     

Object-oriented design processes of electronic commerce in a multi-agent environment

Corporations are moving from traditional management into a world of agile and electronic business. Such businesses have continually sought to develop information technology (IT) systems, in order to assist in the decision-making of the business process. Due to rapid changes in the business environment this process is subject to ongoing examination. To ensure the agility of electronic commerce, business design process problems must be addressed by a team of specialists or intelligent agents, and be based on object-oriented design, characterized by computability, reusability, and exchangeability. This paper proposes a multi-agent system encompassing an object-oriented approach, to design processes for electronic commerce. This approach entails solutions to design processes, for decision-makers who are geographically separated and operate on differing computer platforms. By combining various objects, different types of design processes can be solved with the same agent-based framework, making this approach very responsive. The proposed methodology is applied to a real-world construct that involves combining objects to complete an electronic commerce model: in particular the logistics objective.     

The ECORA framework: A hybrid architecture for context-oriented pervasive computing

An infrastructure approach to support context-aware pervasive computing is advantageous for rapid prototyping of context-aware distributed applications and beneficial for unifying modelling of context and reasoning in uncertain conditions. This paper presents the ECORA framework for context-aware computing, which is designed with a focus on reasoning about context under uncertainty and addressing issues of heterogeneity, scalability, communication and usability. The framework follows an agent-oriented hybrid approach, combining centralized reasoning services with context-aware, reasoning capable mobile software agents. The use of a centralized reasoning engine provides powerful reasoning capabilities and deploying context-aware mobile agents enables agility and robustness of components in the pervasive system. The design and implementation of the framework at different levels, as well as three case studies, are presented.     

基于Web Service的家庭人体健康监护系统快速开发平台

家庭人体健康监护系统作为上下文感知应用的一种,越来越多的被应用到有老人或病人的家庭中。该文提出一种新的面向服务的开发平台,引入Web Service框架,将家庭人体健康监护系统中的软硬件集成模块抽象成独立的网络服务,开发人员既可以直接调用这些服务,又可以创建基于这些服务的业务流程,极大的提高了工作效率。     

Towards Systematic Achievement of Compliance in Service-Oriented Architectures: The MASTER Approach

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) have been successfully adapted by agile businesses to support dynamic outsourcing of business processes and the maintenance of business ecosystems. Still, businesses need to comply with applicable laws and regulations. Abstract service interfaces, distributed ownership and cross-domain operations introduce new challenges for the implementation of compliance controls and the assessment of their effectiveness. In this paper, we analyze the challenges for automated support of the enforcement and evaluation of IT security controls in a SOA. We introduce these challenges by means of an example control, and outline a methodology and a high-level architecture that supports the phases of the control lifecycle through dedicated components for observation, evaluation, decision support and reaction. The approach is model-based and features policy-driven controls. A monitoring infrastructure assesses observations in terms of key indicators and interprets them in business terms. Reaction is supported through components that implement both automated enforcement and the provision of feedback by a human user. The resulting architecture essentially is a decoupled security architecture for SOA with enhanced analysis capabilities and will be detailed and implemented in the MASTER project.     

Context-aware workflow management for virtual enterprises based on coordination of agents

Although virtual enterprises (VE) make it possible for small flexible enterprises to form a collaborative network to respond to business opportunities through dynamic coalition and sharing of the core competencies and resources, they also pose new challenges and issues. Creation of VE involves dynamically established partnerships between the partners and relies on a flexible coordination scheme. The dynamic organizations formed in VE present a challenge in the development of a new methodology to dynamically allocate re-sources and deliver the relevant information to the right people at the right time. A key issue is the development of an effective workflow management scheme for VE. Multi-agent systems (MAS) provide a flexible architecture to deal with changes based on dynamic organization and collaboration of autonomous agents. Despite the extensive studies and research results on MAS, development of a design methodology to support coordination and operations is critical to the success and adoption of VE. The objectives of this research are to propose a design methodology to facilitate coordination and development of context-aware workflow management systems and achieve effective resource allocation for VE based on MAS architecture. To achieve these objectives, a scheme for coordination of agents is proposed. Petri net models are used in the coordination scheme to describe workflows and capture resource activities in VE. The interactions between agents lead to a dynamic workflow model for VE. Based on the aforementioned model, we propose architecture to dynamically generate context-aware graphical user interface to guide the users and control resource allocation based on the state of VE. An order management example is used throughout this paper to illustrate the proposed design methodology.     

Change factors requiring agility and implications for IT

The current highly dynamic business environment requires businesses to be agile. Business agility is the ability to swiftly and easily change businesses and business processes beyond the normal level of flexibility to effectively manage unpredictable external and internal changes. This study reports on a cross-industry analysis of change factors requiring agility and assesses agility gaps that companies are facing in four industry sectors in the Netherlands. A framework was constructed to measure the perceived gaps between the current level of business agility and the required level of business agility. The questionnaire and in-depth interviews held reveal that today's businesses perceive to lack the agility required to quickly respond to changes, whose speed and requirements are difficult to predict. The paper presents rankings of generic and sector-specific agility gaps. These show that although some generic change factors requiring agility exist, the change factors requiring agility that cause agility gaps differ across industry sectors. Among the factors that enable or hinder business agility, the existence of inflexible legacy systems is perceived to be a very important disabler in achieving more business agility. A number of basic principles and directions are discussed to transform Information Technology from barrier into key enabler for increased agility in organizations and business networks.     

