Reuse Of Artifacts Research Articles

Adaptive reuse of modern heritage for cultural purpose: Hybridization strategies in Pier Luigi Nervi Hangar, Italy

The evolution of cities and urban landscapes has witnessed the rise of architectural complexes and urban areas adapting to new functions while leaving behind others deemed obsolete. This phenomenon has sparked a surge in research endeavours aimed at hybridizing land use, not only for urban planning but also for the revitalization of historical edifices. This resurgence often entails the requalification and adaptive reuse of architectural artifacts, harmonizing their historical significance with contemporary demands. This paper delves into a case study focusing on the hybridization project of a pivotal piece of Italian engineering history: the 1938 hangar designed by Pier Luigi Nervi in Salerno, Italy, a groundbreaking prefabricated reinforced concrete structure. The study faces the dual challenge of preserving the hangar’s cultural and technological heritage while seamlessly integrating contemporary cultural functions alongside its military roots. Through an interdisciplinary approach, this research navigates through the complexities of architectural hybridization, offering insights into the preservation and adaptation of historical landmarks for future generations.

Towards a Method to Enable the Selection of Physical Models within the Systems Engineering Process: A Case Study with Simulink Models

The use of different techniques and tools is a common practice to cover all stages in the development life-cycle of systems generating a significant number of work products. These artefacts are frequently encoded using diverse formats, and often require access through non-standard protocols and formats. In this context, Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) emerges as a methodology to shift the paradigm of Systems Engineering practice from a document-oriented environment to a model-intensive environment. To achieve this major goal, a formalised application of modelling is employed throughout the life-cycle of systems to generate various system artefacts represented as models, such as requirements, logical models, and multi-physics models. However, the mere use of models does not guarantee one of the main challenges in the Systems Engineering discipline, namely, the reuse of system artefacts. Considering the fact that models are becoming the main type of system artefact, it is necessary to provide the capability to properly and efficiently represent and retrieve the generated models. In light of this, traditional information retrieval techniques have been widely studied to match existing software assets according to a set of capabilities or restrictions. However, there is much more at stake than the simple retrieval of models or even any piece of knowledge. An environment for model reuse must provide the proper mechanisms to (1) represent any piece of data, information, or knowledge under a common and shared data model, and (2) provide advanced retrieval mechanisms to elevate the meaning of information resources from text-based descriptions to concept-based ones. This need has led to novel methods using word embeddings and vector-based representations to semantically encode information. Such methods are applied to encode the information of physical models while preserving their underlying semantics. In this study, a text corpus from MATLAB Simulink models was preprocessed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and trained to generate word vector representations. Then, the presented method was validated using a testbed of MATLAB Simulink physical models in which verbalisations of models are transformed into vectors. The effectiveness of the proposed solution was assessed through a use case study. Evaluation of the results demonstrates a precision value of 0.925, a recall value of 0.865, and an F1 score of 0.884.

Supervised Classification of UML Class Diagrams Based on F-KNB

Often most software development doesn’t start from scratch but applies previously developed artifacts. These reusable artifacts are involved in various phases of the software life cycle, ranging from requirements to maintenance. Software design as the high level of software development process has an important impact on the following stages, so its reuse is gaining more and more attention. Unified modeling language (UML) class diagram as a modeling tool has become a de facto standard of software design, and thus its reuse also becomes a concern accordingly. So far, the related research on the reuse of UML class diagrams has focused on matching and retrieval. As a large number of class diagrams enter the repository for reuse, classification has become an essential task. The classification is divided into unsupervised classification (also known as clustering) and supervised classification. In our previous work, we discussed the clustering of UML class diagrams. In this paper, we focus on only the supervised classification of UML class diagrams and propose a supervised classification method. A novel ensemble classifier F-KNB combining both dependent and independent construction ideas is built. The similarity of class diagrams is described, in which the semantic, structural and hybrid matching is defined, respectively. The extracted feature elements are used in base classifiers F-KNN and F-NBs that are constructed based on improved K-nearest neighbors (KNNs) and Naive Bayes (NB), respectively. A series of experimental results show that the proposed ensemble classifier F-KNB shows a good classification quality and efficiency under the condition of variable size and distribution of training samples.

