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Saur, Daniel ; Geihs, Kurt: IMPERA: Integrated Mission Planning for Multi-Robot Systems. In: Robotics vol. 4 (2015), Nr. 4, p. 435
This paper presents the results of the project IMPERA (Integrated Mission Planning for Distributed Robot Systems). The goal of IMPERA was to realize an extraterrestrial exploration scenario using a heterogeneous multi-robot system. The main challenge was the development of a multi-robot planning and plan execution architecture. The robot team consists of three heterogeneous robots, which have to explore an unknown environment and collect lunar drill samples. The team activities are described using the language ALICA (A Language for Interactive Agents). Furthermore, we use the mission planning system pRoPhEt MAS (Reactive Planning Engine for Multi-Agent Systems) to provide an intuitive interface to generate team activities. Therefore, we define the basic skills of our team with ALICA and define the desired goal states by using a logic description. Based on the skills, pRoPhEt MAS creates a valid ALICA plan, which will be executed by the team. The paper describes the basic components for communication, coordinated exploration, perception and object transportation. Finally, we evaluate the planning engine pRoPhEt MAS in the IMPERA scenario. In addition, we present further evaluation of pRoPhEt MAS in more dynamic environments.
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Textor, Andreas ; Geihs, Kurt: Calculation of COBIT Metrics Using a Formal Ontology. In: 10th IFIP/IEEE International Workshop on Business-driven IT Management. Ottawa, Canada, 2015
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Niemczyk, Stefan ; Geihs, Kurt: Adaptive Run-Time Models for Groups of Autonomous Robots. In: 2015 IEEE/ACM 10th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS) : IEEE, 2015 — ISBN 978-0-7695-5567-6, pp. 127-133
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Nguyen, Xuan Thang ; Tran, Huu Tam ; Baraki, Harun ; Geihs, Kurt: FRASAD: A Framework for Model-driven IoT Application Development. In: IEEE 2nd World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT). Milan, Italy, 2015
This paper presents FRASAD, an effective model-driven software development framework to manage the complexity of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. We propose a node-centric software architecture and a rule-based programming model that allow designers to describe their application using only sensor node domain concepts. The final application code is successively generated from the initial models through an automatic model transformation process. The evaluation results show that our framework enables a fast way to develop IoT applications by reducing the cost of dealing with the heterogeneity and complexity exhibited by sensor nodes and their operating systems.
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Tran, Huu Tam ; Baraki, Harun ; Geihs, Kurt: Service Co-evolution in the Internet of Things. In: EAI Endorsed Transactions on Cloud Systems vol. 15, ICST (2015), Nr. 1
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Geihs, Kurt: Ubiquitäre IKT-Systeme und -Anwendungen. In: Schröder, A. ; Sommerlatte, T. : Innovationsführerschaft - Credo und Praxis. First. ed.. Düsseldorf : Symposion Publishing, 2015
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Valetto, G. ; Bucchiarone, A. ; Geihs, K. ; Buscher, M. ; Petersen, K. ; Nowak, A. ; Rychwalska, A. ; Pitt, J. ; Shalhoub, J. ; et al.: All Together Now: Collective Intelligence for Computer-Supported Collective Action. In: Third International Workshop on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organising Socio-Technical Systems. Cambridge, MA, 2015
In their contribution, Valetto et al. outline a new methodological paradigm and software platform for designing sustainable computer-supported collective action in smart communities. This enables, for instance, collaborative energy conservation within smart cities. The presented platform is based on the idea of "Collective Intelligence as a Service" and uses insights from dynamic psychological processes and social practices.
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Baraki, Harun ; Geihs, Kurt ; Voigtmann, Christian ; Hoffmann, Axel ; Kniewel, Romy ; Macek, Björn-Elmar ; Zirfas, Julia: Interdisciplinary Design Patterns for Socially Aware Computing. In: The 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Software Engineering in Society (SEIS) track : ACM/IEEE, 2015
The success of software applications that collect and process personal data does not only depend on technical aspects, but is also linked to social compatibility and user acceptance. It requires experts from different disciplines to ensure legal compliance, to foster the users' trust, to enhance the usability of the application and to finally realize the application. Multidisciplinary requirements have to be formulated, interwoven and implemented. We advocate the use of interdisciplinary design patterns that capture the design know-how of typical, recurring features in socially aware applications with particular concern for socio-technical requirements. The proposed patterns address interdisciplinary concerns in a tightly interwoven manner and are intended to facilitate the development of accepted and acceptable applications that in particular deal with sensitive user context information.
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De Sanctis, Martina ; Geihs, Kurt ; Bucchiarone, Antonio ; Valetto, Giuseppe ; Marconi, Annapaola ; Pistore, Marco: Distributed Service Co-evolution based on Domain Objects. In: 11th Int. Workshop on Engineering Service-Oriented Applications (WESOA'15), colocated with ICSOC 2015. Goa, India, 2015
Service evolution is a critical ingredient of the service life-cycle. The more our society depends on large-scale, complex service environments including cloud and mobile services, the more pressing becomes the question of how to evolve a service on-the-fly at runtime without bringing whole systems to a halt. Service inter–dependencies make it increasingly difficult to manage the service collection as a whole. Thus, there is an urgent need for coordinated service evolution. The main contributions of this paper are a conceptual solution for dynamic on-the-fly co-evolution of services, and a framework that supports the engineering of such co-evolution support. We analyze the types of changes that might happen in a service and their potential impact on dependent clients and servers. We present the design of a co-evolution support infrastructure based on a service computing model and platform. Our solution is built on top of the Domain Object concept, and our application domain is smart urban mobility.