Agile enterprise architecture modelling: Evaluating the applicability and integration of six modelling standards

ContextAgile enterprise architecture artefacts are initially architected at the high-level and the details of those artefacts iteratively evolve in small project increments. There is a need to model agile enterprise architecture artefacts both at the high and low detailed level for a particular context. ArchiMate is relatively a new high-level architecture modelling standard. There is a growing interest amongst organisations in applying ArchiMate for high-level agile enterprise architecture modelling. However, organisations are unsure how to effectively apply ArchiMate at high-level and integrate it with their existing low detailed level modelling standards in practice for supporting end-to-end agile enterprise architecture modelling.ObjectiveThis paper evaluates the applicability and integration of high-level ArchiMate modelling standard with the existing low-level modelling standards such as BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation), UML (Unified Modelling Language), FAML (FAME [Framework for Agent-Oriented Method Engineering] Language), SoaML (Service Oriented Architecture Modelling Language), and BMM (Business Motivation Model).MethodA qualitative questionnaire-based evaluation criteria has been developed based on the well-known and comprehensive The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). The evaluation criteria has been applied to evaluate the applicability and integration of the selected six modelling standards from the business, application, infrastructure and extension perspectives.ResultsEach modelling standard is different in scope. A single modelling standard usually does not provide the kind of support required by the agile enterprise architecture modelling. Based on the review results, a hybrid enterprise architecture modelling approach is proposed. This paper demonstrates the application of the proposed hybrid approach with the help of an agile enterprise architecture modelling case study.ConclusionIt is concluded that the ArchiMate does not replace the existing low-level modelling standards, rather it can be used in conjunction with low-level modelling standards. This calls for the adoption of hybrid and integrated approach for agile enterprise architecture modelling.     

A fuzzy group quality function deployment model for e-CRM framework assessment in agile manufacturing

The rapid growth of the Internet and the expansion of electronic commerce applications in manufacturing have given rise to electronic customer relationship management (e-CRM) which enhances the overall customer satisfaction. However, when confronted by the range of e-CRM methods, manufacturing companies struggle to identify the one most appropriate to their needs. This paper presents a novel structured approach to evaluate and select the best agile e-CRM framework in a rapidly changing manufacturing environment. The e-CRM frameworks are evaluated with respect to their customer and financial oriented features to achieve manufacturing agility. Initially, the e-CRM frameworks are prioritized according to their financial oriented characteristics using a fuzzy group real options analysis (ROA) model. Next, the e-CRM frameworks are ranked according to their customer oriented characteristics using a hybrid fuzzy group permutation and a four-phase fuzzy quality function deployment (QFD) model with respect to three main perspectives of agile manufacturing (i.e., strategic, operational and functional agilities). Finally, the best agile e-CRM framework is selected using a technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) model. We also present a case study to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach and exhibit the efficacy of the procedures and algorithms.     

Enhancing enterprise agility by deploying agile drivers, capabilities and providers

Agility is perceived as the dominant competitive vehicle for all organizations in an uncertain and ever-changing business environment. When embracing agility, important questions must be asked. What precisely is agility and how can it be measured? How can one adopt the appropriate agile enablers to develop agility? How can one effectively assist in enhancing agility?For an enterprise to achieve agility, it is critical to create an effective integrated procedure within the business that coordinates and ensures that the agility providers can satisfy the agility capabilities and cope with drivers, ultimately transforming all of these attributes into strategic competitive edges. However, the existing literature on enterprise agility has failed to sufficiently address the relevant perspectives in such analyzes. The relationship matrix in the quality function deployment (QFD) method provides an excellent tool for deploying important concepts and linking processes. This report suggests a new agility development method for dealing with the interface and alignment issues among the agility drivers, capabilities and providers using the QFD relationship matrix and fuzzy logic. A fuzzy agility index (FAI) for an enterprise composed of agility capability ratings and a total relation-weight with agility drivers was developed to measure the agility level of an enterprise. This report also describes how this robust approach has been applied to develop agility in a Taiwanese information technology (IT) product and service enterprise. This development project revealed that the proposed framework and procedures can enhance the agility of an enterprise as well as ensure a competitive edge.     

