Neven Vrček

Prerequisites for successful implementation of Service-Oriented Architecture

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a set of principles for designing extensible, federated and interoperable services, and it represents a new evolutional spiral in the program-applications development and in the evolution of the information systems concept. This article analyses necessary set of prerequisites which should be fulfil by organization attempting to implement SOA. Since SOA implementation requests significant organizational changes such set of prerequisites should comprise not only from technical prerequisites but should take into account data architecture, system integration and compatibility, security and legislative requirements, business requirements and organizational prerequisites. This set of prerequisites can be defined as a Service-Oriented Architecture Maturity Model and used to evaluate the possibility for successful utilization of SOA in specific organization.

Multi-criteria software component allocation on a heterogeneous platform

A recent development of heterogeneous platforms (i.e. those containing different types of computing units such as multicore CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs) has enabled significant improvements in performance processing large amount of data in realtime. This possibility however is still not fully utilized due to a lack of methods for optimal configuration of software; the allocation of different software components to different computing unit types is crucial for getting the maximal utilization of the platform, but for more complex systems it is difficult to find ad-hoc a good enough or the best configuration. In this paper we present an approach to find a feasible and locally optimal solution for allocating software components to processing units in a heterogeneous platform.

Methodology and Software Components for E-Business Development and Implementation: Case of Introducing E-Invoice in Public Sector and SMEs

Many benefits from implementation of e-business solutions are related to network effects which means that there are many interconnected parties utilizing the same or compatible technologies. The large-scale adoption of e-business practices in public sectors and in small and medium enterprises SMEs-prevailing economic environments will be successful if appropriate support in the form of education, adequate legislative, directions, and open source applications is provided. This case study describes the adoption of e-business in public sectors and SMEs by using an integrated open source approach called e-modules. E-module is a model which has process properties, data properties, and requirements on technology. Therefore e-module presents a holistic framework for deployment of e-business solutions and such e-module structure mandates an approach which requires reengineering of business processes and adoption of strong standardization that solves interoperability issues. E-module is based on principles of service-oriented architectures with guidelines for introduction into business processes and integration with ERP systems. Such an open source approach enables the spreading of compatible software solutions across any given country, thus, increasing e-business adoption. This paper presents a methodology for defining and building e-modules.

Ontologies for Platform as Service APIs Interoperability

Abstract Ontologies can be used to describe common cloud functionalities and enable common terminology to assist in cloud interoperability. In this work, we have developed the ontology for resources and operations and the ontology of interoperability problems. The aim is to clearly describe and categorize the existing functionalities, features and specificities of commercial platform asaservice offers. The first ontology also provides data type mappings among different Paa Sstorages and cross-Paa Sdata types used in inputs and outputs of the remote APIoperations to provideacommon layer for information exchange and data migration among different Paa Sproviders. The ontologies were evaluated by tools and by human experts. Furthermore, the ontologies were used in cloud interoperability prototype to show their practical applicability.

A Proposition for Classification of Business Sectors by ERP Solutions Support

This paper illustrates the results of an analysis of business sectors covered by ERP solutions. The authors answer questions in regards to business sectors supported by ERP solutions, while presenting a list of supported business sectors. Using a statistical analysis, an answer is given to the question of whether there are any business sectors that are supported by a large number of ERP solutions, and whether it is possible to classify business sectors based on the occurrence of the support. Finally, three classifications are described that stem from different statistical views of covering business sectors by ERP solutions, and a suggestion for a unique classification of business sectors is given.

Novel Approach to BCG Analysis in the Context of ERP System Implementation

Standard ERP systems have been promoted as software solutions that are built on best business practices. According to the promoters, enterprises that buy them should embrace those built in business templates and achieve excellent business results. However, if enterprise has specific needs which are not part of standard ERP functionality, long lasting, expensive and complicated procedure of customization has to be carried out [5, 23, 24]. The link between competitive advantage and information system has been strong motivator for managers to buy ERP systems and force their implementation. However it is intuitively clear, that if something is commercially available to broad customer base, it cannot bring significant competitive advantage [36]. Many authors recognized that, and although there are certain positive indicators of business performance related to standard ERP systems, there is no strong evidence of such relationship [19, 44]. So what an enterprise or a non-profit organization can actually expect from an ERP system, and what benefits does it bring? It seems that certain organizations are better suited for ERP system implementation than the others [1, 30, 31]. Our results show that every serious attempt, which tries to answer this question, has to dig deep into business processes and find out what is their operational and strategic significance. Such comprehensive analysis requires significant time and strict methodology that enables unambiguous comparison between various organizations. This paper presents results of such approach. It is based on several years of research in various organizations that implemented or considered implementation of an ERP system. For that purpose authors developed methodology for strategic planning of information systems (SPIS). It was published in several scientific and professional articles and verified in relatively large number of commercial projects [10, 11, 12]. The methodology consists of a significant number of well known methods, but it combines them into structured and chained holistic process which gives deep insight into the business system and corresponding information system. By combining various methods under a common framework of methodology we obtain detailed and documented picture of an organization.