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Witsch, Andreas ; Geihs, Kurt: An Adaptive Middleware Core for a Multi-Agent Coordination Language. In: 2015 International Conference and Workshops on Networked Systems (NetSys) : IEEE, 2015, pp. 1-8
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Kirchhoff, Marc ; Geihs, Kurt: Integrating OData Services into the Semantic Web: A SPARQL Interface for OData. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-driven Business, i-KNOW '14. Graz, Austria : ACM, 2014 — ISBN 978-1-4503-2769-5, p. 2:1--2:8
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Kirchner, Dominik ; Geihs, Kurt: Adaptive Model-based Monitoring for Robots. In: 13th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS). Padova, Italy, 2014
Continuous and comprehensive monitoring is a key requirement for reliable failure detection.
However, the overhead of the observation process conflicts with the limited resources of a robot platform. Therefore, robot monitoring faces high efficiency requirements. This defines a trade-off between comprehensive observation and monitoring resource overhead. In this paper, we propose an adaptive, model-based monitoring approach that addresses this trade-off. We specify an individual monitoring configuration in an abstract system model to focus the observation on expressive state aspects. Moreover, we introduce adaptivity to further improve the efficiency of the monitoring process. To evaluate this efficiency, we compare our approach with a reference monitoring system. Due to our results, we are confident that the proposed approach significantly reduces the resource overhead.
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Niemczyk, Stefan ; Kirchner, Dominik ; Witsch, Andreas ; Opfer, Stephan ; Geihs, Kurt: Distributed Sensing in a Robotic Soccer Team. In: CPSWeek 2014 - International Workshop on Robotic Sensor Networks. Berlin, 2014
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David, K. ; Geihs, K. ; Leimeister, J. M. ; Roßnagel, A. ; Schmidt, L. ; Stumme, G. ; Wacker, A.: Socio-technical Design of Ubiquitous Computing Systems. Berlin : Springer, 2014
By using various data inputs, ubiquitous computing systems detect their current usage context, automatically adapt their services to the user’s situational needs and interact with other services or resources in their environment on an ad-hoc basis.
Designing such self-adaptive, context-aware knowledge processing systems is, in itself, a formidable challenge. This book presents core findings from the VENUS project at the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Information System Design (ITeG) at Kassel University, where researchers from different fields, such as computer science, information systems, human-computer interaction and law, together seek to find general principles and guidelines for the design of socially aware ubiquitous computing systems. To this end, system usability, user trust in the technology and adherence to privacy laws and regulations were treated as particularly important criteria in the context of socio-technical system design.
During the project, a comprehensive blueprint for systematic, interdisciplinary software development was developed, covering the particular functional and non-functional design aspects of ubiquitous computing at the interface between technology and human beings. The organization of the book reflects the structure of the VENUS work program. After an introductory part I, part II provides the groundwork for VENUS by presenting foundational results from all four disciplines involved. Subsequently, part III focuses on methodological research funneling the development activities into a common framework. Part IV then covers the design of the demonstrators that were built in order to develop and evaluate the VENUS method. Finally, part V is dedicated to the evaluation phase to assess the user acceptance of the new approach and applications.
The presented findings are especially important for researchers in computer science, information systems, and human-computer interaction, but also for everyone working on the acceptance of new technologies in society in general.
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Huu Tam, Tran ; Baraki, Harun ; Geihs, Kurt: An Approach towards service co-evolution in the Internet of Things. In: IoTaaS2014 the International Conference on IoT as a Service : Springer, 2014
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Kirchner, Dominik ; Geihs, Kurt: Qualitative Bayesian Failure Diagnosis for Robot Systems. In: Burgard, W.: International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, AI and Robotics. Chicago : IEEE, 2014, p. 1 -- 6
Reliability is a key challenge for intelligent robot systems. In order to address this challenge, runtime failure detection and diagnosis (FDD) is an essential task to maintain autonomous operation. The complexity of fully fledged robot systems and the included noise in system observations complicate this task. In this paper, we present our Qualitative Bayesian Failure Diagnosis (QBFD) for precise and robust failure estimation. Our approach uses a Dynamic Bayesian Network to model uncertainties of the measurements while considering temporal relations. Instead of detailed a priori knowledge of system dynamics, our approach models cause-effect relations. These relations are, in practice, more intuitive to specify. As a consequence, we reduce the level of needed system knowledge and therefore increase the practical applicability. We evaluate the quality in respect to two reference approaches in extensive simulations. Due to our results, we are confident that our proposed approach provides comparable, if not superior, estimation quality, while simultaneously reducing the level of needed model details. Furthermore, we provide evidence that, given a proper system decomposition, high quality estimates are possible using general observations, like the resource usage.
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Atzmüller, Martin ; Baraki, Harun ; Behrenbruch, Kay ; Comes, Diana ; Evers, Christoph ; Hoffmann, Axel ; Hoffmann, Holger ; Jandt, Silke ; Kibanov, Mark ; et al.: Die VENUS-Entwicklungsmethode
Eine interdisziplinäre Methode für soziotechnische Softwaregestaltung : Kassel University Press, 2014
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Saur, Daniel ; Geihs, Kurt: pRoPhEt MAS: Reactive Planning Engine For Multi-agent systems. In: 13th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS). Padova, 2014
Autonomous mobile robots can substantially increase their effectiveness in dynamic environments by using planning. This paper proposes a design for a soft real time planning system for autonomous robots and offers a generic and modular approach to control a team of robots. Our system pRoPhEt MAS is based on ALICA (A Language for Interactive Cooperative Agents) and offers the coordination of team behaviors at runtime. In the evaluation scenario the system pRoPhEt MAS uses a state of the art planner "Fast Downward Planning System". The evaluation focuses on planning during execution time. The team executes the best solutions found, selected by the heuristic, under certain time constraints. The results show that the execution with soft real time planning is as good as sequential planning and execution. Hence, it offers the ability to react quickly in dynamic domains.