PuzzleMesh: A Puzzle Model to Build Mesh of Agnostic Services for Edge-Fog-Cloud

This paper presents the design, development, and evaluation of PuzzleMesh, an agnostic service mesh composition model to process large volumes of data in edge-fog-cloud environments. This model is based on a puzzle metaphor where pieces, puzzles, and metapuzzles represent self-contained autonomous and reusable software artifacts encapsulated into containers and published as microservices. A <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">piece</i> represents the integration of apps with I/O interfaces ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">loops</i> / <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">sockets</i> ), parallel processing, and management software. A <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">puzzle</i> represents a processing structure (e.g., workflows) built coupling pieces through loops and sockets. Puzzles integrate structures with a microservice architecture, implicit continuous dataflows, and transparent data exchange management software. A <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">metapuzzle</i> represents a recursive assemble of puzzles. A mesh represents a pool of pieces, puzzles, and metapuzzles available for designers to choose artifacts to build services. A prototype developed using PuzzleMesh model was evaluated through case studies about the automatic construction of processing services for the acquisition, pre-processing, manufacturing, preserving, and visualizing of satellite imagery. A qualitative comparison revealed that PuzzleMesh provides a flexible way to build reusable and portable services and to improve the usability of the services. The case study also revealed that PuzzleMesh yielded better performance results than other state-of-the-art tools.

Development and Evaluation of a Software Product Line for M-Learning Applications

The popularity of mobile devices in all social classes has motivated the development of mobile learning (m-learning) applications. The existing applications, even having many benefits and facilities in relation to the teaching-learning process, still presents problems and challenges, es- pecially regarding the development, reuse and architectural standardization. Particularly, there is a growing adoption of the Software Product Line (SPL) concept, in view of research that investigates these gaps. This paradigm enables organizations to explore the similarities and variabilities of their products, increasing the reuse of artifacts and, consequently, reducing costs and development time. In this context, we discuss how systematic reuse can improve the development of solutions in the m-learning domain. Therefore, this work presents the design, development and experimental evaluation of M-SPLearning, an SPL created to enable the systematic production of m-learning applications. Specifically, the conception of M-SPLearning covers from the initial study for an effective domain analysis to the implementation and evaluation of its functional version. In this regard, the products have been experimentally evaluated by industry software developers, pro- viding statistical evidence that the use of our SPL can speed up the time-to-market of m-learning applications, in addition to reducing their respective number of faults.

“Cup of Pharaoh” from Samarra and the Reuse of Ancient spolia as Water Features in the medieval Islamic World

This paper opens with a consideration of the biography of a large basin discovered during excavations at the Abbasid capital of Samarra. The large, circular, basin from Samarra closely matches historical descriptions of a fountain located in the city’s Congregational Mosque which became known as “kasat firun,” or the “Cup of Pharaoh” and, since its discovery, this excavated basin and the historical account of the fountain have often been conflated as one and the same. The excavated basin is carved from a non-local—and probably Egyptian—stone which may have generated its mysterious association with the Pharaonic past. A consideration of the possible sources from which such a large stone basin might have been obtained during the Islamic period, however, opens up a wider discussion related to the reuse of pre-Islamic artefacts as water features. This paper explores possible scenarios through which the basin from Samarra might have been acquired by the Abbasid caliphs alongside the logistics associated with its transport to Samarra. In addition, the likely motivations for the installation of this enigmatic stone basin are evaluated—including pragmatic reuse of an impressive piece of stonework, a symbolic statement of contemporary pre-eminence over the rulers of the past or perhaps even beliefs in the quasi-magical powers of ancient objects. Alongside this, the existence of several comparable, near-contemporary, basins, demonstrate that the reuse of objects from the past as contemporary water features in important locations, was a wider practice seen in both the Islamic world and beyond. As an object that seems to have led multiple lives, the complex biography of the basin from Samarra illuminates the ways in which material remains of the past were understood and repurposed during the Abbasid Caliphate.

