1,721,126 research outputs found
Making Enterprise Information Systems Resilient Against Disruptive Events: A Conceptual View
No full textEnterprise Information Systems (EIS) are designed to deal with normal variability in their inputs and data. Empowered by CONTEXT-AWARENESS, some EIS even count on sensors and/or data analytics for capturing changes outside of the system. Nevertheless, context-awareness would often fail when EIS are affected by (large-scale) disruptive events, such as disasters, virus outbreaks, or military conflicts. Hence, in the current paper, we take a step forward, by considering context-awareness for disruptive events. We combine context-awareness with risk management techniques, such as FMECA and FTA, that are useful for defining and mitigating risk events. To avoid having to define the likelihood for such very-low-probability disruptive risks, we use CONSEQUENCE-BASED RISK MANAGEMENT rather than traditional risk management. We augment this approach with the context-awareness paradigm, delivering a contribution that is two-fold: (i) We propose context-awareness-related measures and consequence-based-risk-management-related measures, to address disruptive events; (ii) We reflect this in a method featuring the application of context-awareness and risk management for designing robust and resilient EIS.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Policy Analysi
Enforcing context-awareness and privacy-by-design in the specification of information systems
No full textNetworked physical devices, vehicles, home appliances, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and connectivity, allow for run-time acquisition of user data. This in turn can enable information systems which capture the “current” user state and act accordingly. The use of this data would result in context-aware applications that get fueled by user data (and environmental data) to adapt their behavior. Yet the use of data is often restricted by privacy regulations and norms; for example, the location of a person cannot be shared without given consent. In this paper we propose a design approach that allows for weaving context-awareness and privacy-by-design into the specification of information systems. This is to be done since the very early stages of the software development, while the enterprise needs are captured (and understood) and the software features are specified on that basis. In addition to taking into account context-awareness and privacy-sensitivity these two aspects will be balanced, especially if they are conflicting. The presented approach extends the “Software Derived from Business Components” (SDBC) approach. We partially demonstrate our proposed way of modeling, by means of a case example featuring land border security. Our proposed way of modeling would allow developers to smoothly reflect context and privacy features in the application design, supported by methodological guidelines that span over the enterprise modeling and software specification. Those features are captured as technology-independent societal demands and are in the end reflected in technology-specific (software) solutions. Traceability between the two is possible as well as re-use of modeling constructs.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Information and Communication Technolog
Incorporating Trust into Context-Aware Services
Full text linkEnabling technologies concerning hardware, networking, and sensing have inspired the development of context-aware IT services. These adapt to the situation of the user, such that service provisioning is specific to his/her corresponding needs. We have seen successful applications of context-aware services in healthcare, well-being, and smart homes. It is, however, always a question what level of trust the users can place in the fulfillment of their needs by a certain IT-service. Trust has two major variants: policy-based, where a reputed institution provides guarantees about the service, and reputation-based, where other users of the service provide insight into the level of fulfillment of user needs. Services that are accessible to a small and known set of users typically use policy-based trust only. Services that have a wide community of users can use reputation-based trust, policy-based trust, or a combination. For both types of trust, however, context awareness poses a problem. Policy-based trust works within certain boundaries, outside of which no guarantees can be given about satisfying the user needs, and context awareness can push a service out of these boundaries. For reputation-based trust, the fact that users in a certain context were adequately served, does not mean that the same would happen when the service adapts to another user’s needs. In this paper we consider the incorporation of trust into context-aware services, by proposing an ontological conceptualization for user-system trust. Analyzing service usage data for context parameters combined with the ability to fulfill user needs can help in eliciting components for the ontology.Policy Analysi
Towards a norm-driven design of context-aware e-health applications
Full text linkIn this paper, we explore the usefulness of elaborating process models with norms, especially focusing on the Norm Analysis Method (NAM) as an elaboration tool that can be combined with a process modeling tool, such as Petri Net (PN). The PN-NAM combination has been particularly considered in the paper in relation to a challenge that concerns the design of context-aware applications, namely the challenge of specifying and elaborating complex behaviors that may include alternative (context-driven) processes (we assume that a user context space can be defined and that each context state within this space corresponds to an alternative application service behavior). Hence, the main contribution of our paper comprises an adaptability-driven methodological and modeling support to the design of context-aware applications; modeling guidelines are proposed, considered together with corresponding modeling tools (in particular PN and NAM), and partially illustrated by means of an e-Health-related example. Given the multi-disciplinary nature of the e-Health domain, it is expected that the current research will be useful for it. In particular, e-Health system developers might benefit from the relevant methodological and modeling support, proposed in the paper
Improving Resilience Using Drones for Effective Monitoring after Disruptive Events