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Geihs, Kurt ; Evers, Christoph ; Niemczyk, Stefan: VENUS meets SEMAT – How do they compare? In: ASSE 2014 Argentine Symposium on Software Engineering. Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2014
SEMAT (Software Engineering Methods And Theory) is an initiative to define a generic foundation for software engineering as a rigorous discipline. The so-called SEMAT kernel provides a thinking framework for software engineers that is not constrained to certain methods and processes but aims to encompass all kinds of proven principles and best practices. Our own interdisciplinary VENUS development method is designed to achieve similar generality and compatibility objectives, although the chosen application domain in VENUS has a much narrower scope. In this paper we compare the VENUS de velopment method with SEMAT. The main contributions are positioning the VENUS development concepts within the SEMAT conceptual framework, and investigating whether SEMAT is an appropriate framework for dealing with inherently interdisciplinary development processes. In the end we present suggestions for the improvement of both approaches.
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Witsch, Andreas ; Opfer, Stephan ; Geihs, Kurt: A Formal Multi-Agent Language for Cooperative Autonomous Driving Scenarios. In: 2014 International Conference on Connected Vehicles & Expo (ICCVE 2014). Vienna, Austria, 2014
This paper addresses the problem of coordinating autonomous cars to provide higher safety standards in public road traffic with limited computational resources. We present a modelling language that allows formal program verification to guarantee correctness. We apply the multi-agent coordination language ALICA that has originally been developed for the robotic football domain. To show the practical applicability and efficiency for the autonomous driving domain, we applied ALICA to two autonomous car driving scenarios. Thus, we demonstrate the benefits of using a conceptually sound methodology for the coordination of autonomous cars.
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Saur, Daniel ; Haque, Tareq Rezaul ; Geihs, Kurt: Empirical study of planning and execution for large teams of robots. In: First Workshop on Model-Driven Robot Software Engineering at Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations. York, UK, 2014
Autonomous mobile robots can substantially increase the effectiveness of planning by acting as coordinated team. Our focus is on the planning of the activities of a team of autonomous, mobile robots in such environments. The communication bandwidth of robot systems is constrained. Being able to model complex activities of a team in an intuitive way requires combining modeling and planning techniques. The main contribution of the paper is the optimization of the planning process while using every agent as a planning resource and aiming at low communication needs. A general conclusion is that the planning process for teams of up to 75 agents can be improved compared to state of the art approaches by up to 23%.
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Baraki, Harun ; Geihs, Kurt ; Hoffmann, Axel ; Voigtmann, Christian ; Kniewel, Romy ; Macek, Björn-Elmar ; Zirfas, Julia: Towards Interdisciplinary Design Patterns for Ubiquitous Computing Applications : Zentrum für Informationstechnik‐Gestaltung (ITeG), 2014
To draw on the full potential of Ubiquitous Computing (UC)
systems, they have to be designed with awareness for their social embedding
in order to increase the user acceptance. To this end, not only the
compliance with laws has to be ensured, but also usability-enhancing and
trust and confidence-building measures have to be applied. This makes
the development of UC applications a challenging task that involves experts
from different disciplines. The main contribution of this report is
a set of design patterns for UC applications that specifically focus on
the interweaving and implementation of multidisciplinary requirements.
The patterns capture the design know-how of typical, recurring features
in context-aware adaptive UC applications with particular concern for
the sociotechnical requirements. First, we present a detailed discussion
of the related work on design patterns in the realm of UC. Afterwards,
we explain our research methodology and the template structure of our
pattern specifications. The core of the report consists of eight interdisciplinary
UC design patterns. This initial list of patterns was derived from
several application case studies in the interdisciplinary research project
LOEWE-VENUS. We view this collection as a starting point for an evolving
set of commonly accepted reusable design patterns that facilitate the
development of accepted and acceptable UC applications.
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Saur, Daniel ; Haque, Tareq Rezaul ; Herzog, Ralf ; Geihs, Kurt: MAGiC : Multi-Agent Planning using Grid Computing concepts. In: 12th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation in Space. Montreal, 2014
This paper presents a distributed planning approach which is able to produce a plan with minimum communication among the agents of the team. We developed a fusion planner which considers the limitations of distributed and centralized planning. Principally, a central agent distributes tasks among multiple agents to solve a problem in reduced search space compared to centralized planner. Moreover, the designed planner requires lesser communication than a distributed planner among multiple agents. We perform evaluation on NASA's Mars Rover domain and compare the proposed planner with similar ones. A general conclusion is that the planning process for a team of agents can be improved compared to the state of the art approaches by up to 46.4% faster and 98.2% lesser messages.
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Dar, Kashif ; Taherkordi, Amir ; Baraki, Harun ; Eliassen, Frank ; Geihs, Kurt: A resource oriented integration architecture for the internet of things: A business process perspective. In: Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Elsevier (2014)
Abstract The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) foresees a future Internet incorporating smart physical objects that offer hosted functionality as IoT services. These services when integrated with the traditional enterprise level services form the creation of ambient intelligence for a wide range of applications. To facilitate seamless access and service life cycle management of large, distributed and heterogeneous IoT resources, service oriented computing and resource oriented approaches have been widely used as promising technologies. However, a reference architecture integrating IoT services into either of these two technologies is still an open research challenge. In this article, we adopt the resource oriented approach to provide an end-to-end integration architecture of front-end IoT devices with the back-end business process applications. The proposed architecture promises a programmer friendly access to IoT services, an event management mechanism to propagate context information of IoT devices, a service replacement facility upon service failure, and a decentralized execution of the IoT aware business processes
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Söllner, Matthias ; Voss, Amanda ; Niemczyk, Stefan ; Geihs, Kurt ; Leimeister, Jan Marco: Investigating the Impact of Different Research Designs on Empirical Results. In: European Conference on Information Systems 2014, AIS-Journals Joint Author Workshop. Israel, Tel Aviv, 2014
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Tomforde, Sven ; Haehner, Joerg ; Mammen, Sebastian von ; Gruhl, Christian ; Sick, Bernhard ; Geihs, Kurt: Know thyself -- Computational Self-Reflection in Intelligent Technical Systems. In: Workshop on Self-Improving System Integration (SISSY 2014), co-located with SASO 2014 - Eight IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems. London, England, 2014
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Geihs, Kurt ; Niemczyk, Stefan ; Roßnagel, Alexander ; Witsch, Andreas: On the socially aware development of self-adaptive ubiquitous computing applications. In: it-it vol. 56 (2014), Nr. 1, pp. 33-41
Ubiquitous computing applications provide pervasive support to users in a self-adaptive and non-obtrusive way. Applications reason about the user situation and adapt dynamically, often without explicit user interaction. Such applications exploit technical features such as context awareness, context reasoning, adaptation models, dynamic resource discovery/binding, and self-configuration. The engineering of ubiquitous computing applications is a challenge because the user acceptance depends not only on functional features but at least as much on non-functional and user-related features that we address under the term “social awareness”. In this paper we present an interdisciplinary development approach for self-adaptive applications that takes into account social awareness requirements in a systematic and integrated manner. Our focus is on usability, trust, and legality. We present the ingredients of our new methodology and its evaluation based on application prototypes. Our approach is compatible with existing software engineering process models and practices.