Coloured Petri Nets-Based Modeling and Validation of Insulin Infusion Pump Systems

Safety and effectiveness are crucial quality attributes for insulin infusion pump systems. Therefore, regulatory agencies require the quality evaluation and approval of such systems before the market to decrease the risk of harm, motivating the usage of a formal Model-Based Approach (MBA) to improve quality. Nevertheless, using a formal MBA increases costs and development time because it requires expert knowledge and thorough analyses of behaviors. We aim to assist the quality evaluation of such systems in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner, providing re-usable project artifacts by applying our proposed approach (named MBA with CPN—MBA/CPN). We defined a Coloured Petri nets MBA and a case study on a commercial insulin infusion pump system to verify and validate a reference model (as a component of MBA/CPN), describing quality assessment scenarios. We also conducted an empirical evaluation to verify the productivity and reusability of modelers when using the reference model. Such a model is relevant to reason about behaviors and quality evaluation of such concurrent and complex systems. During the empirical evaluation, using the reference model, 66.7% of the 12 interviewed modelers stated no effort, while 8.3% stated low effort, 16.7% medium effort, and 8.3% considerable effort. Based on the modelers’ knowledge, we implemented a web-based application to assist them in re-using our proposed approach, enabling simulation-based training. Although a reduced number of modelers experimented with our approach, such an evaluation provided insights to improve the MBA/CPN. Given the empirical evaluation and the case study results, MBA/CPN showed to be relevant to assess the quality of insulin infusion pump systems.

Managing the Blockchain-enabled digital transformation of the healthcare supply chain

Healthcare organisations are currently in an era of significant digital transformation further accelerated through the COVID-19 pandemic. Organisations are seeking to adapt within a globalised environment with the ever-increasing supply chain disruptions, complexity of care and regulatory requirements. To be successful in this new era, organisations must re-envision their supply chain to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs and be flexible and adaptable in their ability to respond to the competitive marketplace. The combination of traditional production and cyber-physical production will indicate the evolution from traditional business models to the emerging non-linear supply chains with a patient-centric focus. The aim of this article is to review the healthcare supply chain in the context of digitally enabled technologies such as hyperledger and Blockchain, which have the potential to extensively alter healthcare organisations. The management contributions include the development of a reusable hyperchain artifact, construct development and understanding of the shift from the traditional healthcare supply chain to the industry 4.0 digital healthcare model instantiation of the hyperchain.

Flying Daggers, Horse Whisperers and a Midwinter Sacrifice: Creating the Past during the Viking Age and Early Middle Ages

This paper sets out to trace the life history of a horse skull found in a bog in Scania in the year 1900. A parallel is drawn between the find of the horse and the famous painting, "Midwinter Sacrifice" by Carl Larsson. The story of the horse has opened up a discussion on how material culture is created and recreated in time and space, resulting in completely new communicative fields. The manifestation of the past and the reuse of Stone Age places and artefacts are brought into focus when the author discusses the location where the horse skull was originally found.

Toward replication study types for design science research

In design science research, two important challenges exist to achieve greater influence in research and practice: (1) foster frequent reuse of artifacts and design theories and (2) increase knowledge accumulation in the field. In this article, we argue that replication studies could support the accumulation and development of design theories to reach a state that encourages reuse of artifacts and design theories. However, it is unclear precisely how replication relates to design science research—that is, what outcomes replication produces and how researchers should apply it within design science research. This study proposes three overarching research questions ( Does the artifact provide utility? Is the design theory complete? What design theory components fit a larger context?) and eight categories for replication studies in design science research (Test, Redesign, Justification, Adaptation, Explanation, Update, Recreation, and Meta-Replication). We offer guidance to researchers, editors, and reviewers on how to conduct replication studies in design science research and why such studies are so critical. Our goal is to provide “food for thought” on the significance of design science research replication studies and, in turn, help facilitate their widespread implementation and publication. We conclude our study by highlighting areas for further discussion and investigation, such as defining replication procedures and conceptualizing genuine replication goals within design science research.