Towards lean service bus architecture for industrial integration infrastructure and pull manufacturing strategies

The Lean Manufacturing approach requires advanced and efficient manufacturing technologies in order to meet customer demands. Manufacturing companies have increased their productivity and efficiency over time by implementing new strategies, business processes and IT solutions. Best practices also allow companies to achieve on-demand manufacturing through the integration of pull flow production strategy. In order to achieve agility to meet business needs, a key for success is a flexible integration of different information system components to enable the flow of exchanged data and information. To insure the agility of an enterprise’s organization, ISA S-95 standard can be used to determine which information has to be exchanged between system components. We propose an Industrial System Integration Architecture, a Lean Enterprise Service Bus which relies on Lean Manufacturing constraints based on semantic aspects with respect to the ISA S-95 standard. This architecture aims at enhancing the interoperability between the production system and the global enterprise information system in terms of business and manufacturing requirements and establishes semantic interoperability to achieve an industrial semantic.     

Enterprise-level business component identification in business architecture integration

The component-based business architecture integration of military information systems is a popular research topic in the field of military operational research. Identifying enterprise-level business components is an important issue in business architecture integration. Currently used methodologies for business component identification tend to focus on software-level business components, and ignore such enterprise concerns in business architectures as organizations and resources. Moreover, approaches to enterprise-level business component identification have proven laborious. In this study, we propose a novel approach to enterprise-level business component identification by considering overall cohesion, coupling, granularity, maintainability, and reusability. We first define and formulate enterprise-level business components based on the component business model and the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) models. To quantify the indices of business components, we formulate a create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) matrix and use six metrics as criteria. We then formulate business component identification as a multi-objective optimization problem and solve it by a novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm called the ‘simulated annealing hybrid genetic algorithm (SHGA)’. Case studies showed that our approach is more practical and efficient for enterprise-level business component identification than prevalent approaches.     

Agile business process development: why,how and when—applying Nonaka’s theory of knowledge transformation to business process development

The traditional way of business process development is via creating a detailed model of a business process in question, acquiring an IT-system to support it, and then implementing it in the organizational practice. Acquiring a system can be done via designing and manufacturing it by the business itself, or via commissioning it to somebody else. Alternatively, a generic system can be bought and configured according to the business process model created. The traditional approach has a number of risks that become visible only during the latest phase of introducing the system in the organizational practice, e.g., when it becomes clear that the system does not fit the business and/or people who work in it. These risks could be mitigated by using an agile approach to the development of business processes. In agile approach: (a) the phases of process modeling, IT-system design, and manufacturing are merged into one, and (b) instead of using one big cycle, a series of smaller development cycles is used. The paper discusses what is needed to implement the agile approach, and in which business situations the agile approach is the most appropriate. Examples of tools to support agile development are presented and analyzed. The results presented in the paper have been achieved based on the knowledge transformation perspective along the lines suggested by Nonaka in SECI model. The modification of this model has been used to understand the risks and requirements connected to a particular process development strategy.     

Agile product line planning: A collaborative approach and a case study

Agile methods and product line engineering (PLE) have both proven successful in increasing customer satisfaction and decreasing time to market under certain conditions. Key characteristics of agile methods are lean and highly iterative development with a strong emphasis on stakeholder involvement. PLE leverages reuse through systematic approaches such as variability modeling or product derivation. Integrating agile approaches with product line engineering is an interesting proposition which – not surprisingly – entails several challenges: Product lines (PL) rely on complex plans and models to ensure their long-term evolution while agile methods emphasize simplicity and short-term value-creation for customers. When incorporating agility in product line engineering, it is thus essential to define carefully how agile principles can support particular PLE processes. For instance, the processes of defining and setting up a product line (domain engineering) and deriving products (application engineering) differ significantly in practices and focus with implications on the suitability of agile principles. This paper presents practical experiences of adopting agile principles in product line planning (a domain engineering activity). ThinkLets, i.e., collaborative practices from the area of collaboration engineering, are the building blocks of the presented approach as they codify agile principles such as stakeholder involvement, rapid feedback, or value-based prioritization. We discuss how our approach balances agility and the intrinsic needs of product line planning. A case study carried out with an industrial partner indicates that the approach is practicable, usable, and useful.     

A methodology for architecture-level reliability risk analysis

The paper presents a methodology for reliability risk assessment at the early stages of the development lifecycle, namely, the architecture level. We describe a heuristic risk assessment methodology that is based on dynamic metrics. The methodology uses dynamic complexity and dynamic coupling metrics to define complexity factors for the architecture elements (components and connectors). Severity analysis is performed using Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) as applied to architecture models. We combine severity and complexity factors to develop heuristic risk factors for the architecture components and connectors. Based on analysis scenarios, we develop a risk assessment model that represents components, connectors, component risk factors, connector risk factors, and probabilities of component interactions. We also develop a risk analysis algorithm that aggregates risk factors of components and connectors to the architectural level. Using the risk aggregation and the risk analysis model, we show how to analyze the overall risk factor of the architecture as the function of the risk factors of its constituting components and connectors. A case study of a pacemaker architecture is used to illustrate the application of the methodology. The methodology is used to identify critical components and connectors and to investigate the sensitivity of the architecture risk factor to changes in the heuristic risk factors of the architecture elements