Interconnected Services Research Articles

Competency Based Approach: Modeling and Implementation

The expansion of computer networks has at the same time given impetus to the distance learning environments. E-learning systems are also advanced and more efficient. However, these platforms offer such complex teaching functionalities that designers find themselves poorly equipped to succeed in their engineering processes. This article presents a tool that makes it easier for designers to produce educational content according to the Competency-Based Approach (CBA). We propose an implementation of the CBA after its modeling via ontology. Our module can be grafted to any author system oriented pedagogy based skills. We have advocated for Service for Oriented Architecture as a software solution to model our business process that consists of a set of interconnected services that are modeled and implemented. The proposed system is the result of a coordina-tion of, services, incorporating the order of competences explained by a distance education, which integrates and interacts according to an orchestration plan.

‘Goods With Digital Elements’ and the Interplay With Directive 2019/771 on the Sale of Goods

Adoption of the new consumer contract law package in 2019 has raised a question of the delimitation of the scopes of the directives: are ‘goods with digital elements’ within the scope of the digital content directive or the new consumer sales directive? As a starting point, the rules of the directives create a legal presumption that the seller of the smart good is liable not only for the tangible good and embedded digital software but also for the inter-connected digital services. This should be so even if the consumer concludes an additional licensing contract with the digital service provider in order to benefit from the digital service. However, this article argues that there is much room left for party autonomy with a consequence that exactly the opposite might become true in practice. It will also show that the situation becomes even more complicated for consumers when the ‘digital element’ of the good is a free and open source software. In these cases, the ‘separately bought’ digital content does not even fall within the scope of the digital content directive - with the result that the seller is not liable for the digital content under the consumer sales directive and the digital content provider is also not liable for it under the digital content directive. The consumer is then left without any remedies under the new directives. All in all, the sellers of goods with digital elements are clearly incentivized to exclude the digital elements from the consumer sales contract.

Comparing Simulation with Physical Verification and Validation in a Maritime Test Field

The steadily increasing complexity of maritime systems substantially raised the need for advanced verification and validation (V&V) as well as certification methods. Extensive simulation-based certification adds new opportunities to existing physical testing. Compared with simulation, field tests are extremely time-consuming and therefore expensive. Furthermore, relevant close-range situations between ships or environmental impacts (e.g. certain types of bad weather situation) are impossible to perform in the field for safety reasons and the uncontrollability of the environment or simply the amount of experiments needed. Systems in the maritime domain (like products for navigation assistance, sensors, communication equipment etc.) are typically not used isolated but as part of a complex setup. More and more sensors and actuators are integrated to provide data for various systems or information services on board a ship and ashore. Since such systems are typically continuously evolving during their service lifetime, the development and maintenance of maritime systems (e.g. bridge systems) need to considered in its usage context that includes interconnected systems and external services, sensors and actuators. CPSoS (Cyber-Physical System of Systems) demand innovative approaches for distributed optimization, novel distributed management and control methodologies that can also deal with partially autonomous systems, and must be resilient to faults or cyber-attacks. In addition, CPSoS engineering no longer maintains the former strict separation between the engineering phases and actual operation. Instead, integrated approaches for the design- and operation- phase are required to cover the full lifecycle by modelling, simulation, validation, and verification (V&V). Thus, prospectively, it will be necessary to monitor the system formation and to conduct a final assessment of the system by means of a suitable application of test cases in a controlled and comprehensible manner. These systems have an emerging behavior and cannot entirely defined during the design phase. At this point it becomes apparent that conventional unit, integration and system tests are no longer sufficient to fully cover and validate the functional limits of Cyber-Physical System of Systems. An acceptable test coverage cannot be achieved with these methods for such systems. In this paper the authors present a use case of collision-regulation compliance checker to compare virtual (i.e. simulation-based) V&V, physical (i.e. in-situ testing) V&V and hybrid, mixed-reality V&V.

Value-based Engineering for Ethics by Design

This article gives a methodological overview of Value-based Engineering for ethics by design. It discusses key challenges and measures involved in eliciting, conceptualizing, prioritizing and respecting values in system design. Thereby it draws from software engineering, value sensitive design, design thinking and participatory design as well as from philosophical sources, especially Material Ethics of Value. The article recognizes timely challenges for Value-based Engineering, such as compatibility with agile forms of system development, responsibility in hardly controllable ecosystems of interconnected services, fearless integration of external stakeholders and the difficulty in measuring the ethicality of a system. Finally, the Value-based Engineering methodology presented here benefits from learnings collected in the IEEE P7000 standardization process as well as from a case study. P7000 has been set up by IEEE to establish a process model, which addresses ethical considerations throughout the various stages of system initiation, analysis and design.