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Kirchner, Dominik ; Saur, Daniel: Reliable Robotics – Diagnostics ++. In: ROS Developer Conference. Stuttgart, Willow Garage (2013)
Let a robot do something is one thing, but let a robot do something reliably quite another. This talk will teach the basics of the diagnostic stack and related tools. Additionally, it will provide some pointers to useful extensions and will highlight the addressed topics in a real world system. After the talk the attendees have a good starting point to set up their own diagnostic system in their robotic projects.
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Hoyer, Ralf ; Bartetzki, Andre ; Kirchner, Dominik ; Witsch, Andreas: Giving Robots a Voice: A Kineto-Acoustic Project. In: Third International Conference on Arts and Technology. Milano (Italy), 2013 — ISBN 978-3-642-37981-9
In this paper we present a kineto-acoustic project based on soccer robots. The movements of robots, determined by the needs of a soccer game, are transformed into a piece of music. Therefore, the robots are equipped with microphones, speakers, and custom-designed audio modules. The amplification of microphones and speakers is adjusted to create constantly varying feedback effects. These effects evolve from the relative positions and motions of the robots. Furthermore, data from control computers are utilized for the musical sound modulation. As the sequence of movements is not deterministic the resulting musical structure is unique in each performance.
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Amma, Till ; Beifuß, Jewgeni ; Bozic, Zjelko ; Bui, Mike ; Gawora, Fridolin ; Haque, Tareque ; Geihs, Kurt ; Jakob, Stefan ; Kirchner, Dominik ; et al.: Team Description: Carpe Noctem 2013, RoboCup Federation, 2013
Carpe Noctem is a Mid-Size League Robocup team at the University of Kassel. It is part of the Distributed Autonomous Systems Laboratory of the Distributed Systems Group which is well known for its research contributions on middleware platforms, distributed system management, and software technologies for distributed systems. Carpe Noctem is a team of researchers and students who collectively aim at competing in the Robocup championships. Several undergraduate students are involved in the research as part of their bachelor or master thesis, and the achieved results are directly integrated into the overall system. Carpe Noctem successfully developed a modular and platform-independent communication middleware for autonomous robots in the past years. The main research focus has now shifted towards representation and robust execution of cooperative strategies in dynamic domains. As such, Robocup is again an ideal domain to evaluate our approach.
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Evers, Christoph ; Kniewel, Romy ; Geihs, Kurt ; Schmidt, Ludger: The user in the loop: Enabling user participation for self-adaptive applications. In: Future Generation Computer Systems (2013)
Abstract Future computing systems must adjust to the user’s situations, habits, and intentions. Self-adaptive applications autonomously adapt to changing contexts without asking the user. However, the self-adaptive behaviour lacks of success if it does not correspond to the user’s personal interaction habits and intentions, particularly for complex scenarios with a high degree of user interaction. Concerning the interaction design, such adaptations can be irritating and distracting for the user if they do not match the current situation. In this article we provide a solution how to integrate the user in the self-adaptation feedback loop. The user will be able to influence the adaptation behaviour at run-time and in the long term by setting individual preferences. Consequently, we achieve a harmonization between full application autonomy and user control. We implemented our generic concepts by extending an existing self-adaptation middleware with capabilities to respect the user’s application focus and interaction behaviour. A notification-based solution for user participation has been evaluated in a substantial user study with 62 participants. Although participants perceived much better control with our solution, the study made clear that notification design is specific for each adaptation type.
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Baraki, H. ; Comes, D. ; Geihs, K.: Context-Aware Prediction of QoS and QoE Properties for Web Services. In: Networked Systems (NetSys), 2013 Conference on, 2013, pp. 102-109
Web Services are commonly used for integrating applications between partners over the Internet. Since services with the same functionality are advertised with different Quality of Service (QoS) levels and are assessed with different Quality of Experience (QoE), choosing the right service may be quite challenging. It is essential for a user to predict QoS and QoE values as accurately as possible in order to find a suitable service. Usually collaborative filtering is applied using similar users and services for predictive purposes. We hypothesize a correlation between context data and QoS and QoE dimensions which can be additionally incorporated to improve predictive accuracy and scalability. In this paper we present the two algorithms PredReg and PredNet in order to predict QoS and QoE values for Web Services. The PredReg algorithm is based on multiple linear regression. The PredNet algorithm uses additionally a neural network for prediction. Both algorithms include context data of users and services generating personalized predictions for the requesting user. In addition, PredNet is able to process categorical variables so that user profiles can also be considered for predictions. We evaluated PredReg and PredNet and compared them with the state-of-the-art approach WSRec 1 which is a memory-based collaborative filtering approach. Our experiments demonstrated that PredReg and PredNet provide a higher predictive accuracy and a significantly improved scalability. Therefore, we recommend the application of PredReg and PredNet for future personalized predictions.