No full textWe observe a world of increasing anxiety due to natural and man-made disasters, pandemics, andmilitary conflicts. Such disruptive events lead to decreased infrastructure and personnel availability; still, infrastructure and personnel are essential for keeping society running, and for addressing the effects of disruptions. We argue that drone technology could provide monitoring/logistics services that can help in addressing such needs. This paper focuses on the monitoring function whichcan provide situational awareness to decision makers after such a crisis. Drones are less dependenton nearby area infrastructure and can observe affected regions from above. Those are key advantagescompared to other solutions. Still, drones are dependent on communication services and ground operators. Therefore, we need drone solutions that are less dependent on the availability of local infrastructure and people. Several conceptual solutions to reach this independence, based on recent developments in drone technology, are explicitly discussed in the current paper and confronted with therequirements and boundary conditions posed by disruptive events. Validating such solutions in real emergency situations is left for future work.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Policy Analysi
On the design of context-aware applications
Full text linkIgnoring the dynamic context of users may lead to suboptimal applications. Hence, context-aware applications have emerged, that are aware of the end-user context situation (for example, “user is at home", “user is travelling"geen id), and provide the desirable services corresponding to the situation at hand. Developing context aware applications is not a trivial task nevertheless and the following related challenges have been identified: (i) Properly deciding what physical context to ‘sense’ and what high-level context information to pass to an application, and bridging the gap between raw context data and high level context information; (ii) Deciding which end-user context situations to consider and which to ignore; (iii) Modeling context-aware application behavior including ‘switching’ between alternative application behaviors. In this paper, we have furthered related work on context-aware application design, by explicitly discussing each of the mentioned interrelated challenges and proposing corresponding solution directions, supported by small-scale illustrative examples. It is expected that this contribution would usefully support the current efforts to improve context-aware application development
On the Context-Aware Servicing of User Needs:Extracting and Managing Context Information Supported by Rules and Predictions
Full text linkThe desired context-aware servicing of user needs assumes adequately capturing the user situation, which in turn is often done using sensors. In most cases, the sensor-driven extraction of context information is done counting on pre-defined rules that concern Boolean expressions directly referring to data values for the sake of evaluating the user situation. Further, sensors would be of limited use when considering context indicators (such as intentions) that are not “physical”. Inspired by those challenges, we address the training-data-driven extraction of context information, opting for considering Bayesian Modeling and particularly the Naïve Bayesian Classification Approach because it is: (i) effective as it concerns predictions that are based on training data; (ii) rarely misleading in comparatively “simple” cases, which holds for most real-life cases, as opposed to natural-science-related cases where numerous possible outcomes may apply to any situation; (iii) easily applicable in terms of hardware and software capabilities. Hence, we study the adequacy and usefulness of applying probabilistic approaches together with rules, in establishing and managing the extraction of context information that in turn is needed for the appropriate context-aware servicing of user needs.</p
Combining Context-Awareness and Data Analytics in Support of Drone Technology
Full text linkDrones performing an autonomous mission need to adapt to frequent changes in their environment. In other words, they have to be context-aware. Most current context-aware systems are designed to distinguish between situations that have been pre-defined in terms of anticipated situation types and corresponding desired behavior types. This only partially benefits drone technology because many types of drone missions can be characterized by situations that are hard to predict at design time. We suggest combining context-awareness and data analytics for a better situation coverage. This could be achieved by using performance data (generated at real-time) as training data for supervised machine learning – it would allow relating situations to appropriate behaviors that a drone could follow. The conceptual ideas are presented in this position paper while validation is left for future work.</p
Towards Well-Founded and Richer Context-Awareness Conceptual Models
Full text linkWe observe that context-aware systems currently developed in one domain or another are mostly technology-driven, and not so much user-centric. They are often not based on a thorough analysis of the effects they produce when interacting with their context, especially regarding the contribution of these effects to user needs. We argue that a conceptual framework is needed to support such analyses. In this paper we identify the concepts necessary to define important structural aspects of a context-aware system and its context, and to formulate generalizations about effects of the interaction of the context-aware system and its context related to user needs. Using this conceptual framework, we classify context-aware systems in terms of the kinds of context assumptions that we can make at design time, and we discuss several threats to validity of a context-aware system. We believe that the proposed conceptual framework can help to better assess the utility concerning a context-aware system design. We use various examples of context-aware applications to illustrate our ideas.</p
A Comparative Study of Methods for Deciding to Open Data
No full textGovernments may have their own business processes to decide to open data, which might be supported by decision-making tools. At the same time, analyzing potential benefits, costs, risks, and other effects-adverse of disclosing data are challenging. In the literature, there are various methods to analyze the potential advantages and disadvantages of opening data. Nevertheless, none of them provides discussion into the comparative studies in terms of strengths and weaknesses. In this study, we compare three methods for disclosing data, namely Bayesian-belief networks, Fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making, and Decision tree analysis. The comparative study is a mechanism for further studying the development of a knowledge domain by performing a feature-by-feature at the same level of functionalities. The result of this research shows that the methods have different strengths and weaknesses. The Bayesian-belief Networks has higher accuracy in comparison, and able to construct the causal relationships of the selected variable under uncertainties. Yet, this method is more resource intensive. This study can contribute to the decision-makers and respected researchers to a better comprehend and provide recommendation related to the three methods comparison.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Information and Communication Technolog
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