Thing as a Service Interoperability: Review and Framework Proposal

Internet of things (IoT) is global network of interconnected entities aimed at automating our lives. However, a number of IoT devices and systems have been created in parallel and there is no universal coding language and communication protocol. For this reason, IoT interoperability is a complex research and practical problem. In this work, we review existing work about IoT interoperability and IoT ontologies. Next, we propose a framework for things as a service interoperability that includes composition of different sensors and actuators at service level, and their integration with existing cloud services. The proposed framework consists of four main layers: virtual sensor, service, semantic, and interoperability layer. We plan to use the proposed framework to achieve service-level interoperability of smart things that will be semantically annotated in order to describe their functional and non-functional properties (with special emphasis on security and privacy).

Evaluation of security and privacy issues in integrated mobile telemedical system

Different modern information and communication technologies are emerging in all segments of our lives. The simplicity of using these high-tech and high-performance components enables us to build a wide range of enhanced and fast-in-reaction telemedical systems with the purpose of improving the quality of living. While building these systems it is easy to overlook or underestimate the need for data security and privacy protection. Telemedicine and e-health laws, regulations and standards, along with other telemedicine infrastructure components in the USA, Europe and Croatia are compared and discussed in this paper. After the common model for integrated mobile telemedical system is proposed with the example of heart-work monitoring system, all possible vulnerable and weak points in its architecture are identified and recommendations on design and implementation of similar systems are also discussed and given.

An extensible framework for software configuration optimization on heterogeneous computing systems: Time and energy case study

Abstract Context: Application of component based software engineering methods to heterogeneous computing (HC) enables different software configurations to realize the same function with different non–functional properties (NFP). Finding the best software configuration with respect to multiple NFPs is a non–trivial task. Objective: We propose a Software Component Allocation Framework (SCAF) with the goal to acquire a (sub–) optimal software configuration with respect to multiple NFPs, thus providing performance prediction of a software configuration in its early design phase. We focus on the software configuration optimization for the average energy consumption and average execution time. Method: We validated SCAF through its instantiation on a real–world demonstrator and a simulation. Firstly, we verified the correctness of our model through comparing the performance prediction of six software configurations to the actual performance, obtained through extensive measurements with a confidence interval of 95%. Secondly, to demonstrate how SCAF scales up, we performed software configuration optimization on 55 generated use–cases (with solution spaces ranging from 1030 to 3070) and benchmark the results against best performing random configurations. Results: The performance of a configuration as predicted by our framework matched the configuration implemented and measured on a real–world platform. Furthermore, by applying the genetic algorithm and simulated annealing to the weight function given in SCAF, we obtain sub–optimal software configurations differing in performance at most 7% and 13% from the optimal configuration (respectfully). Conclusion: SCAF is capable of correctly describing a HC platform and reliably predict the performance of software configuration in the early design phase. Automated in the form of an Eclipse plugin, SCAF allows software architects to model architectural constraints and preferences, acting as a multi–criterion software architecture decision support system. In addition to said, we also point out several interesting research directions, to further investigate and improve our approach.

Smart City Vehicular Mobile Sensor Network

Smart City concept comprises numerous technologies and heavily depends on sensors to be aware of its environment in order to adapt and to evolve. Wireless sensors networks thrive on the latest development of sensor technologies where sensors dynamically connect and rely on wireless networks which might not be available all the time or their geographical coverage can change depending on various circumstances. Special challenge are mobile wireless sensors where data transmission can be significantly obstructed. Therefore in a Smart City environment sensor data can be gathered by using powerful sensors on mobile devices(smart-phones), static sensors or vehicular sensors that rely on heterogeneous and changing network infrastructure. This paper presents one possible approach to build such network infrastructure where vehicular networks, augmented with existing city’s WiFi network, can be used to transmit (relay) and gather sensor data.