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Opfer, Stephan: Grenzen von SROIQ bei der Unterstuetzung der Modellierung von Multi-Agenten-Plaenen. In: Informatik-Spektrum vol. 36, Springer Berlin Heidelberg (2013), Nr. 6, pp. 1-4
Die Unterstützung durch logisches Schlussfolgern während der Modellierung von Multi-Agenten-Plänen erhöht die Qualität der Ergebnisse und die Effizienz des Modellierungsprozesses. Daher haben wir die Anwendbarkeit eines auf Beschreibungslogik basierenden Verfahrens für die Multi-Agenten-Modellierungssprache ALICA untersucht. Wir wählten SROIQ als eine der ausdrucksstärksten Beschreibungslogiken. Für eine umfassende Beurteilung der Anwendbarkeit wurden Schlussfolgerungsaufgaben verschiedener Komplexität realisiert. Nach einer ausführlichen Diskussion der entdeckten Probleme kommen wir zu dem Schluss, dass nur verbesserte oder alternative Schlussfolgerungstechniken für die Komplexität von Multi-Agenten-Plänen geeignet sind.
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Floch, J. ; Frà, C. ; Fricke, R. ; Geihs, K. ; Wagner, M. ; Lorenzo, J. ; Soladana, E. ; Mehlhase, S. ; Paspallis, N. ; et al.: Playing MUSIC — building context-aware and self-adaptive mobile applications. In: Software: Practice and Experience vol. 43, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd (2013), Nr. 3, p. 359--388
Although the idea of context-awareness was introduced almost two decades ago, few mobile software applications are available today that can sense and adapt to their run-time environment. The development of context-aware and self-adaptive applications is complex and few developers have experience in this area. On the basis of several demonstrators built by the joint European research project MUSIC, this paper describes typical context and adaptation features relevant for the development of context-aware and self-adaptive mobile applications. We explain how the demonstrators were realised using the open-source platform MUSIC and present the feedback of the developers of these demonstrators. The main contribution of this paper is to show how the development complexity of context-aware and self-adaptive mobile applications can be mastered by using an adaptation framework such as MUSIC. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Witsch, Andreas ; Skubch, Hendrik ; Niemczyk, Stefan ; Geihs, Kurt: Using Incomplete Satisfiability Modulo Theories to Determine Robotic Tasks. In: IEEE International Workshop on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2013
Many robotic task specifications can be naturally expressed by boolean combinations of arbitrary constraints. This allows a separation of problem description and solution strategy.
In this paper, we present a novel approach to solve non-linear constraint systems based on Satisfiability Modulo Theories.
While most SMT-based techniques emphasize completeness, we intentionally use an incomplete local search strategy.
Despite this incompleteness, the presented solution is able to deal with many real world problems like task allocation or robot positioning.
We show that our approach is able to exploit the logical structure to solve highly complex tasks almost in real-time.
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Brun, Yuriy ; Desmarais, Ron ; Geihs, Kurt ; Litoiu, Marin ; Lopes, Antonia ; Shaw, Mary ; Smit, Michael: A Design Space for Self-Adaptive Systems. In: Lemos, R. ; Giese, H. ; Müller, H. A. ; Shaw, M. : Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems II, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. vol. 7475 : Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013 — ISBN 978-3-642-35812-8, pp. 33-50
Self-adaptive systems research is expanding as systems professionals recognize the importance of automation for managing the growing complexity, scale, and scope of software systems. The current approach to designing such systems is ad hoc, varied, and fractured, often resulting in systems with parts of multiple, sometimes poorly compatible designs. In addition to the challenges inherent to all software, this makes evaluating, understanding, comparing, maintaining, and even using such systems more difficult. This paper discusses the importance of systematic design and identifies the dimensions of the self-adaptive system design space. It identifies key design decisions, questions, and possible answers relevant to the design space, and organizes these into five clusters: observation, representation, control, identification, and enacting adaptation. This characterization can serve as a standard lexicon, that, in turn, can aid in describing and evaluating the behavior of existing and new self-adaptive systems. The paper also outlines the future challenges for improving the design of self-adaptive systems.
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Geihs, Kurt: Self-Adaptivity from Different Application Perspectives. In: Lemos, R. ; Giese, H. ; Müller, H. A. ; Shaw, M. : Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems II, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. vol. 7475 : Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013 — ISBN 978-3-642-35812-8, pp. 376-392
Self-adaptivity can be beneficial in many application domains. In recent years we have researched the engineering of self-adaptive software systems in three rather diverse domains: ubiquitous computing applications, teams of autonomous mobile robots, and management of service-oriented software systems. While all of them perform dynamic adaptation at run-time following a specified control loop, they differ fundamentally in their specific objectives, requirements, properties, and constraints. Consequently, their design and realization focus on different domain aspects and require different modeling and engineering techniques. In this paper we elaborate on synergies and discrepancies in developing the three case studies. We evaluate these self-adaptive systems using a recently published framework for evaluating self-adaptive software systems. The main contributions of this paper are a reflection on the design space of self-adaptive systems and a critique of the proposed evaluation framework.
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Kirchhoff, Marc ; Geihs, Kurt: Semantic Description of OData Services. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Semantic Web Information Management, SWIM '13. New York, New York : ACM, 2013 — ISBN 978-1-4503-2194-5, p. 2:1--2:8
The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a data access protocol that is based on the REST principles. It is built upon existing and well-known technologies such as HTTP, AtomPub and JSON. OData is already widely-used in the industry. Many IT companies provide OData interfaces for their applications. The structure of the data that is provided by an OData service is described with the Conceptual Schema Definition Language (CSDL). To make this data available for the integration with the Semantic Web, we propose to semantically annotate CSDL-documents. This extension of CSDL allows the definition of mappings from the underlying Entity Data Model (EDM) to RDF graphs which is a first step towards the implementation of a SPARQL endpoint on top of existing OData services. Based on the OData interfaces of existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, it is possible to realize a SPARQL endpoint for those systems which can lead to a great simplification in the retrieval of data.
