Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly
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Selected Topics in Management and Modeling of Complex Systems: Editorial Introduction to Issue 15 of CSIMQ
Get PDFThe 15th issue of CSIMQ presents articles discussing management and modeling aspects of informatics research. The provided models and their application help to understand the domains under discussion. The models range from socio-technical models over business process models to models of usable graphical interfaces. Readers might find a lot of interesting aspects in this broad spectrum of management and modeling research. The published articles support management and modeling of complex systems in different ways on different levels of abstraction. The research results reflected in the articles can help to fill knowledge gaps and facilitate decision making in project management, business process management, very complex domain analysis, and data-intensive cyber-physical systems engineering
Decomposition and Conceptualization to Support System Dynamics Behavior Modeling
Get PDFWith the increasing need for data-based decision making, social systems and the ecosystems; practitioners and decision makers need guidance in their decision making, as is offered by data-based models and a systematic generation of simulation tools. Overtly, relations between data and practice have been under-conceptualized. Data modelers and decision makers tend to lack a mutual understanding of each other’s knowledge systems which has led to huge knowledge gaps. Assimilation of modeling methods therefore is vital. Modeling methods use a specific way of thinking, rules and directions on how to model different aspects of systems. These rules and directions are what we refer to as constructs. Conceptualizing model relations and formulations requires significant domain knowledge and understanding of the constructs. In this article, we use the decomposition mechanism to better conceptualize and understand the System Dynamics (SD) model behavior, and show how using a natural language based domain modeling method (Object-Role Modeling, ORM) helps in dealing with complex SD models. Through applying the decomposition mechanism, we are able to better understand the underlying concepts of the stock and flow diagram and update behaviors of ORM objects. To achieve this, we use examples and an SD model derived from a case “Intrapartum process in Ugandan hospitals” to study the object behaviors. The main results of this article include: a theoretical founding of integrating ORM with SD; quantitative analysis at the level of ORM reasoning; and transformation rules from ORM into SD
Selected Topics on Research Challenges in Information Science: Editorial Introduction to Issue 17 of CSIMQ
Get PDFThis thematic issue of the Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly journal is dedicated to Information Science. It is a selection of the extended best papers presented at the 12th edition of the International IEEE Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS’2018). The articles presented in this thematic issue contain at least 30% new material compared to the initial papers.The RCIS conference covers a wide spectrum of topics in the information science field: information search and discovery, requirement engineering, product lines, smart cities and Internet of Things, business processes, recommendation and prediction, security, social computing and Social Network Analysis, Human-Computer Interaction and systems engineering.After an additional reviewing process, the articles which have been finally selected present contributions of different types to the field of information science: models, architectures, frameworks, and surveys
Smart Data for Genomic Information Systems: the SILE Method
Get PDFDuring the last two decades, data generated by Next Generation Sequencing Technologies have revolutionized our understanding of human biology and improved the study on how changes (variations) in the DNA are involved in the risk of suffering a certain disease. A huge amount of genomic data is publicly available and frequently used by the research community in order to extract meaningful and reliable gene-disease relationships. However, the management of this exponential growth of data has become a challenge for biologists. Under such a Big Data problem perspective, they are forced to delve into a lake of complex data spread in over thousand heterogeneous repositories, represented in multiple formats and with different levels of quality; but when data are used to solve a concrete problem only a small part of that “data lake” is really significant; this is what we call the “smart” data perspective. By using conceptual models and the principles of data quality management, adapted to the genomic domain, we propose a systematic approach called SILE method to move from a Big Data to a Smart Data perspective. The aim of this approach is to populate an Information System with genomic data which are accessible, informative and actionable enough to extract valuable knowledge
Business Processes Modeling Recommender Systems: User Expectations and Empirical Evidence
Get PDFRecommender systems are in widespread use in many areas, especially electronic commerce solutions. In this contribution, we apply recommender functionalities to business process modeling and investigate their potential for supporting process modeling. To do so, we have implemented two prototypes, demonstrated them at a major fair and collected user feedback. After analysis of the feedback, we have confronted the findings with the results of the experiment. Our results indicate that fairgoers expect increased modeling speed as the key advantage and completeness of models as the most unlikely advantage. This stands in contrast to an initial experiment revealing that modelers, in fact, increase the completeness of their models when adequate knowledge is presented while time consumption is not necessarily reduced. We explain possible causes of this mismatch and finally hypothesize on two “sweet spots” of process modeling recommender systems