On Mapping the Interconnections in Today’s Internet

Internet interconnections are the means by which networks exchange traffic between one another. These interconnections are typically established in facilities that have known geographic locations, and are owned and operated by so-called colocation and interconnection services providers (e.g., Equinix, CoreSite, and EdgeConneX). These previously under-studied colocation facilities and the critical role they play in solving the notoriously difficult problem of obtaining a comprehensive view of the structure and evolution of the interconnections in today’s Internet are the focus of this paper. We present $\tt {mi}^{2}$ , a new approach for m apping I nternet i nterconnections inside a given colocation facility. 1 We infer the existence of interconnections from localized traceroutes and use the Belief Propagation algorithm on a specially defined Markov Random Field graphical model to geolocate them to a target colocation facility. We evaluate $\tt {mi}^{2}$ by applying it initially to a small set of US-based colocation facilities. In the process, we compare our results against those obtained by two recently developed related techniques and discuss observed discrepancies that derive from how the different techniques determine the ownership of border routers. As part of our validation approach, we also identify drastic changes in today’s Internet interconnection ecosystem (e.g., new infrastructures in the form of “cloud exchanges” that offer new types of interconnections called “virtual private interconnections”), and discuss their wide-ranging implications for obtaining an accurate and comprehensive map of the Internet’s interconnection fabric. 1 An open-source prototype of $\tt {mi}^{2}$ is available at our project website located at https://onrg.gitlab.io/projects/mii

The Social Welfare Service Delivery System to Reinforce Sustainable Social Participation

Structural social changes and population aging are emerging as important policy issues in many countries around the world. In particular, although early retirees aged 50 or older are left behind from social welfare services and suffer from worsening social problems, policies have often only focused on elderly people aged 65 or older and vulnerable groups. Based on the theory of a welfare service delivery system, the present study analyzed the case of the Seoul 50 Plus Project in South Korea, which was established to enhance service professionalism and integrate various services to keep up with a changing environment, considering four factors: ‘integration’, ‘accessibility’, ‘systematic function distribution’, and ‘participation’. The case analysis revealed that interconnected service content, which can improve leisure activities, hobbies, and self-development, is very important along with job creation from social services to the 50 plus generation.

Service Blueprinting: A Method for Assessing Library Technologies within an Interconnected Service Ecosystem

ABSTRACTService blueprinting is a method for designing, assessing, and improving services. This article provides a practical overview of the service blueprinting process for library technology services. We begin by outlining the recent conversation around library technologies, service design, and service blueprinting. We then detail an iterative case study for the creation process of a service blueprint, followed by a discussion of the service insights and improvements that resulted from this activity. We conclude by offering a set of recommendations for creating and analyzing service blueprints. Ultimately, the service blueprint is a useful tool for understanding the operation of a service, and for situating that service within a broader and interconnected library ecosystem.

Multimodal divide: Reproduction of transport poverty in smart mobility trends

This paper makes a critical contribution to the discussion about the transition from an automobile society to a multimodal society in Western transport and mobility research, which is characterised by a flexible use of different transport options. This discussion is fuelled, in particular, by the emergence of smart mobility, in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) – e.g., the smartphone – are used to switch flexibly between new interconnected mobility services (such as carsharing, ridesharing, bikesharing, bus or train). The starting point for the scepticism towards this transition is the research on transport poverty, which problematizes social exclusions from participation in mobility due to the unequal distribution of mode options. This paper suggests a change of perspective from the real mode choice to potential/optional mode choice in order to account for this scepticism in the research on multimodal behaviours. Multioptionality is conceptualised as a necessary precondition for multimodal behaviours to achieve this change of perspective. Based on this conceptualisation, three theses result from a quantitative analysis of a data set from an area in the Rhine-Main region in Germany. The theses challenge the often-postulated potential ubiquity of multimodal behaviours: (i) Transport poverty – represented by a lack of mode options – inhibits the potential production of multimodal behaviours, particularly by socially marginalised people (low income, low education, precarious job situation, etc.). (ii) A multimodal divide describes the reproduction of transport poverty in the guise of modernisation, as the transport poor – with few mode options – also lack certain ICTs that provide central access media to smart mobility. (iii) Another (perfidious) form of social exclusion from participation in smart mobility concerns critical thinkers who avoid installing mobility applications to protect their privacy. This exclusion occurs because these apps do not have an alternative as access software to smart mobility.