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Kirchner, Dominik ; Niemczyk, Stefan ; Geihs, Kurt: RoSHA: A Multi-Robot Self-Healing Architecture. In: Springer,: RoboCup 2013: Robot Soccer World Cup XVII. RoboCup International Symposium (RoboCup-2013) : Springer, 2013, pp. 1-12
Reliability is one of the key challenges in multi-robot systems to increase practicable applicability and hence the commercial usage. This paper presents RoSHA, a self-healing architecture for multi-robot systems. RoSHA is based on the established robot middleware ROS and provides components for application independent analysis and repair. A plug-in architecture enables the developer to simply add new components for repair and analysis. Bayesian networks are used to diagnose failures and their root causes. ALICA, a domain specific language for multi-robot systems, is applied to coordinate recovery plans in multi-robot systems.
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Lemos, Rogério ; Giese, Holger ; Müller, HausiA. ; Shaw, Mary ; Andersson, Jesper ; Litoiu, Marin ; Schmerl, Bradley ; Tamura, Gabriel ; Villegas, NorhaM. ; et al.: Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems: A Second Research Roadmap. In: Lemos, R. ; Giese, H. ; Müller, H. A. ; Shaw, M. : Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems II, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. vol. 7475 : Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013 — ISBN 978-3-642-35812-8, pp. 1-32
The goal of this roadmap paper is to summarize the state-of-the-art and identify research challenges when developing, deploying and managing self-adaptive software systems. Instead of dealing with a wide range of topics associated with the field, we focus on four essential topics of self-adaptation: design space for self-adaptive solutions, software engineering processes for self-adaptive systems, from centralized to decentralized control, and practical run-time verification & validation for self-adaptive systems. For each topic, we present an overview, suggest future directions, and focus on selected challenges. This paper complements and extends a previous roadmap on software engineering for self-adaptive systems published in 2009 covering a different set of topics, and reflecting in part on the previous paper. This roadmap is one of the many results of the Dagstuhl Seminar 10431 on Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems, which took place in October 2010.
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Kniewel, Romy ; Evers, Christoph ; Schmidt, Ludger ; Geihs, Kurt: Challenging the Need for Transparency, Controllability, and Consistency in Usable Adaptation Design. In: Margaria, T. ; Padberg, J. ; Taentzer, G. : Proceedings of the Combined workshop on Self-organizing, Adaptive, and ContextSensitive Distributed Systems and Self-organized Communication in Disaster Scenarios (SACS/SoCoDiS 2013), Electronic Communications of the EASST. vol. 56, 2013
Adaptive applications constitute the basis for many ubiquitous computing scenarios as they can dynamically adapt to changing contexts. The usability design principles transparency, controllability, and consistency have been recommended for the design of adaptive interfaces. However, designing self-adaptive applications that may act completely autonomous is still a challenging task because there is no set of usability design guidelines. Applying the three principles in the design of the five different adaptations of the mobile adaptive application Meet-U revealed as difficult. Based on an analysis of the design problem space, we elaborate an approach for the design of usable adaptations. Our approach is based on a notification design concept which calculates the attention costs and utility benefits of notified adaptations by varying the design aspects transparency and controllability. We present several designs for the adaptations of Meet‑U. The results of a user study shows that the notification design approach is beneficial for the design of adaptations. Varying transparency and controllability is necessary to adjust an adaptation’s design to the particular context of use. This leads to a partially inconsistent design for adaptations within an application.
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Geihs, Kurt ; Wagner, Michael: Context-Awareness for Self-adaptive Applications in Ubiquitous Computing Environments. In: Vinh, P. C. ; Hung, N. M. ; Tung, N. T. ; Suzuki, J. : Context-Aware Systems and Applications, Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. vol. 109 : Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012 — ISBN 978-3-642-36641-3, pp. 108-120
Context-awareness is a prerequisite for self-adaptive applications that are able to react and adapt to their runtime context. We have built and evaluated a comprehensive development framework for context-aware, self-adaptive applications in dynamic ubiquitous computing scenarios. The framework consists of a middleware and an associated model-driven development methodology. In this paper we focus on the context-awareness part of the framework. We discuss design objectives, design decisions, and lessons learnt. The main contributions of this paper are generally applicable insights into the design and seamless integration of context-awareness, dynamic service landscapes, and application adaptation management for applications in highly dynamic execution environments. These insights not only relate to the functional requirements and constraints, but also to non-functional aspects that have a strong influence on the user acceptance of such applications.
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Comes, DianaElena ; Evers, Christoph ; Geihs, Kurt ; Hoffmann, Axel ; Kniewel, Romy ; Leimeister, JanMarco ; Niemczyk, Stefan ; Roßnagel, Alexander ; Schmidt, Ludger ; et al.: Designing Socio-technical Applications for Ubiquitous Computing. In: Göschka, K. M. ; Haridi, S. : Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. vol. 7272 : Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012 — ISBN 978-3-642-30822-2, pp. 194-201
A major challenge for ubiquitous system design is creating applications that are legal-compatible and accepted by their intended users. Today’s European data protection principles contradict the ideas of ubiquitous computing. Additionally, users have to deal with unconventional interaction concepts leading to a low amount of trust and acceptance in such systems. Current development approaches do not sufficiently cover these concerns, as they do not systematically incorporate expertise from the relevant disciplines. We present a novel development approach for ubiquitous systems that explicitly addresses these concerns. Our primary task was to manage the increased number of stakeholders and dependencies, respectively conflicts between requirements of the particular disciplines. The approach incorporates predefined artifacts and a defined workflow with responsibilities, as well as suggesting how to develop mutual understanding. We apply this multidisciplinary approach to develop the ubiquitous application Meet-U.
