Monica Drăgoicea

A Service Oriented Simulation Architecture for Intelligent Building Management

This paper introduces a proposal on developing a service oriented modelling and simulation architecture related to intelligent building management based on an existing open platform that is intended to allow different people to participate and contribute at developing a intelligent building management service ecosystem. In this way, both users and developers can compose new services, while the developer can focus on the most effective use of devices and data, instead of getting lost in upgrading to the latest device driver. The novelty of the proposed framework is the integration in the simulation loop of a Smart Building Controller that can control the real and virtual devices at the facility level. Therefore, the simulation model of the smart building integrates both real as well as simulated devices. The web-based service oriented software application allows to simulate the device-level and facility level behaviour of an intelligent building. It demonstrates a strategy to define an Intelligent Building Management solution that includes scenario simulation, testing of the functionality of the Smart Building Controller (SBC), device monitoring and control, report generation, and implementation of device web services.

Integrating Agents and Services for Control and Monitoring: Managing Emergencies in Smart Buildings

The present work introduces a research perspective on developing Smart Building control and monitoring solutions using a service-centric conceptual framework in which agents and services are integrated in order to solve both the problem of comfort and the issue of safety. The proposed conceptual framework relies on the service oriented architecture approach and its related supporting technologies, tools, mechanisms that facilitate discovery, integration, processing and analysis of datasets collected from various ubiquitous appliances. At the same time, agents can take, based on environmental data, decision for control, monitoring, fault diagnosis and maintenance of more and more complex systems. In order to further develop the above mentioned service-centric conceptual framework, this paper proposes an extensive integration of emergency protection systems that take into account a varied range of hazards and disasters, from small fires to earthquakes, with a priori defined Intelligent Operations Centre for Smart Cities. In this respect, the CitySCAPE development framework is exploited, as being the architectural style of thinking in terms of Smart Building integration on different control levels, monitoring and safety intervention, meeting basic requirements of seismic protection at city level.

Self-organising socio-technical description in service systems for supporting smart user decisions in public transport

Exploration to transpose service science principles to guide service systems design.Modelling of value co-creation service interactions embedding customer experience.Description of the Socio-Technical Systems Engineering (STSE) process.Exploratory case study of a real time information and travel planning service.Integration guidelines of the STSE process steps with Presage2 multiagent platform. This paper describes an exploration towards the transposition of service science principles into design guidelines. This aims at capturing value co-creation service interactions embedding customer experience in service design and delivery activities. The new Socio-Technical Systems Engineering (STSE) process is proposed to guide improved design, and it is exemplified with a new real time service that provides integrated information for trip planning in a city. The STSE process supports a high level visual modelling approach assisted by model execution and simulation tools. From a service engineering perspective, the outcomes of this process are artefacts that automatically support consistency among design steps and effective integration of customer experience and stakeholder requirements through iterative cycles related to service design. The application of the STSE process in the design of an exploratory case study of a real time information and travel planning service is validated through simulation using an executable representation of requirements. It can be executed over more complex transport service offerings, with different resource allocation algorithms, or different public transport planning services over a sample of real users requesting information. Results of such a simulation are beneficial for the users, for the service providers, and for the authorities managing public transport in city or metropolitan areas.

A Generic Service System Activity Model with Event-Driven Operation Reconfiguring Capability

This paper presents a proposal on developing an activity-based generic model of a service system (SSyst) that realises business oriented, IT-based intensive service processes. The approach proposed here to conceive and design the SSyst model takes into consideration the service systems’ lifecycle that includes the interactions between the four stakeholders’ categories: service provider (with suppliers and service outsourcing), service customer, competition, and compliance bodies (law, financial, environment, a.o.). The high level description of the lifecycle of a service process is used in order to further define, structure and analyze the SSyst model from a triple perspective: (1) the stages of the service’s lifecycle; (2) core activities for services; (3) the activity type components of a composite service. The proposed SSyst model is generic, meaning that it can be applied to generate different types of services, ranging from already existent services (that only need to be configured according to the customer needs) to completely new services (that have to be integrated based on the provider’s service repository and outsourced services). The services generated in a SSyst type service system must be planned and they must receive resources and capacities optimally allocated for service delivery.

