Reference Software Architecture Research Articles

Maintenance architecture design of equipment operation and maintenance system based on digital twins

The digital twins process of equipment operation and maintenance involves massive data and complex business logic. Through data awareness of equipment and workshop environment. According to the characteristics of equipment operation and maintenance, the data characteristics and requirements are analysed, an equipment operation and maintenance management system based on the micro-service framework is proposed, a set of equipment operation and maintenance digital twins are designed and a general reference software architecture is designed and by checking the underlying in-heap pattern reduces high-impact portions of memory to provide accurate follow-up complex digital twins modelling provides the architectural foundation.

A reference architecture for social robots

Social robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalized interaction with their users. Moreover, in this context recurrent software design issues such as ensuring interoperability, improving reusability and customizability of software components also arise. Designing and implementing social robotic software architectures is a time-intensive activity requiring multi-disciplinary expertise: this makes it difficult to rapidly develop, customize, and personalize robotic solutions. These challenges may be mitigated at design time by choosing certain architectural styles, implementing specific architectural patterns and using particular technologies. Leveraging on our experience in the MARIO project, in this paper we propose a series of principles that social robots may benefit from. These principles lay also the foundations for the design of a reference software architecture for social robots. The goal of this work is twofold: (i) Establishing a reference architecture whose components are unambiguously characterized by an ontology thus allowing to easily reuse them in order to implement and personalize social robots; (ii) Introducing a series of standardized software components for social robots architecture (mostly relying on ontologies and semantic technologies) to enhance interoperability, to improve explainability, and to favor rapid prototyping.

Three decades of software reference architectures: A systematic mapping study

Software reference architectures have played an essential role in software systems development due to the possibility of knowledge reuse. Although increasingly adopted by industry, these architectures are not yet completely understood. This work presents a panorama on existing software reference architectures, characterizing them according to their context, goals, perspectives, application domains, design approaches, and maturity, as well as the industry involvement for their construction. For this, we planned and conducted a systematic mapping study. During last decade, the number of reference architectures in very diverse application domains has increased, resulting from efforts of industry, academia, and through their collaborations. Academic reference architectures are oriented to facilitate the reuse of architectural and domain knowledge. The industry has focused on architectures for standardization with certain maturity level. However, the great amount of architectures studied in this work have been designed without following a systematic process, and they lack the maturity to be used in real software projects. Further investigations can be oriented to gathering empirical evidences, from different sources than academic data libraries, that allow to understand how references architectures have been constructed, utilized, and maintained during the whole software life-cycle.

Integral Support Predictive Platform for Industry 4.0

Currently, companies in the industrial sector are focusing their efforts on incorporating the advances contained in the Industry 4.0 model, to continue competing in an increasingly high-tech market. These advances, in addition to productivity, have a remarkable impact on the working environment of workers and on the measures adopted to maintain a healthy workspace. Thus, for example, there are projects to develop augmented reality technologies for maintenance and industrial training, advanced modelling tools for additive manufacturing, or Big Data analysis platforms for industrial data. However, the solutions designed are too specific to a particular industry problem or the platforms proposed are too generalist and not easily adaptable to the industries. This work seeks to provide a reference software architecture at the service of the connected industry that allows the provision of new capacities for process optimisation, predictive maintenance and real-time visualisation, integrating all the relevant information generated by the existing systems, incorporating new sources of data resulting from the digital society, and ensuring future compatibility with the new sources of information, solutions and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices that may be implemented.

Blockchain anchored supply chain automation

Increasing globalization, e-commerce usage, and social awareness are leading to increased consumer demand for variety, value, convenience, immediacy, verifiable authenticity and provenance, ethical materials sourcing and manufacturing, regulatory compliance, and services after sales. Fulfilling this increased complexity of consumer demand has required supply chains to evolve into multienterprise networks with numerous flow paths in production, merchandising, and fulfillment involving many organizational/institutional handoffs, to effectively manage a large number of complex products with shorter life cycles and high transaction volumes. The supply chain management models of today place higher demands on automation and require a transition from the traditional paradigm of planning followed by long-loop execution for a handful of segments to a paradigm of managing a portfolio of end-to-end instrumented data-rich microsegmented supply chains that are monitored and adjusted in near real time. These essential aspects and challenges of supply chain management require the supporting information technology to also evolve. In this paper, we propose a novel reference software architecture to address the complex requirements of modern supply chains that also integrates blockchain into several layers of the stack. We present several examples where this reference architecture is applicable, and then demonstrate through a use case in production that integrating blockchain technology helps with providing visibility, documenting provenance, and allowing permissioned data access to facilitate the automation of many high-volume tasks such as reconciliations, payments, and settlements.