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Skubch, Hendrik: Solving Non-linear Arithmetic Constraints in Soft Realtime Environments. In: Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC '12. Trento, Italy : ACM, 2012 — ISBN 978-1-4503-0857-1, p. 67--73
In many domains, such as in multi-robot scenarios, operational instructions controlling a system are highly complex. In order to facilitate both ease of modeling and intelligent decision making, powerful reasoning techniques become available, which are able to solve complex non-linear formulae within a very small time frame. We argue that the problem class of arbitrary boolean combinations of non-linear constraints is a suitable representation for a wide range of robotic problems and present an evaluation of several state-of-the-art solving techniques, targeting problems that arise in robotic and multi-robotic domains, which need to be solved in near real-time. Additionally, we combine available techniques yielding two highly competitive solvers for non-linear continuous constraint systems. Finally, we present new results on complexity phase transition phenomena of the local searches involved.
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Comes, DianaElena ; Baraki, Harun ; Reichle, Roland ; Geihs, Kurt: BPRules and the BPR-Framework: Comprehensive Support for Managing QoS in Web Service Compositions. In: Göschka, K. M. ; Haridi, S. : Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. vol. 7272 : Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012 — ISBN 978-3-642-30822-2, pp. 222-235
For a successful collaboration between enterprises, Web services and service compositions need to fulfill certain QoS (Quality of Service) requirements so that they can be trusted by their clients. Thus, the best services have to be chosen for the composition, the performance of the composition needs to be monitored and in case of QoS deviations, appropriate management actions are required. We propose the BPRules language and the BPR-framework that offer novel capabilities and improved flexibility for the management of BPEL processes with regard to QoS concerns. The BPRules language allows to specify the QoS monitoring of BPEL processes and offers a variety of management actions for controlling the process and for the improvement of its QoS behavior. Thereby, the BPR-framework provides the necessary components to perform the QoS monitoring and to execute the management actions. For the selection of high quality services, the BPR-framework comes with efficient selection algorithms, like our OPTIM_PRO algorithm. We present the features of BPRules that we consider as indispensable for managing the services’ QoS behavior.
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Behrenbruch, Kay ; Atzmüller, Martin ; Evers, Christoph ; Schmidt, Ludger ; Stumme, Gerd ; Geihs, Kurt: A Personality Based Design Approach Using Subgroup Discovery. In: Winckler, M. ; Forbrig, P. ; Bernhaupt, R. : Human-Centered Software Engineering, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. vol. 7623 : Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012 — ISBN 978-3-642-34346-9, pp. 259-266
To facilitate user-centered software engineering, developers need an easy to grasp understanding of the user. The use of personas helps to keep specific user needs in mind during the design process. Technology acceptance is of particular interest for the design of innovative applications previously unknown to potential users. Therefore, our research focuses on defining a typology of relevant user characteristics with respect to technology acceptance and transferring those findings to the description of personas. The presented work focuses on the statistical relationship between technology acceptance and personality. We apply sub-group discovery as a statistical tool. Based on the statistically derived subgroups and patterns we define the mentioned personas to help developers to understand different forms of technology acceptance. By integrating the specifically defined personas into existing methods in the field of software engineering the feasibility of the presented approach is demonstrated.
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Evers, Christoph ; Kniewel, Romy ; Geihs, Kurt ; Schmidt, Ludger: Achieving User Participation for Adaptive Applications. In: Bravo, J. ; López-de Ipiña, D. ; Moya, F. : Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. vol. 7656 : Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012 — ISBN 978-3-642-35376-5, pp. 200-207
Adaptive applications establish the basis for many ubiquitous computing scenarios as they can dynamically adapt to changing contexts. But adaptive applications lack of success when the adaptive behaviour does not correspond to the user’s interaction habits. A user study revealed that such applications are not satisfying for complex scenarios with a high degree of user interaction. We claim that there must be a trade-off between automation and user participation. By extending an existing adaptation middleware with capabilities to respect user preference and interaction behaviour we demonstrate how to integrate the user in the self-adaptation loop. Interdisciplinary results from the fields of usability engineering and interaction design include the need for an adaptation notification concept to avoid mismatching adaptation behaviour.
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Amma, Till ; Beifuß, Jewgeni ; Bozic, Zjelko ; Bui, Mike ; Gawora, Fridolin ; Haque, Tareque ; Geihs, Kurt ; Jakob, Stefan ; Kirchner, Dominik ; et al.: Team Description: Carpe Noctem 2012, RoboCup Federation, 2012
Carpe Noctem is a Mid-Size League Robocup team at the University of Kassel. It is part of the Distributed Autonomous Systems Laboratory of the Distributed Systems Group which is well known for its research contributions on middleware platforms, distributed system management, and software technologies for distributed systems. Carpe Noctem is a team of researchers and students who collectively aim at competing in the Robocup championships. Several undergraduate students are involved in the research as part of their bachelor or master thesis, and the achieved results are directly integrated into the overall system. Carpe Noctem successfully developed a modular and platform-independent communication middleware for autonomous robots in the past years. The main research focus has now shifted towards representation and robust execution of cooperative strategies in dynamic domains. As such, Robocup is again an ideal domain to evaluate our approach.