Evaluating Company’s Readiness for Adopting Product Line Engineering: a Second Evaluation Round
Get PDFProduct lines have emerged in the software industry as an attractive approach to perform planned reuse of code. Nevertheless, a product line solution is not appropriate in all cases and also requires some conditions to be implemented successfully. The literature offers several contributions regarding the adoption of product lines. However, only a few of them are able to support decision-makers in making informed decisions in favor of or against following this approach. We proposed APPLIES, a framework for evaluating the organization’s motivation and preparation for adopting product lines. This article presents the second version of the APPLIES framework as well as the second iteration of the evaluation of this approach. This evaluation consisted of (i) a workshop with a practitioner who had experience in adopting the product line production approach and; (ii) a review of the content by five product line experts. The results obtained from the evaluation resulted in modifications to the framework content, mainly to simplify the statements and eliminate redundant elements. Also, we detected new functionalities and modifications that we expect to be resolved in the following evaluation iterations. Further evaluations and improvements are needed to mature the framework. Moreover, we expect to incorporate APPLIES into a process that covers the aspects that a company must consider before deciding to adopt this production paradigm
Using a Socio-Technical Model of a Global Software Development Project for Facilitating Risk Management and Improving the Project Structure
Get PDFAny global software development project needs to deal with distances – geographical, cultural, time zone, etc. – between the groups of developers engaged in the project. To successfully manage the risks caused by such distances, there is a need to explicate and present the distances in a form suitable for manual or semi-automatic analysis, the goal of which is to detect potential risks and find ways of mitigating them. The article presents a technique of modeling a global software development project suitable for such analysis. The project is modeled as a complex socio-technical system that consists of functional components connected to each other through output-input relationships. The components do not coincide with the organizational units of the project, and their teams can be distributed through the geographical and organizational landscape of the project. The modeling technique helps to explicate and represent various kinds of distances between the functional components to determine which of them constitute risk factors. The technique was developed during two case studies, of which the second is used for presenting and demonstrating the new modeling technique in the article
Effort Estimation in BPMS Migration
Get PDFUsually Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) are highly integrated in the IT of organizations and are at the core of their business. Thus, migrating from one BPMS solution to another is not a common task. However, there are forces that are pushing organizations to perform this step, e.g. maintenance costs of legacy BPMS or the need for additional functionality. Before the actual migration, the risk and the effort must be evaluated. This work provides a framework for effort estimation regarding the technical aspects of BPMS migration. The framework provides questions for BPMS comparison and an effort evaluation schema. The applicability of the framework is evaluated based on a simplified BPMS migration scenario
The Role of Top Management Commitment in Enterprise Architecture Development in Governmental Organizations
Get PDFGovernmental organizations adopt Enterprise Architecture (EA) not only to enhance their performance and efficiency but also to move toward e-government implementation. The article at hand investigates the EA development obstacles in governmental organizations. An interpretivist paradigm using the Grounded Theory Methodology was selected to carry out this study. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 9 governmental organizations in Iran. In total, 17 obstacles were identified. This study revealed the precedence in addressing EA development obstacles and top management commitment category was identified as a category that has the highest impact on the EA projects. It was realized that the commitment that top management levels of the organizations show toward EA development projects, motivates employees to effectively engage with the projects. In addition, a committed top manager assigns adequate resources to the EA project in order to prepare the infrastructure of the company. In this study, government and politics category appeared to be a category of external obstacles that affects most of the other categories directly or indirectly. This study contributes to industry and academia by investigating the EA development obstacles
Time-Dependent Influence Measurement in Citation Networks
Get PDFIn every scientific discipline, researchers face two common dilemmas: where to find bleeding-edge papers and where to publish their own articles. We propose to answer these questions by looking at the influence between communities, e.g. conferences or journals. The influential conferences are those which papers are heavily cited by other conferences, i.e. they are visible, significant and inspiring. For the task of finding such influential places-to-publish, we introduce a Running Influence model that aims to discover pairwise influence between communities and evaluate the overall influence of each considered community. We have taken into consideration time aspects such as intensity of papers citations over time and difference of conferences starting years. The community influence analysis is tested on real-world data of Computer Science conferences