Benefits and drawbacks of software reference architectures: A case study

ContextSoftware Reference Architectures (SRAs) play a fundamental role for organizations whose business greatly depends on the efficient development and maintenance of complex software applications. However, little is known about the real value and risks associated with SRAs in industrial practice. ObjectiveTo investigate the current industrial practice of SRAs in a single company from the perspective of different stakeholders. MethodAn exploratory case study that investigates the benefits and drawbacks perceived by relevant stakeholders in nine SRAs designed by a multinational software consulting company. ResultsThe study shows the perceptions of different stakeholders regarding the benefits and drawbacks of SRAs (e.g., both SRA designers and users agree that they benefit from reduced development costs; on the contrary, only application builders strongly highlighted the extra learning curve as a drawback associated with mastering SRAs). Furthermore, some of the SRA benefits and drawbacks commonly highlighted in the literature were remarkably not mentioned as a benefit of SRAs (e.g., the use of best practices). Likewise, other aspects arose that are not usually discussed in the literature, such as higher time-to-market for applications when their dependencies on the SRA are managed inappropriately. ConclusionsThis study aims to help practitioners and researchers to better understand real SRAs projects and the contexts where these benefits and drawbacks appeared, as well as some SRA improvement strategies. This would contribute to strengthening the evidence regarding SRAs and support practitioners in making better informed decisions about the expected SRA benefits and drawbacks. Furthermore, we make available the instruments used in this study and the anonymized data gathered to motivate others to provide similar evidence to help mature SRA research and practice.

Reference software architecture for improving modifiability of personalised web applications - a controlled experiment

Although web personalisation has been studied for the last two decades, there remains a need to address current challenges: context-awareness and the inclusion in a business environment. The wide variety of mobile devices and their continuous technological evolution demands the permanent development of new personalisation strategies. Additionally, two factors complicate the inclusion of personalised web applications in a business environment: the frequent change of personalisation strategies for each business, and the technical complexity to integrate these strategies in a short time. We propose a reference architecture as a tool to favour their modifiability. Moreover, our proposal facilitates the opportunity for enterprises to adopt web-personalised systems into their business as a strategic tool. A controlled experiment validates our approach; we compare five change scenarios that are implemented under two architectures: experimental and control architecture. We used change scenarios derived from a real Brazilian e-commerce enterprise.

Enabling chain-wide transparency in meat supply chains based on the EPCIS global standard and cloud-based services

Transparency in meat supply chains is necessary to guarantee the safety, quality and trust of consumers in meat products. However, transparency systems currently in place are often not adequate for sharing transparency data among food operators, providing consumers accurate transparency information, or enabling authorities to respond quickly and effectively in cases of food safety emergencies. Due to major meat crises and scandals the meat sector has in this respect attracted substantial attention. In this paper we identify regulatory, business, consumer and technological requirements for meat supply chain transparency systems and present a reference software architecture that will guide the realisation of these systems. The reference architecture is characterized by three main elements: the EPCIS standard for tracking and tracing, cloud-based realisation of transparency systems, and the provision of transparency systems as services by third-party transparency service providers (3pTSPs). Usage scenarios are presented to explain how the different types of meat supply chain actors can use transparency systems that are based on the architecture.

Towards guidelines for building a business case and gathering evidence of software reference architectures in industry

Software reference architectures are becoming widely adopted by organizations that need to support the design and maintenance of software applications of a shared domain. For organizations that plan to adopt this architecture-centric approach, it becomes fundamental to know the return on investment and to understand how software reference architectures are designed, maintained, and used. Unfortunately, there is little evidence-based support to help organizations with these challenges. We have conducted action research in an industry-academia collaboration between the GESSI research group and everis, a multinational IT consulting firm based in Spain. The results from such collaboration are being packaged in order to create guidelines that could be used in similar contexts as the one of everis. The main result of this paper is the construction of empirically-grounded guidelines that support organizations to decide on the adoption of software reference architectures and to gather evidence to improve RA-related practices. The created guidelines could be used by other organizations outside of our industry-academia collaboration. With this goal in mind, we describe the guidelines in detail for their use.