A Service Oriented Architecture for Total Manufacturing Enterprise Integration

The paper describes a, framework and implementing issues addressing service orientation in the management and control of enterprises. A hybrid, semi-heterarchical control model based on the paradigm of holonic manufacturing is proposed; it switches its operating mode from hierarchical to heterarchical in the presence of perturbations to ensure both global optimization and agility to changes in batch orders, while featuring robustness to disturbances in the production environment. In order to ensure these conflicting functionalities, a service oriented architecture is proposed and implemented, whose structure includes a distributed fault-tolerant Resource Service Access Model. Besides the design of a generic structural and dynamic model, a real implementation solution is proposed using a multi-agent framework.

Building an Extended Ontological Perspective on Service Science

This paper presents an approach accounting for the classification of the main knowledge resources related to the new Science of Service. The main knowledge categories are defined as concepts integrated in an extended Service Science ontology. The ontology derived from several sources was captured using UML and Protege, and then, through a RDF/OWL transformation, a semantically annotated wiki has been directly implemented offering an execution of the ontology together with implemented use cases. Further, a dedicated application was developed – the Service Science Knowledge Environment (SSKE) – in order to grant user access to different knowledge categories created along with the proposed ontology. The SSKE is a cloud based collaborative software service, aiming at providing co-created knowledge resources shared by academia, industry and government organizations. This application can be accessed through the Web ( http://sske.cloud.upb.ro/ ) and it can be used for managing service related knowledge.

On a Qualitative Game Theoretic Approach of Teacher-Student Interaction in a Public Higher Education Service System

Public higher education services receive nowadays intense attention from the society from at least two perspectives: the high level professional performances requested by companies and public administration as final customers of the educational service system, on one side, and the problem encountered by the authorities in deciding how to dedicate the financial support for universities from the public budget, taking into account also the present state of the labour market and its trend, on another side. Starting from empirical considerations, this paper proposes an ontology model of a generic public higher education service system and several scenarios regarding a qualitative game modelling approach of a Teacher-Student interaction when this service system is placed in an emerging economy and, comparatively, in a mature free market economy.

Case Studies for Education in Robotics: From Serious Games to “Technology to Teach Technology” Platforms

This paper describes a specific perspective on developing case studies related to education in robotics. The proposed framework intends to support students learning how to develop distributed software applications through functionality composition. The multi-agent approach is used as a test bed for case studies development. It tries to stress the role of the application development platform in creating rich simulations, giving students the possibility to express their goals with clarity, and creating suitable application architectures to achieve their goals. The presented roadmap describes three “Technology to Teach Technology” platforms that support distributed application development. The last section of the paper gives the structure of a specific case study in mobile robotics, along with the Presage2 multi-agent platform.

Digital Services Development Using Statistics Tools to Emphasize Pollution Phenomena

This paper presents a perspective related to information service integration for pollution awareness evaluation. The proposed methodology is based on indirect information analysis as retrieved from available literature over time. A time series - type analysis highlighting usage of pollution-related terms is employed. The displayed impact of pollution is evaluated based on public awareness, exposed through digitalized available publications. Estimation techniques and tools are also employed in order to evaluate the exact impact of pollution related events on society. The proposed methodology fosters the design of improved environmental monitoring smart services, specifically addressing the development of data processing components in information sub-systems of EISs (Enterprise Information Systems).

How Social Responsibility Influences Innovation of Service Firms: An Investigation of Mediating Factors

The purpose of this study is to extend research on corporate social responsibility and to emphasise the role of this concept on innovation performance of service firms using mediators such as customer collaboration, employee collaboration, and business partners’ collaboration. This will help identifying the opportunities to improve the innovation capacity of firms. The results indicate that collaboration relationships played a partially mediating role. It acts as significant intermediate variables between social responsibility and innovation performance of service firms. The findings fill a gap in the literature by demonstrating how social responsibility initiatives influence the collaboration mechanisms of the firms through its positive effects on the collaboration between customers, employees, and business partners. They could also lead to the increase of their innovation potential. The managers of the firms using limited resources can stimulate indirectly the innovation by stimulating social responsibility initiatives because these have a multiplicative role in increasing the service firms’ innovation potential.