Cloud-based software services delivery from the perspective of scalability

Measuring and testing the scalability and performance of cloud-based software services is critical for the delivery of such services, and the development of cloud computing. There are three interconnected Cloud-based software services’ performance aspects; both elasticity and efficiency are depending on the delivery of a sufficient level of scalability performance. In this work, we focused on testing and measuring the cloud-based software services scalability from a technical perspective. This paper uses technical scalability metrics that address both volume and quality scaling, inspired by earlier technical metrics of elasticity. We demonstrate the application of the metrics using a practical example and three demand scenarios and discuss the importance of these metrics. We show how our technical scalability metrics integrated into an earlier utility-oriented metric of scalability, in order to enable the scalability analysis from technical and production-driven perspectives. This work is related to the delivery of cloud-based software services from scalability perspective. We demonstrate our metrics by testing a cloud-based software service connecting with both AWS auto-scaling and load-balancing services. Measurements have been collected and analysis, and then been used to calculate the values of our scalability metrics.

Improvement of the enterprise infrastructure evaluation method

The object of research is the infrastructure. The main task of infrastructure is ensuring the availability of IT services and software for users and support business growth. The main disadvantage of the existing process of evaluating the infrastructure of an is identification of its main components. One of the most problematic places is the evaluation of the infrastructure to determine the impact of the introduction of a new IT service in a context of continuous changes in functional requirements of end-users. Based on the results of the analysis of the infrastructure evaluation problems and the existing variants of the term enterprise infrastructure, the main elements of the infrastructure are identified. It is proposed to define the infrastructure of the as a set of interconnected IT services, information and communication technologies integrated by the computer network of the enterprise. In the course of the research, the analysis of the basic methods of evaluating the infrastructure of the was carried out, their advantages and disadvantages were determined. As a result of the analysis of the infrastructure evaluation process, an improved method for evaluating the infrastructure of the was proposed. The proposed method, in contrast to the existing ones, combines quantitative cost evaluation and a qualitative evaluation of the components of the updated infrastructure of the enterprise, allowing a comprehensive evaluation of its infrastructure and formulating recommendations for the application of the selected IT service. The advantage of the proposed method is that it provides the opportunity to form a preliminary evaluation of the planned changes in the infrastructure of the and thus refuse to make changes in the event of their low efficiency. It is noted that any modification of the infrastructure of an leads to a change in the indicator of its quality evaluation. Consequently, the detection of the dynamics of the indicator of quality evaluation will allow controlling the quality of the infrastructure of the enterprise. The accumulated statistics makes it possible to identify trends and, on the basis of their analysis, make timely decisions about the need for changes in the infrastructure of the in order to adapt it to the new conditions. The results of the infrastructure evaluation can also be used to develop management decisions for the development and improvement of the enterprise.

Multioptionalität: Ein neuer („alter“) Terminus in der Alltagsmobilität der modernen Gesellschaft?

In this paper, the sociological term multioptionality is translated into the field of transport and mobility research. The aim is to stimulate a change of perspective from actual to potential mode choice by conceptualising multioptionality as a precondition for multimodal behaviours. The intention is to criticise the largely positive debate concerning transition from the automobile to the multimodal society. Multimodality discourse assumes a shift from the largely exclusive use of private cars to the flexible use of several transport modes. In this respect, the paper discusses the critical role of the concept of multioptionality in the transitional debate in three steps. i) The paper argues that structural developments such as interconnected mobility services legitimise the assumption of potentially "more" options, which increases opportunities for realising multimodal behaviours in everyday mobility, ii) Regressive tendencies in modern society lead to the assumption that mode options are, however, increasingly unequally distributed. In this sense, the emergence of multioptionality can be classified as a socially selective trend. iii) A concept proposal is put forward according to which the term multioptionality can be incorporated into empirical studies on multimodality in order to take a critical view of the uneven preconditions of options for the realisation of multimodal behaviours.

