Adaptable Enterprise Architectures for Software Evolution of SmartLife Ecosystems

The digital transformation of our life changes the way we work, learn, communicate, and collaborate. Enterprises are presently transforming their strategy, culture, processes, and their information systems to become digital. The digital transformation deeply disrupts existing enterprises and economies. Digitization fosters the development of IT systems with many rather small and distributed structures, like Internet of Things, Microservices and mobile services. Since years a lot of new business opportunities appear using the potential of services computing, Internet of Things, mobile systems, big data with analytics, cloud computing, collaboration networks, and decision support. Biological metaphors of living and adaptable ecosystems provide the logical foundation for self-optimizing and resilient run-time environments for intelligent business services and adaptable distributed information systems with service-oriented enterprise architectures. This has a strong impact for architecting digital services and products following both a value-oriented and a service perspective. The change from a closed-world modeling world to a more flexible open-world composition and evolution of enterprise architectures defines the moving context for adaptable and high distributed systems, which are essential to enable the digital transformation. The present research paper investigates the evolution of Enterprise Architecture considering new defined value-oriented mappings between digital strategies, digital business models and an improved digital enterprise architecture.

High-level enterprise services are considered as wrappers of business processes and ICT capabilities in enterprise architecture. Enterprise services have distinctive features that are not typically observed in Web services, e.g. signicant portions of the functionality of these services might be executed in a human-mediated fashion. As such, a service level agreement should be described as a mixture of human-mediated functionality (e.g., service penalty) and computer-interpretable factors (e.g., reliability, payment). This paper reports our preliminary work in defining a taxonomy for co-relating SLAs with elements of enterprise architecture. It gives insight into the alignment between what the enterprise in questions contractually agrees with its partners (or customers) and what it possesses to be able to fulfill the agreement. We define the service level agreement formally. We adopt the ArchiMate - a widely used language for modeling and analyzing enterprise architectures. We then propose the corelation between items in the agreement with elements in the enterprise architecture. We showcase our work using a real-life case-study in the retailing market of domestic airfare.

Service orientation is a new paradigm, not only for software engineering but also for the broader topic of enterprise architecture. This chapter studies the relevance and impact of the service concept and service orientation to the discipline of enterprise architecture. It provides ideas on how to set up a service-oriented enterprise architecture. It is argued that a service-oriented approach to enterprise architecture provides better handles for architectural alignment and business and IT alignment, in particular.

The goal of the workshop is to develop concepts and methods to assist the engineering and management of service oriented enterprise architectures and the software systems supporting them. Especially four themes of research have been pursued: 1. Alignment of the enterprise goals and strategies with the service-oriented enterprise architecture; 2. Design of the service-oriented enterprise architecture; 3. Mapping of service-oriented enterprise architecture to enterprise resources; 4. SoEA and Cloud-Computing; influence of cloud, social and big data.

Emerging business models such as digital ecosystems involving collaborative innovation, participatory decision-making and flexible organizational structures are set to significantly affect inter- and intra-enterprise structure and functionality. This has seen the appearance of increasingly complex Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) scenarios featuring various partnership levels, increased resilience and adaptation to tougher compliance regulations, more seamless integration with process layers, etc. This complexity has brought about the need to broaden the SOA paradigm, so as to include business, infrastructure and multi-layering, resulting in an evolved concept known as Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture (SOEA). This paper aims to describe the way new business and technology paradigms continue to affect the new SOEA approach and how the inherently holistic Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks and related practices can support the emerging complex dynamic, multi-layered and value-chained service-based scenario.

Digitization of societies changes the way we live, work, learn, communicate, and collaborate. In the age of digital transformation IT environments with a large number of rather small structures like Internet of Things (IoT), Microservices, or mobility systems are emerging to support flexible and agile digitized products and services. Adaptable ecosystems with service-oriented enterprise architectures are the foundation for self-optimizing, resilient run-time environments and distributed information systems. The resulting business disruptions affect almost all new information processes and systems in the context of digitization. Our aim are more flexible and agile transformations of both business and information technology domains with more flexible enterprise information systems through adaptation and evolution of digital enterprise architectures. The present research paper investigates mechanisms for decision-controlled digitization architectures for Internet of Things and Microservices by evolving enterprise architecture reference models and state of the art elements for architectural engineering for micro-granular systems.

Followed by the introduction of IoT and new sustainable technologies, energy management, Quality of Service and decrease of communication costs become important and complex for enterprise systems at airports. The aviation authorities’ reports reveal that the airport ICT investments are mainly focused on travel safety, mobile commerce, and new technologies. The main idea behind a smart airport is to deploy IoT network managed through a Cloud-Fog-Edge paradigm for a smart platform and optimize the airport’s efficiency. An IoT cloud-based platform solution supports multiple types of data, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning techniques. However, cloud computing has certain limitations such as increased delay in data reporting, increased latency in accessing user network, limited customization, increased reliance on external network and data privacy. Fog-Cloud and Edge-Cloud paradigms can overcome the weaknesses of cloud computing architectures. Therefore, to understand the organizational impact of combining the usage of cloud, fog, and edge computing, we created an enterprise architecture that can be applied in a smart airport demonstration study. The enterprise architecture modelling was done by using ArchiMate and validated by means of an expert assessment and prototype implementation.

