Anshuman B. Saxena

Requirements modeling in SEAM: The example of a car crash management system

This paper presents how business and IT requirements are captured with the Systemic Enterprise Architecture Methodology (SEAM). The method is applied to the Car Crash Management System (CMS) - Software Product Line (SPL) case study. The existing business situation is analyzed. We identify the problems and list relevant solutions. We select one of these solutions for which we define the business and the IT requirements. We then present the two components of SEAM used in this paper, goal-belief and behavior modeling. We end the paper by presenting the systemic foundations of SEAM.

From composites to service systems: The role of emergence in service design

Service Design is an engineering endeavor to enrich some aspect of the real world through a man-made artifact. Systems approach to modeling reality is particularly relevant to Service Design as it seeks to explain reality as a composition of functional observations. Nevertheless, its adoption varies from casual interpretations of interconnectedness to citations of non-deducible causality. To establish Systems approach firmly within the domain of Service Design, it is important to provide an unambiguous characterization of the nature of composition that a Systemic view entails. Further, such characterization should be amenable to the development of a formal framework for specifying Services. In this paper, we take a cognitive approach to composition and highlight the difference between composites as structure-unifying integrated-wholes and composites as emergence-revealing systems. We then translate this characterization into a set of visual semantics for expressing a service-oriented view of observed reality.

A Situated and Embodied Approach to Service Design

The two basic questions that every service-designer has to consider are - what features to include in a service, and who all to engage in the implementation of these features? We demonstrate that the true semantics of the value, which a service aims to create for its adopter, resides in the social and bodily being of the adopter. Situating the adopter in her interactions with the external-world helps identify the different responsibilities that the adopter, and other entities occurring in that situation, can undertake in realizing the service. At the same time, embodying the adopter helps acknowledge the role of bodily states in mediating the effect a situation has in terms of the appreciation it invokes at the adopter. We provide a set of four force-dynamic patterns that model this mediation, thereby helping service-designers identify situations that best implement the features required to invoke the desired appreciation.

A Situated Approach to Systems Based Modeling of Services

Situatedness refers to the imagery that a conceptualization invokes. The image, as a whole, provides the context for interpreting the relevance of the categories revealed in the image. At a basic level of conceptualization, the conceptual relevance of an observed category can be historically inspired, empirically informed, rationally thought, or pragmatically focused. From a service-design perspective, the interest in a given phenomenon is limited to its functional organization, which requires taking an exclusively pragmatic view of the world. In this paper, we propose a role-based approach to modeling categories, which requires service-designers assign functional and non-functional roles to categories by making explicit their interpretation of the conceptual relevance of these categories. Staying aware of the design choices will help the service-designer develop an informed model of observed reality, leading to better alignment between the scope and the purpose of the inquiry.

On the Situated Semantics of Service Systems (Short Paper)

Service System refers to the group of entities that work together to implement a service. An important challenge for the service designer is to organize her conceptualization of the service in a way that helps her identify the functional components required to engineer the service. At a basic level of conceptualization, the functional relevance of an observed category can be historically inspired, empirically informed, rationally thought, or pragmatically focused. From a service-design perspective, the interest in a given phenomenon is limited to its functional organization, which requires taking an exclusively pragmatic view of the world. In this paper, we propose a role-based approach to modeling categories, which requires service-designers assign functional and non-functional roles to categories by making explicit their interpretation of the conceptual relevance of these categories. Staying aware of the design choices will help the service-designer develop an informed model of observed reality, leading to better alignment between the scope and the purpose of the design activity.

A developing world perspective on the design of wireless enabled humanitarian relief services

In the absence of adequate state support, societies in the developing world have long relied on community support for humanitarian relief. Such community networks provide a readily available platform for delivery of humanitarian relief services. Wireless technologies can play an important role in enabling humanitarian relief applications that strengthen these community networks by facilitating the flow of information amongst the community members. Nevertheless, given the welfare nature of the activity, these applications face some strict design constraints that emerge from the larger socio-political-economic landscape. This paper presents a systematic approach to unearth the requirements that these domains may impose on the design of wireless enabled information and communication oriented humanitarian relief services, wiHRS. We describe SEAM, a systems thinking inspired conceptual framework that provides the theoretical underpinnings of the modeling apparatus used in this paper. As an example, we demonstrate the relevance of this framework to the design of wiHRS by analyzing the economics of enhanced information flow in community networks and how this analysis can be exploited to reflect on the financial viability of such services by, say, soliciting support from financial risk management instruments like insurance schemes.

A Systemic Approach to Multi-Party Relationship Modeling

Socio-economic systems exist in a wide variety of activity domains and are composed of multiple stakeholder groups. These groups pursue objectives which are often entirely motivated from within their local context. Domain specificities in the form of institutional design, for example the de-regulation of Public Utility systems, can further fragment this context. Nevertheless, for these systems to be viable, a management subsystem that maintains a holistic view of the system is required. From a Systems perspective, this highlights the need to invest in methods that capture the interactions between the different stakeholders of the system. It is the understanding of the individual interactions that can help piece together a holistic view of the system thereby enabling system level discourse. In this paper we present a modeling technique that models industry interactions as a multi-party value realization process and takes a Systems approach in analyzing them. Every interaction is analyzed both from outside – system as a black box and from within – system as a white box. The design patterns that emerge from this whole/composite view of value realization provide the necessary foundation to analyze the working of multi-stakeholder systems. An explicit specification of these concepts is presented as Regulation Enabling Ontology, REGENT. As an example, we instantiate REGENT for the urban residential electricity market and demonstrate its effectiveness in identifying the requirements for time-based electricity supply systems.