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Behrenbruch, K. ; Kniewel, R. ; Niemczyk, S. ; Schmidt, L.: Akzeptanz technikferner Nutzergruppen für innovative Smartphone-Apps. In: VDI/VDE-Gesellschaft Mess- und Automatisierungstechnik,: Useware 2012: Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion (Kaiserslautern 2012), VDI-Berichte. vol. 2179. Düsseldorf : VDI-Verlag, 2012, pp. 65–74
Zu einer sozialverträglichen Technikgestaltung neuartiger Smartphone-Anwendungen gehört es, die Bedürfnisse unterschiedlicher Nutzergruppen zu berücksichtigen. Dieser Beitrag stellt die Kasseler Entwicklungsmethodik vor, die darauf ausgerichtet ist, softwarebasierte Systeme sozialverträglich zu gestalten und im Rahmen der Zusammenarbeit im Forschungsprojekt VENUS gemeinsam entworfen wird. Die koordinierte Zusammenarbeit von Experten aus den Bereichen Informatik, Rechts- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften sowie Ergonomie im Rahmen der Kasseler Methodik wird im Folgenden am Beispiel der Gestaltung der Smartphone Applikation Meet-U dargestellt. Dabei wird das Entwicklungsergebnis mit Kasseler Methodik (Meet-U-A) im Rahmen einer Evaluation der Nutzerakzeptanz mit einer Version B der Anwendung (Meet-U-B) verglichen, die ohne Kasseler Methodik entwickelt wurde. Die Auswertung der Evaluationen (n=150 bzw. n=153) erfolgte mit dem Ziel, die folgende Hypothese zu prüfen: Die Entwicklung nach Kasseler Methodik führt zu einer höheren Akzeptanz bei einer relativ technikfernen Nutzergruppe. Für die technikfernen Personen konnte tatsächlich eine signifikante Erhöhung der Akzeptanz von etwa 50\% (Meet-U-B) auf 70\% (Meet-U-A) festgestellt werden. Die Ergebnisse der Evaluationen werden bezogen auf ihre Aussagekraft für die Qualität der Kasseler Methodik diskutiert.
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Kirchner, Dominik ; Geihs, Kurt: Merging Backgrounds – An Interdisciplinary Course Concept for a Robotic Laboratory. In: Springer,: 3rd International Workshop Teaching Robotics, Teaching with Robotics. Riva del Garda (Trento, Italy), 2012, pp. 107-116
Interdisciplinary work is seen as an essential part in industrial development and scientific research projects. Modern education should address this skill. But integrating interdisciplinarity in a teaching curriculum is a demanding task. In this paper, we present a design of an introductory robotic laboratory, which is suitable for students in robotic related study programs, such as computer science, electrical engineering, mechatronics, and mechanical engineering. The course concept proposes the application of optional individual tasks to balance the different backgrounds and levels of the participants. Active participation and self-contained learning is identified as a key aspect in the proposed concept and therefore specifically addressed. Criteria for a suitable robot kit were formulated and a corresponding robot kit as an attractive teaching platform is presented. Results of a questionnaire provide an evaluation of the realized course concept.
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Kirchhoff, Marc ; Geihs, Kurt: Querying SAP ERP with SPARQL. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Semantic Systems, I-SEMANTICS '12. Graz, Austria : ACM, 2012 — ISBN 978-1-4503-1112-0, p. 173--176
Most of the mid-size and large companies employ enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to manage their business data and business processes. Business entities like purchase orders, equipments or customers are represented as business objects in ERP systems. Multiple business objects can span a business object graph by referencing each other. The SAP ERP system provides several interfaces to access business objects. Querying business objects with regard to their positions within a business object graph by using these existing interfaces is not an easy task. In this paper, we propose to use the RDF query language SPARQL to express queries against business object graphs. We argue that SPARQL is well suited to query business objects in ERP systems and introduce an architecture to provide a SPARQL endpoint on top of an SAP ERP system. This novel approach simplifies the retrieval of data from ERP systems and makes it available to the integration with the Semantic Web.
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Hallsteinsen, S. ; Geihs, K. ; Paspallis, N. ; Eliassen, F. ; Horn, G. ; Lorenzo, J. ; Mamelli, A. ; Papadopoulos, G.A.: A development framework and methodology for self-adapting applications in ubiquitous computing environments. In: Journal of Systems and Software vol. 85 (2012), Nr. 12, pp. 2840 - 2859
Today software is the main enabler of many of the appliances and devices omnipresent in our daily life and important for our well being and work satisfaction. It is expected that the software works as intended, and that the software always and everywhere provides us with the best possible utility. This paper discusses the motivation, technical approach, and innovative results of the \MUSIC\ project. \MUSIC\ provides a comprehensive software development framework for applications that operate in ubiquitous and dynamic computing environments and adapt to context changes. Context is understood as any information about the user needs and operating environment which vary dynamically and have an impact on design choices. \MUSIC\ supports several adaptation mechanisms and offers a model-driven application development approach supported by a sophisticated middleware that facilitates the dynamic and automatic adaptation of applications and services based on a clear separation of business logic, context awareness and adaptation concerns. The main contribution of this paper is a holistic, coherent presentation of the motivation, design, implementation, and evaluation of the \MUSIC\ development framework and methodology.
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Geihs, K. ; Leimeister, J.M. ; Rossnagel, A. ; Schmidt, L.: On Socio-technical Enablers for Ubiquitous Computing Applications. In: Applications and the Internet (SAINT), 2012 IEEE/IPSJ 12th International Symposium on, 2012, pp. 405-408
The focus of this paper is on context-aware, self-adaptive ubiquitous computing applications that involve mobile users. The development of such applications is inherently complex for two main reasons: From a technical perspective, context management and adaptation management add complexity to the application design and implementation. From a socio-technical perspective, concerns and requirements related to the social embedding and user acceptance must be addressed in the application design and lead to additional complexity, particularly because sensitive personal data is collected, processed, stored and communicated by such applications. In this position paper we present an analysis of the problem space and a solution approach. We have developed an interdisciplinary methodology that systematically addresses technical as well as non-technical concerns. Our conclusion is that solving the socio-technical challenges will be a key enabler for ubiquitous computing.