Cloud Computing, Big Data and the Industry 4.0 Reference Architectures

The Industry 4.0 promotes the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in manufacturing processes to obtain customized products satisfying demanding needs of new consumers. The Industry 4.0 approach transforms the traditional pyramid model of automation to a network model of interconnected services, combining operational technology (OT) with Information Technology (IT). This new model allows the creation of ecosystems enabling more flexible production processes through connecting systems and sharing data. In this context, cloud computing and big data are critical technologies for leveraging the approach. Thus, this paper analyzes cloud computing and big data under the lenses of two leading reference architectures for implementing Industry 4.0: 1) the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA), and 2) the Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0). A main contribution of this paper is to present a comparative analysis of IIRA and RAMI 4.0, discussing needs, benefits, and challenges of applying cloud computing and big data in the Industry 4.0.

Mobile broadband internet access service is a commercial mobile service, and hence must be regulated as a common carrier service

ABSTRACTThe FCC’s Restoring Internet Freedom Order reclassified mobile broadband service from a commercial mobile radio service to a private mobile radio service, thereby eliminating common carrier regulation of the service. The reclassification is an incredible assertion: that the most important public mobile service of our time is classified under statute as a private mobile service. We analyze the relevant precedent from the 1940s through 2017. We find that the Order’s lack of consideration of the relevant precedent and technology undermines its interpretation of the statute on which it relies. The Order’s reversion to the 1994 definitions of public switched network and interconnected service ignores the growth of the public switched network to include the Internet. The Order’s conclusion that the public switched telephone network and the Internet are separate non-interconnected networks is factually wrong. Critically, when interpreting interconnection, the Order ignores the fact that in order for meaningful communication to occur, the users’ devices and subscribed services must be compatible. A proper interpretation of relevant statute and precedent leads to the opposite conclusion of the Order, that mobile broadband service is a commercial mobile service. This finding lays the foundation for reinstatement of net neutrality protections on mobile broadband service.

IoT security through web application firewall

The current trend in home electronics needs to be Internet Connectivity. Internet of Things is a collection of many interconnected objects, services and devices that can communicate and share the data to achieve a common goal in different areas and applications using internet. Attacks on IoT devices are physical attacks, side channel attacks, cryptanalysis attacks, software attacks, network attacks. The network attacks does not require physical access to create a major disruption like DDos in the network. The attackers can insert themselves between us and our devices like Man in Middle Attack. A firewall acts as a barrier between a trusted network and an untrusted network. This is a proposed work to focus on the security challenges of IoT using web application firewall.

Cross border mobility: what do we need in practice?

The European Commission is proposing to provide efficient rules for cross-border operations. This article suggests improvements to the cross-border merger provisions in the Consolidated Company Law Directive 2017/1132 to provide better creditor protection and minority shareholder protection, more use of the Business Registries Interconnection Service and a simpler process in simpler cases. It suggests provisions relevant for creditor protection in the case of cross-border divisions, the process to be followed for a cross-border division and a simpler process for simpler cases. It also suggests a process for cross-border conversions and provisions to protect creditors and minority shareholders.

GTFS bus stop mapping to the OSM network

Due to budget constraints public transportation (PT) can no longer be deployed in regions where it attracts insufficient customers. Novel techniques such as demand-responsive collective transportation (DRT) are evaluated to cut costs. This requires detailed simulations that are able to predict travel demand and include trip execution. Simulating facilities acting as feeder services to time-table based PT services requires detailed and accurate information about the PT infrastructure on a network. However, there are no public data sources that combine network and PT infrastructure data with the preferred level of detail. This led to the development of a new bus stop mapping technique that combines the OpenStreetMap (OSM) and General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) open data sources, which are maintained independently. Merging the data into a single database requires alignment. Developing bus stop mapping algorithms is challenging due to (i) inaccurate location data, (ii) inconsistent data sources and (iii) the vastly interconnected PT network and services. Due to the inaccuracy in the GTFS stop locations and in the OSM network, pure geometric considerations might lead to multiple candidate solutions to map a stop to the network. The new technique handles all GTFS trips at once and operates under the assumption that PT operators minimize the total distance driven to complete all trips.