A Reference Software Architecture to Support Unmanned Aircraft Integration in the National Airspace System

This paper outlines an architecture that provides data and software services to enable a set of Unmanned Aircraft (UA) platforms to operate in a wide range of air domains which may include terminal, en route, oceanic and tactical. The architecture allows a collection of command, control, situational awareness, conflict detection and avoidance, and data management elements to be composed in order to meet different requirement sets as defined by specific UA platforms, users, and operating regimes. The architecture discussed is based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with open standards on the interfaces between elements. Services may include common situational awareness, sense and avoid, weather, data management and flight plan information. Service contracts specify quality of service, interface specifications, service description metadata, security provisions, and governance. Pieces of the architecture have been implemented by MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the form of a Sense and Avoid (SAA) testbed that provides some of the core services. This paper describes the general architecture and a SAA testbed implementation that begins to realize that architecture and quantifies the benefits. The proposed architecture is not directed at a specific program but is intended to provide guidance and offer architectural best practices.

A framework for analysis and design of software reference architectures

Context A software reference architecture is a generic architecture for a class of systems that is used as a foundation for the design of concrete architectures from this class. The generic nature of reference architectures leads to a less defined architecture design and application contexts, which makes the architecture goal definition and architecture design non-trivial steps, rooted in uncertainty. Objective The paper presents a structured and comprehensive study on the congruence between context, goals, and design of software reference architectures. It proposes a tool for the design of congruent reference architectures and for the analysis of the level of congruence of existing reference architectures. Method We define a framework for congruent reference architectures. The framework is based on state of the art results from literature and practice. We validate our framework and its quality as analytical tool by applying it for the analysis of 24 reference architectures. The conclusions from our analysis are compared to the opinions of experts on these reference architectures documented in literature and dedicated communication. Results Our framework consists of a multi-dimensional classification space and of five types of reference architectures that are formed by combining specific values from the multi-dimensional classification space. Reference architectures that can be classified in one of these types have better chances to become a success. The validation of our framework confirms its quality as a tool for the analysis of the congruence of software reference architectures. Conclusion This paper facilitates software architects and scientists in the inception, design, and application of congruent software reference architectures. The application of the tool improves the chance for success of a reference architecture.

Content Design Patterns for Game-Based Learning

To address the lack of documented best practices in the development of digital educational games, the authors have previously proposed a reference software architecture. One of its components is the rule system specifying learning and gameplay content. It contains quest, player character, non-player character, environment, and item rules. Documented content design patterns can assist in the authoring of such rules. This paper reports on four studies that have collected quest, character, environment, and item design patterns by analysing a variety of media. A selection of the results is presented, as well as a discussion of how the patterns can be used in designing educational game content.

A reference software architecture for the development of industrial automation high-level applications in the petroleum industry

This paper presents a reference software architecture for the development of enterprise industrial automation applications for the oil industry. Its design accounts for criteria such as interoperability, portability, scalability, availability, security, use of legacy systems and maintainability. The architecture includes a technological platform that consists of a J2EE application server, a failover management system and, optionally, a server farm with an IP redirection-based load balancer. Also part of the architecture are infrastructure elements such as: (i) process data sources (PDSs) that offer an uniform interface for the synchronous and asynchronous access to SCADA or similar systems, (ii) field event generators (FEGs) that produce asynchronous notifications corresponding to the occurrence of pre-established conditions in the industrial processes, and (iii) business entities (BEs) that allow the handling of persistent information of real business entities, independently of the persistence mechanism used. Finally, its effectiveness is verified through the development of a prototype application for the optimization of the duration of well production tests.

Engineering software reuse for on‐board embedded real‐time systems

AbstractThe dimensions of concern to ambitious reuse initiatives largely exceed the provision of desired functionalities. A domain‐specific blend of functional, technical and quality considerations determines the reuse potential of software reuse assets. In a recent project we realized considerable reuse dividends from coupling the definition of a reference software architecture and of an associated set of standard interfaces with the selection of a powerful computational model equipped with reuse‐geared enabling technology. In this paper we present our engineering approach to the project and show how it earned us a good balance between the preservation of predictability and scalability and the maximization of the reuse objective. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.