Sehl Mellouli

Building Understanding of Smart City Initiatives

This study presents the first results of an analysis primarily based on semi-structured interviews with government officials and managers who are responsible for smart city initiatives in four North American cities—Philadelphia and Seattle in the United States, Quebec City in Canada, and Mexico City in Mexico. With the reference to the Smart City Initiatives Framework that we suggested in our previous research, this study aims to build a new understanding of smart city initiatives. Main findings are categorized into eight aspects including technology, management and organization, policy context, governance, people and communities, economy, built infrastructure, and natural environment.

Smart government, citizen participation and open data

The use of Information Technologies in government (or e-government) has evolved during the last few years to make the interactions between government and citizens (G2C), government and businesses (G2B), and inter-agency relationships (G2G) more effective, democratic and transparent [1,6,8]. Moreover, in the most recent years we have observed two important trends with an impact in all these interactions. On the one hand, governments around the world have engaged in a movement to open data with open licenses and in easier to re-use formats. On the other hand, technology ubiquity is contributing to the production of impressive amounts of data that have the potential to help us better understand complex social problems as well as to improve government relationships with citizens, private organizations, NGOs and other governments. Both trends together with a more extensive use of information technologies have been referred to as smart government or intelligent government. Smart government is considered as one of the key trends that governments have to follow for the next 10–15 years [7]. The concept of a smart community refers to the use of information and communication technologies by local governments and cities to better interact with their citizens, taking advantage of all available data to solve important problems [2]. However, in order to deliver the expected values, governments need not only to create new services to their citizens based on these technologies in order to improve their quality of life, but also to engage citizens in this new set of services. Hence, there are two main components to be considered: the extensive use of technology by governments, which we refer to as smart government, and the extensive use of technology by citizens to interact with governments, which we will refer to as citizens’ engagement.

Modeling and Simulation Agent-based of Natural Disaster Complex Systems☆

Abstract A number of modeling and simulation tools have been developed in the domain of Natural Disasters. In these situations, several research teams may make an intervention and that have to coordinate their activities in order to save the maximum number of lives. To this end, they have to define an organizational structure and adopt management policies to improve their performance. The organizational structure and the policies are important elements that have to be taken into account to simulate a real emergency activity. To facilitate the design of these simulations, an agent-based methodological framework for complex system (Supply Chain, Natural Disaster) is proposed. The main contribution of the framework is that it will reflect the organizational structure and policies within the simulation, and which involves the integration truly dynamic dimension of this organization. We propose also a specification of the translation process to ensure the transition between various models that are proposed in the methodological framework.

Modeling e-government business processes: New approaches to transparent and efficient performance

Many governments worldwide are restructuring their business practices to improve their performances. To help describe and understand the process of restructuring, modeling techniques are used at different levels of modeling abstraction. This paper presents a new approach to the modeling of e-government business processes. It is based on two existing modeling techniques: Business Process Mapping (BPMapping) and UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM). The BPMapping technique provides an overall graphical representation of an organization depicting all different types of business processes, their inputs, outputs, and the environment in which the organization operates. The UMM methodology with its different business views gives details on collaborations and interactions of business processes. Combining BPMapping with UMM leads to a very expressive modeling approach which can provide artifact details at the higher levels of modeling abstraction and which also shows deployment strategies of the business processes. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, it is applied to the modeling of the Record Integrated Management business process at Quebec Government.

Information Sharing at National Borders: Extending the Utility of Border Theory

Research has identified the potential and challenges of information sharing in government settings mostly within the context of a single country. The challenges facing inter-governmental information exchanges that take place across national border governments, however, are thought to be different. To date, research has failed to provide theoretical guidance in understanding the complexities that the cross border environment brings to information sharing initiatives. This paper brings together BrunetJailly’s theory of borders [10] and definitions of crossboundary information sharing from Gil-Garcia et al. [39] to develop a framework that incorporates the information sharing and technology dimension with the economic, political and cultural contextual factors impacting border regions. This study is an initial step toward understanding the challenges that the border environment brings to information sharing initiatives. Future research is necessary to empirically test the utility of the proposed theory as a tool for understanding this new area of both practical and theoretical importance.