Adapting Behavior Driven Development (BDD) for large-scale software systems

Context:Large-scale software projects require interaction between many stakeholders. Behavior-driven development (BDD) facilitates collaboration between stakeholders, and an adapted BDD process can help improve cooperation in a large-scale project. Objective:The objective of this study is to propose and empirically evaluate a BDD based process adapted for large-scale projects. Method:A technology transfer model was used to propose a BDD based process for large-scale projects. We conducted six workshop sessions to understand the challenges and benefits of BDD. Later, an industrial evaluation was performed for the process with the help of practitioners. Results:From our investigations, understanding of a business aspect of requirements, their improved quality, a guide to system-level use-cases, reuse of artifacts, and help for test organization are found as benefits of BDD. Practitioners identified the following challenges: specification and ownership of behaviors, adoption of new tools, the software projects’ scale, and versioning of behaviors. We proposed a process to address these challenges and evaluated the process with the help of practitioners. Conclusion:The evaluation proved that BDD could be adapted and used to facilitate interaction in large-scale software projects in the software industry. The feedback from the practitioners helped in improving the proposed process.

Design and Realisation of Reusable Artefacts for Internal Supply Chain Management in Manufacturing Company

Maintaining many similar software products with huge similarities and some variations have been studied is Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE). Traditional software methodology lacks the notions to model and maintain those variability and commonality in all phases of standard known software methodology (e.g. from requirement phase up to the testing phase). This paper shows a proposed software methodology based on SPLE to ease the development and maintainability of similar software product. The paper focuses on the design and realizes the reusable artefacts to generate a family of software products systematically with case study example of Supply Chain Management in Manufacturing. This methodology utilized the commonly known UML diagram with the use of UML Profile of Delta Programming and some tools of code generator.

Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle: The Spolia of Late Antique and Early Christian Rome

The architectural landscape of present-day Rome is a physical history lesson in the use of spolia; ancient marble blocks lie embedded in medieval fortresses, pieces of aqueducts appear in walls, and decorative columns sit recontextualized in grand cathedrals. Spolia refers to the intentional reuse of materials or artifacts in the creation of new structures, and when examined critically it can reveal the history surrounding the many lives the materials have lived. During the transitional phase between late antique Rome and early Christian Rome, the use of spolia reached an all time high. The emergence of Christianity in Rome coupled with the political and economic decline of the empire created a demand for large amounts of cheap building material. With Gaulish invaders to the north, Romans found themselves in dire need of fortification. In addition to the convenience of spolia in mass building projects like the Aurelian Wall, the use of spolia emerged as a way to reconcile the past and present of Rome amidst its rapidly shifting social climate. Clergymen and emperors alike had to recontextualize the physical landscape of the city to fit a modern, Christian framework.

Сквозное проектирование автоматизированных систем на основе онтологий

Currently, a large number of studies are being carried out on the use of ontologies in the development of automated systems. Ontological modeling improves the efficiency of the software development process. The division of labor in the development of automated systems contributes to the appearance of semantic gaps between the phases of the design process. The practice of using a wide range of reusable design artifacts is a risk factor for violation of conceptual integrity, consistency and completeness of the developed design solutions. The article proposes a new approach to ontological modeling of automated systems, which serves the design process for their development at all stages of design up to implementation; and a new structure of metadata of ontological specifications of automated systems, which allows taking into account semantically important entities and features of the system being developed. It is shown that the use of this approach significantly reduces labor costs in the design of a complex automated system in the face of changing requirements at different stages of system creation. The use of ontological models in the design process helps to increase the conceptual integrity, consistency and completeness of the developed design solutions.

Exploring artefact reusability in decision support system - a synthesis of extant contributions

Decision-making in business remains the pivotal aspect for managers. Accordingly, decision support systems (DSSs) have evolved as one of the most popular fields in management science. To understand its development as a field, we analyse more than 2,000 articles published in the last decade. Since manual interpretation for such a large corpus remains a challenge, we adopt a more systematic and scientific approach. This study utilises the power of statistical computing and text mining to analyse the content in the abstracts of all the published articles. The existing evidence from this study hint towards a clear absence of a cumulative tradition of 're'-designing, and development of re-usable artefacts. We plug this gap by positing a feedback loop for substantiating the need of artefact re-usability. This study opens new avenues for both scholars and practitioners of the domain to further explore and analyse a more efficient practice of deploying DSS through re-usability of DSS artefacts.