Several frameworks have been developed to assist the analysis of service management systems. However, most of these frameworks only capture limited aspects of a service-oriented enterprise. This paper first reviews several popular service management frameworks. An enterprise architecture approach that is commonly used in information systems planning has been adapted to integrate various service management frameworks and tools, as well as to support the planning and documentation of a service-oriented enterprise. The proposed service-oriented enterprise architecture (SOEA) includes the following aspects: service, process, people, information, and motivation. Each aspect can be viewed from a strategic, tactical, and operational level. The mapping of the conceptual constructs of existing service management frameworks to the proposed SOEA is discussed in detail.

Summary form only given. Industry has been wrestling with the complexity of managing business systems for years. The challenge stems from the variety of application and IT resource providers that enterprises use to build their business systems. A range of management systems co-exist to manage the breadth of resources. The management industry and customers have an opportunity to take advantage of the industry trend towards using Web services for business integration and moving to service oriented architectures for business. It is now possible to garner these same advantages seen in business for management. Building manageable resources and management systems on a Web services foundation is going to cause a profound shift in how enterprises and vendors manage their IT resources in the future. Embracing this shift is going to create more flexible IT infrastructures, better integration of business and IT objectives, and greater end to end management of both IT infrastructures and business processes. This presentation provides a bottoms-up tutorial of Web services distributed management (WSDM), the new OASIS Standard that provides the first step in solving this classic management integration problem. The session will begin with an overview of the SOA based management architecture and WSDM's place in that architecture relative to other industry standards and initiatives. The technical tutorial will begin with an introduction on WSDL and WS-addressing, specifications on which WSDM depends. The presenters will build on this with an overview of the Web services for resource framework (WSRF) and Web services notification (WSN) OASIS specifications and discuss how they are used by WSDM. Finally, the session will explore WSDM components, management using WS (MUWS) and WSDM management of Web services (MOWS). MUWS defines how to represent and access the manageability interfaces of any IT resource as Web services. MOWS defines how to manage Web services as resources and how to describe and access that manageability using MUWS. Concrete customer issues solved by WSDM will also be highlighted as well as how CIM modeled resources can be accessed using WSDM. Apache MUSE and IBM Developerworks Toolkits will be used to illustrate the programming techniques

A survey of Digital Twin techniques in smart manufacturing and management of energy applications

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explain how buyers can more effectively and efficiently utilize technologies to improve their performance and to inform top executives in retail firms how these technologies can be used to improve the overall performance of the retail store.Design/methodology/approachUsing a descriptive approach, the paper identifies current technologies that are being used and shows how technology can be used by retail buyers.FindingsTechnologies developed over the past 20 years have changed the way buyers execute their responsibilities with advancements in various technologies; faster transmission of data results in the ability of buyers to immediately react to inventory and pricing issues. However, given that technology investments can exceed millions of dollars, and that many retailers' margins and inventory productivity have been eroding over the last ten years, the stakes for information technology decisions have grown exponentially, so care must be taken in making these decisions.Practical implicationsThis subject matter is most important for retail practitioners because it identifies areas where the performance of buyers can be improved. It is also valuable to college professors who teach retailing and buying and to their students because it provides current subject matter that should be incorporated into classes.Originality/valueThis paper identified the most current technologies being used by buyers in a variety of stores to improve their performance. In addition, this paper identified the future trends in technology adopted by innovative retailers.

Future trends in technology and automation

Autoantibodies to double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) are, by definition, serological markers of systemic lupus erythematosus. However, the clinical value of anti-dsDNA antibodies largely depends on the assay principle and analytical variables of the methods used to quantitate and immunologically characterize them. In the present article, an overview of current methods for anti-dsDNA antibody detection is presented, together with a look at the future trends in technologies newly employed in this field.

How is technology being used to train teachers to keep up with the rapid pace of change in schools and society today? This chapter discusses the utilization of technology for in-service (practicing) teacher training, a process known as professional development within the field of education. The chapter analyzes both formal and informal methods of technology integrated teacher training, presents examples of each, and discusses positive and negative implications. The chapter concludes with an examination of future trends in technology and their potential for significant impact on teacher professional development.

Mining and mineral exploration play important roles in the global economy. In mining operations, communication systems play vital roles in ensuring personnel safety, enhancing operational efficiency and process optimization. Over the period 1920-2012, this article surveys the evolution of wireless communications in underground mines, the developments of the underlying technology, and progress in understanding and modeling the underground wireless propagation channel. Current and future trends in technology, applications and propagation modeling are also identified. About ninety relevant references have been reviewed that consider: 1) the emergence of technology and applications, 2) analytical, numerical and measurement-based propagation modeling techniques, and 3) implications of the physical environment, antenna placement and radiation characteristics on wireless communication system design. Affected systems include narrowband, wideband/ultra-wideband (UWB) and multiple-antenna systems. The paper concludes by identifying open areas of research.