Architecturing large integrated complex information systems: an application to healthcare

The global enterprise-wide approaches help organizations to model and understand the enterprise key components and their relationships and manage the organizations’ transformations and change. However, many of these approaches lack of insights into how to manage complexities related to the multitude of applications developed in silos such as the various systems in health organizations that were designed independently from each other. This paper contributes to the solutions addressing this issue by proposing a methodology and tools to create foundations based on key components to help develop the information architecture at the heart of the enterprise architecture that can guarantee the evolution of the organization. These core components are a set of reusable Field Actions representing the non-contextual persistent information, a common canonical Corporate Conceptual Data Model capturing all the vital data in the organization, and Views or sub-schema of this global data model that represent information for different stakeholders in the organization. To show the effectiveness of the proposed approach and to gain more insights into its practical value, the architecturing approach is applied in the healthcare domain to create the information architecture and the enterprise architecture for the Quebec healthcare network.

Multinational E-Government Collaboration, Information Sharing, and Interoperability: An Integrative Model

Several known factors impact collaboration whenever multiple public organizations engage in information sharing and interoperability initiatives. However, few analyses exist on how to cope with the challenges faced in inter-organizational collaborations across nations. Based on the literatures on networked government, inter-organizational collaboration, information integration, and border theory, this paper presents a framework that integrates important factors, which are proposed to affect multinational e-government collaboration, information sharing, and interoperability. The main contribution of this conceptual paper is to connect existing theoretical models as a basis to initially explain and to guide planned empirical research on the phenomena of multinational e-government collaborative networks and information sharing initiatives across national borders.

An ontology for representing financial headline news

This paper presents the development of an ontology to represent financial headline news. This ontology is developed using the On-To-Knowledge methodology where the focus is on the design steps of the Knowledge Meta Process. This development is part of an ongoing project which aims to design a virtual stock market simulator based on multi-agent systems. The proposed ontology has 31 concepts and includes 201 attributes. The testing results conducted on reliable headline news show that 99% of these headline news can be properly represented by the attributes of the right category in the ontology. Unreliable headline news characterized by news having uncertainties, incompleteness, ill-definition, or imprecision cannot be represented by the proposed ontology. Approaches for representing these unreliable headline news are discussed.

Digital Government in North America: A Comparative Analysis of Policy and Program Priorities in Canada, Mexico, and the United States

International digital government research has increased in the last 10 years. However, international research comparing or analyzing relevant problems for the North American region is scarce. In an effort to lay the foundation for new research in the context of North America, this chapter presents a comparative analysis of policy and program priorities of digital government in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Common themes in the agendas of the three countries include services to the citizen, improved government operations, transparency, connectivity, and economic development. Main differences can be explained on the basis of differences in development. In general, we could say that the US government is renewing its e-government agenda, as a component of a wider innovation system. The government of Canada is also in a refreshing process, but more directed to consolidate a digital architecture for government services and operations, and Mexico is in the process of consolidating a digital government program.

Laying Down the Foundations of an Agent Modelling Methodology for Fault-Tolerant Multi-agent Systems

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are designed to solve problems, sometimes in unstable environments. Each agent in a MAS can play a set of roles; it may be prone to failure, which may cause a system failure. As a result, agents may become unavailable and some roles may be left unfilled (thereafter called missing roles). Unfortunately, there are not always backup agents ready to replace unavailable ones. In this case, the MAS must reorganize itself in order to achieve its objectives by assigning missing roles to the remaining agents. We propose an agent modelling methodology for Fault-Tolerant Multi-Agent Systems based on MAS reorganization. By taking into account the environment in the modelling phases of the system, we can anticipate different critical situations that could occur in the environment and that could have an impact on the MAS organization. Hence, we can propose an appropriate MAS re-organization so that the system continues to operate correctly. We know that it is impossible to consider all the different situations that can happen in the environment, but we can consider those that are predictable and critical.