Network slicing to improve multicasting in HPC clusters

In high performance computing (HPC) resources’ extensive experiments are frequently executed. HPC resources (e.g. computing machines and switches) should be able to handle running several experiments in parallel. Typically HPC utilizes parallelization in programs, processing and data. The underlying network is seen as the only non-parallelized HPC component (i.e. no dynamic virtual slicing based on HPC jobs). In this scope we present an approach in this paper to utilize software defined networking (SDN) to parallelize HPC clusters among the different running experiments. We propose to accomplish this through two major components: A passive module (network mapper/remapper) to select for each experiment as soon as it starts the least busy resources in the network, and an SDN-HPC active load balancer to perform more complex and intelligent operations. Active load balancer can logically divide the network based on experiments’ host files. The goal is to reduce traffic to unnecessary hosts or ports. An HPC experiment should multicast, rather than broadcast to only cluster nodes that are used by the experiment. We use virtual tenant network modules in Opendaylight controller to create VLANs based on HPC experiments. In each HPC host, virtual interfaces are created to isolate traffic from the different experiments. The traffic between the different physical hosts that belong to the same experiment can be distinguished based on the VLAN ID assigned to each experiment. We evaluate the new approach using several HPC public benchmarks. Results show a significant enhancement in experiments’ performance especially when HPC cluster experiences running several heavy load experiments simultaneously. Results show also that this multi-casting approach can significantly reduce casting overhead that is caused by using a single cast for all resources in the HPC cluster. In comparison with InfiniBand networks that offer interconnect services with low latency and high bandwidth, HPC services based on SDN can provide two distinguished objectives that may not be possible with InfiniBand: The first objective is the integration of HPC with Ethernet enterprise networks and hence expanding HPC usage to much wider domains. The second objective is the ability to enable users and their applications to customize HPC services with different QoS requirements that fit the different needs of those applications and optimize the usage of HPC clusters.

Integrated care: learning between high-income, and low- and middle-income country health systems.

Over the past decade, discussion of integrated care has become more widespread and prominent in both high- and low-income health care systems (LMICs). The trend reflects the mismatch between an increasing burden of chronic disease and local health care systems which are still largely focused on hospital-based treatment of individual clinical episodes and also the long-standing proliferation of vertical donor-funded disease-specific programmes in LMICs which have disrupted horizontal, or integrated, care. Integration is a challenging concept to define, in part because of its multiple dimensions and varied scope: from integrated clinical care for individual patients to broader systems integration—or linkage—involving a wide range of interconnected services (e.g. social services and health care). In this commentary, we compare integrated care in high- and lower-income countries. Although contexts may differ significantly between these settings, there are many common features of how integration has been understood and common challenges in its implementation. We discuss the different approaches to, scope of, and impacts of, integration including barriers and facilitators to the processes of implementation. With the burden of disease becoming more alike across settings, we consider what gains there could be from comparative learning between these settings which have constituted two separate strands of research until now.

Efficiency Analysis of Integrated Public Hospital Networks in Outpatient Internal Medicine.

Healthcare systems are evolving towards a complex network of interconnected services due to the increasing costs and the increasing expectations for high service levels. It is evidenced in the literature the importance of implementing management techniques and sophisticated methods to improve the efficiency of healthcare systems, especially in emerging economies. This paper proposes an integrated collaboration model between two public hospitals to reach the reduction of weighted average lead time in outpatient internal medicine department. A strategic framework based on value stream mapping and collaborative practices has been developed in real case study settled in Colombia.

Towards the encapsulation and decentralisation of OKD-MES services within embedded devices

Traditionally, the resources of embedded devices which are employed for process control at shop floors were resource constrained. However, advances in embedded system technologies permit the enhancement of the processing and storage capabilities of embedded devices. Therefore, semantic descriptions of manufacturing systems can now be hosted and computed at the device level. This fact permits the creation of a decentralised solution for controlling processes at the lowest level of the manufacturing enterprises and the reduction in the time and effort requirements for the configuration and information exchange. The eScop project presented the Open Knowledge-Driven Manufacturing Execution System (OKD-MES) solution, which enables monitoring and controlling production systems openly and allows runtime re-configurability of interconnected industrial equipment and services. This research work presents how part of the OKD-MES functionality can be handled at lower level. More precisely, the OKD-MES representation and management of knowledge can be decentralised and handled at the shop floor level, where the industrial machines are connected to devices that are capable of controlling the execution of processes. The main objective of this paper is to describe a decentralised vision for the OKD-MES framework, which is a centric solution in terms of knowledge management. Moreover, the article also discusses some of the advantages to be gained from decentralising the management of knowledge model semantic descriptions.