Exploring artefact reusability in decision support system - a synthesis of extant contributions

Decision-making in business remains the pivotal aspect for managers. Accordingly, decision support systems (DSSs) have evolved as one of the most popular fields in management science. To understand its development as a field, we analyse more than 2,000 articles published in the last decade. Since manual interpretation for such a large corpus remains a challenge, we adopt a more systematic and scientific approach. This study utilises the power of statistical computing and text mining to analyse the content in the abstracts of all the published articles. The existing evidence from this study hint towards a clear absence of a cumulative tradition of 're'-designing, and development of re-usable artefacts. We plug this gap by positing a feedback loop for substantiating the need of artefact re-usability. This study opens new avenues for both scholars and practitioners of the domain to further explore and analyse a more efficient practice of deploying DSS through re-usability of DSS artefacts.

Finding reusable structured resources for the integration of environmental research data

Successful data integration requires careful examination of data semantics, a task that has often been approached with the use of ontologies. However, there are some barriers to build ontologies for data integration in complex domains such as the environmental one. A relevant problem is the development of new ontologies disregarding previous knowledge resources such as reference models and vocabularies. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing a systematic approach (dubbed CLeAR) for the identification and selection of reusable artifacts for building ontologies with the purpose of research data integration. CLeAR follows some principles of the systematic literature reviews, supporting the search for structured resources in the scientific literature. We apply CLeAR to the environmental domain. A total of 543 publications were surveyed. The results obtained provide a set of 75 structured resources for the environmental domain, evaluated according domain coverage and some quality attributes (e.g., proper documentation, community acceptance).

A framework for automated multi-stage and multi-step product configuration of cyber-physical systems

Product line engineering (PLE) has been employed to large-scale cyber-physical systems (CPSs) to provide customization based on users’ needs. A PLE methodology can be characterized by its support for capturing and managing the abstractions as commonalities and variabilities and the automation of the configuration process for effective selection and customization of reusable artifacts. The automation of a configuration process heavily relies on the captured abstractions and formally specified constraints using a well-defined modeling methodology. Based on the results of our previous work and a thorough literature review, in this paper, we propose a conceptual framework to support multi-stage and multi-step automated product configuration of CPSs, including a comprehensive classification of constraints and a list of automated functionalities of a CPS configuration solution. Such a framework can serve as a guide for researchers and practitioners to evaluate an existing CPS PLE solution or devise a novel CPS PLE solution. To validate the framework, we conducted three real-world case studies. Results show that the framework fulfills all the requirements of the case studies in terms of capturing and managing variabilities and constraints. Results of the literature review indicate that the framework covers all the functionalities concerned by the literature, suggesting that the framework is complete for enabling the maximum automation of configuration in CPS PLE.

Providing Clarity on Big Data Technologies

Big Data is a term that gained popularity due to its potential benefits in various fields, and is progressively being used. However, there are still many gaps and challenges to overcome, especially when it comes to the selection and handling of relevant technologies. A consequence of the huge number of manifestations in this area, growing each year, the uncertainty and complexity increase. The lack of a classification approach causes a growing demand for more experts with a broad knowledge and expertise. Using various techniques of ontology engineering and following the design science methodology, this work proposes the Big Data Technology Ontology (BDTOnto) as a comprehensive and sustainable classification approach to classify big data technologies and their manifestations. In particular, a reusable, extensible and adaptable artifact in the form of an ontology will be developed and evaluated.

A hybrid DevOps process supporting software reuse: A pilot project

AbstractLarge software development organizations manage reusable software components through a reusable software repository in order to reduce development time and cost and to improve software quality and productivity. This paper presents a hybrid DevOps process with a systematic reuse‐based software development and management process to reduce the effort and cost required for the rework and to increase productivity. The proposed approach promotes the systematic reuse of software components based on both information retrieval and ontology‐based retrieval techniques. The reusable assets are presented in different styles to ease and support the reuse process with fine‐grained reusable artifacts. To evaluate our proposed process, a pilot project, aiming to monitor the health of a patient, was developed and monitored the reuse activities throughout the whole experiment. The results revealed that our proposed process got an average gain of 35.2% in terms of developed function points by reusing 30.63% of reusable artifacts available in the reuse repository.