A domain specific language for domotic systems

To cope with modernity, the interesting of having a fully automated house has been increasing over the years, as technology evolves and as our lives become more stressful and overloaded. An automation system provides a way to simplify some daily tasks, allowing us to have more spare time to perform activities where we are really needed. There are some systems in this domain that try to implement these characteristics, but this kind of technology is at its early stages of evolution being that it is still far away of empowering the user with the desired control over a habitation. The reason is that the mentioned systems miss some important features such as adaptability, extension and evolution. These systems, developed from a bottom-up approach, are often tailored for programmers and domain experts, discarding most of the times the end users that remain with unfinished interfaces or products that they have difficulty to control. Moreover, complex behaviors are avoided, since they are extremely difficult to implement mostly due to the necessity of handling priorities, conflicts and device calibration. Besides, these solutions are only reachable at very high costs, yet they still have the limitation of being difficult to configure by non-technical people once in runtime operation. As a result, it is necessary to create a tool that allows the execution of several automated actions, with an interface that is easy to use but at the same time supports all the main features of this domain. It is also desirable that this tool is independent of the hardware so it can be reused, thus a Model Driven Development approach (MDD) is the ideal option, as it is a method that follows those principles. Since the automation domain has some very specific concepts, the use of models should be combined with a Domain Specific Language (DSL). With these two methods, it is possible to create a solution that is adapted to the end users, but also to domain experts and programmers due to the several levels of abstraction that can be added to diminish the complexity of use. The aim of this thesis is to design a Domain Specific Language (DSL) that uses the Model Driven Development approach (MDD), with the purpose of supporting Home Automation (HA) concepts. In this implementation, the development of simple and complex scenarios should be supported and will be one of the most important concerns. This DSL should also support other significant features in this domain, such as the ability to schedule tasks, which is something that is limited in the current existing solutions.

Fostering e-participation sustainability through a BPM-driven semantic model

According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (2014), 68% of Europeans tend not to trust national governments. As the increasing alienation of citizens from politics endangers democracy and welfare, governments, practitioners and researchers look for innovative means to engage citizens in policy matters. One of the measures intended to overcome the so-called democratic deficit is the promotion of civic participation. Digital media proliferation offers a set of novel characteristics related to interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, social networking and inclusiveness that enable new forms of societal-wide collaboration with a potential impact on leveraging participative democracy. Following this trend, e-Participation is an emerging research area that consists in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to mediate and transform the relations among citizens and governments towards increasing citizens’ participation in public decision-making. However, despite the widespread efforts to implement e-Participation through research programs, new technologies and projects, exhaustive studies on the achieved outcomes reveal that it has not yet been successfully incorporated in institutional politics. Given the problems underlying e-Participation implementation, the present research suggested that, rather than project-oriented efforts, the cornerstone for successfully implementing e-Participation in public institutions as a sustainable added-value activity is a systematic organisational planning, embodying the principles of open-governance and open-engagement. It further suggested that BPM, as a management discipline, can act as a catalyst to enable the desired transformations towards value creation throughout the policy-making cycle, including political, organisational and, ultimately, citizen value. Following these findings, the primary objective of this research was to provide an instrumental model to foster e-Participation sustainability across Government and Public Administration towards a participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative democracy. The developed artefact, consisting in an e-Participation Organisational Semantic Model (ePOSM) underpinned by a BPM-steered approach, introduces this vision. This approach to e-Participation was modelled through a semi-formal lightweight ontology stack structured in four sub-ontologies, namely e-Participation Strategy, Organisational Units, Functions and Roles. The ePOSM facilitates e-Participation sustainability by: (1) Promoting a common and cross-functional understanding of the concepts underlying e-Participation implementation and of their articulation that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical users; (2) Providing an organisational model which allows a centralised and consistent roll-out of strategy-driven e-Participation initiatives, supported by operational units dedicated to the execution of transformation projects and participatory processes; (3) Providing a standardised organisational structure, goals, functions and roles related to e-Participation processes that enhances process-level interoperability among government agencies; (4) Providing a representation usable in software development for business processes’ automation, which allows advanced querying using a reasoner or inference engine to retrieve concrete and specific information about the e-Participation processes in place. An evaluation of the achieved outcomes, as well a comparative analysis with existent models, suggested that this innovative approach tackling the organisational planning dimension can constitute a stepping stone to harness e-Participation value.

Methodology for WSN communication technologies automated field tests

Wireless Sensor Networks(WSN) are networks of devices used to sense and act that applies wireless radios to communicate. To achieve a successful implementation of a wireless device it is necessary to take in consideration the existence of a wide variety of radios available, a large number of communication parameters (payload, duty cycle, etc.) and environmental conditions that may affect the device’s behaviour. However, to evaluate a specific radio towards a unique application it might be necessary to conduct trial experiments, with such a vast amount of devices, communication parameters and environmental conditions to take into consideration the number of trial cases generated can be surprisingly high. Thus, making trial experiments to achieve manual validation of wireless communication technologies becomes unsuitable due to the existence of a high number of trial cases on the field. To overcome this technological issue an automated test methodology was introduced, presenting the possibility to acquire data regarding the device’s behaviour when testing several technologies and parameters that care for a specific analysis. Therefore, this method advances the validation and analysis process of the wireless radios and allows the validation to be done without the need of specific and in depth knowledge about wireless devices.

Growth hacking model for B2B saas startups

The following project introduces a model of Growth Hacking strategies for business-tobusiness Software-as-a-Service startups that was developed in collaboration with and applied to a Portuguese startup called Liquid. The work addresses digital marketing channels such as content marketing, email marketing, social marketing and selling. Further, the company’s product, pricing strategy, partnerships and website communication are examined. Applying best case practices, competitor benchmarks and interview insights from numerous industry influencers and experts, areas for improvement are deduced and procedures for each of those channels recommended.