Stakeholder engagement in early stage product-service system development for healthcare informatics

This paper presents the findings from four case studies on stakeholder engagement in new health information and communication technology (ICT) product-service system (PSS) development. The degree of connectivity between the new health ICT PSS and its intended operating environment has emerged to be an important contextual factor that may impact the decision of stakeholder engagement in the early stage development process. Along with the proposition of a four-level framework to guide stakeholder identification for new PSS development, three stakeholder engagement propositions that are based on the degree of connectivity are developed. Analysis has shown that there can be two types of connectivity: data and process. Moreover, each connectivity type can be characterized by how much the new PSS is connected with its environment: independent if there is no linkage, linked if it interfaces with, or incorporated if it is embedded into. Furthermore, depending upon whether and to what extent the PSS has data and process connectivity with its intended operating environment, the stakeholder engagement needs in early stage development vary. The propositions presented in this paper provide important directions for future work exploring PSS characterization and stakeholder engagement decision in early stage new PSS development in the healthcare industry. © 2013 PICMET.

Articulating current service development practices: a qualitative analysis of eleven mental health projects.

BACKGROUND: The utilisation of good design practices in the development of complex health services is essential to improving quality. Healthcare organisations, however, are often seriously out of step with modern design thinking and practice. As a starting point to encourage the uptake of good design practices, it is important to understand the context of their intended use. This study aims to do that by articulating current health service development practices. METHODS: Eleven service development projects carried out in a large mental health service were investigated through in-depth interviews with six operation managers. The critical decision method in conjunction with diagrammatic elicitation was used to capture descriptions of these projects. Stage-gate design models were then formed to visually articulate, classify and characterise different service development practices. RESULTS: Projects were grouped into three categories according to design process patterns: new service introduction and service integration; service improvement; service closure. Three common design stages: problem exploration, idea generation and solution evaluation - were then compared across the design process patterns. Consistent across projects were a top-down, policy-driven approach to exploration, underexploited idea generation and implementation-based evaluation. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides insight into where and how good design practices can contribute to the improvement of current service development practices. Specifically, the following suggestions for future service development practices are made: genuine user needs analysis for exploration; divergent thinking and innovative culture for idea generation; and fail-safe evaluation prior to implementation. Better training for managers through partnership working with design experts and researchers could be beneficial.

Design and path planning for a remote-brained service robot

This paper presents a novel robot named "TUT03-A" with expert systems, speech interaction, vision systems etc. based on remote-brained approach. The robot is designed to have the brain and body separated. There is a cerebellum in the body. The brain with the expert systems is in charge of decision and the cerebellum control motion of the body. The brain-body. interface has many kinds of structure. It enables a brain to control one or more cerebellums. The brain controls all modules in the system and coordinates their work. The framework of the robot allows us to carry out different kinds of robotics research in an environment that can be shared and inherited over generations. Then we discuss the path planning method for the robot based on ant colony algorithm. The mathematical model is established and the algorithm is achieved with the Starlogo simulating environment. The simulation result shows that it has strong robustness and eligible pathfinding efficiency.

Design and path planning for a remote-brained service robot

This article introduced an effective design method of robot called remote-brain, which is made the brain and body separated. It leaves the brain in the mother environment, by which we mean the environment in which the brain's software is developed, and talks with its body by wireless links. It also presents a real robot TUT06-B based on this method which has human-machine interaction, vision systems, manipulator etc. Then it discussed the path planning method for the robot based on ant colony algorithm in details, especially the Ant-cycle model. And it also analyzed the parameter of the algorithm which can affect the convergence. Finally, it gives the program flow chat of this algorithm.

Web Services Workflows—Composition, Co-Ordination, and Transactions in Service-Oriented Computing

Web services can be seen as a newly emerging research area for Service-oriented Computing and their implementation in Service-oriented Architectures. Web services are self-contained, self-describing modular applications or components providing services. Web services may be dynamically aggregated, composed, and enacted as Web services Workflows. This requires frameworks and interaction protocols for their co-ordination and transaction support. In a Service-oriented Computing setting, transactions are more complex, involve multiple parties (roles), span many organizations, and may be long-running, consisting of a highly decentralized service partner and performed by autonomous entities. A Service-oriented Transaction Model has to provide comprehensive support for long-running propositions including negotiations, conversations, commitments, contracts, tracking, payments, and exception handling. Current transaction models and mechanisms including their protocols and primitives do not sufficiently cater for quality-aware and long running transactions comprising loosely-coupled (federated) service partners and resources. Web services transactions require co-ordination behavior provided by a traditional transaction mechanism to control the operations and outcome of an application. Furthermore, Web services transactions require the capability to handle the co-ordination of processing outcomes or results from multiple services in a more flexible manner. This requires more relaxed forms of transactions—those that do not strictly have to abide by the ACID properties—such as loosely-coupled collaboration and workflows. Furthermore, there is a need to group Web services into applications that require some form of correlation, but do not necessarily require transactional behavior. The purpose of this paper is to provide a state-of-the-art review and overview of some proposed standards surrounding Web services composition, co-ordination, and transaction. In particular the Business Process Execution Language for Web services (BPEL4WS), its co-ordination, and transaction frameworks (WS-Co-ordination and WS-Transaction) are discussed.

基于BPEL的Web Service组合的数据流分析测试方法

随着Web Service组合变得越来越复杂,通过测试来保证服务质量和可靠性也变得越来越重要.将传统数据流分析方法扩展用于Web Service组合测试,提出了一种基于BPEL的Web Service组合的数据流分析测试方法.该方法基于一个测试模型:Web Service组合测试模型WSCTM,该测试模型可以捕获Web Service组合的数据流接口.采用基于服务的模型WSCTM,数据流可以从3个视点来分析:服务间、服务内和服务实现构件间.从而,Web Service组合的数据流测试可以在三层上得到实现.基于以上方法,可得到Web Service组合的定义-使用链,最终可产生满足既定测试标准以获得需求Web服务组合质量要求的测试路径.

Delegation, Arbitration and High-Level Service Discovery as Key Elements of a Software Infrastructure for Pervasive Computing

The dream of pervasive computing is slowly becoming a reality. A number of projects around the world are constantly contributing ideas and solutions that are bound to change the way we interact with our environments and with one another. An essential component of the future is a software infrastructure that is capable of supporting interactions on scales ranging from a single physical space to intercontinental collaborations. Such infrastructure must help applications adapt to very diverse environments and must protect people's privacy and respect their personal preferences. In this paper we indicate a number of limitations present in the software infrastructures proposed so far (including our previous work). We then describe the framework for building an infrastructure that satisfies the abovementioned criteria. This framework hinges on the concepts of delegation, arbitration and high-level service discovery. Components of our own implementation of such an infrastructure are presented.

Evolution feature oriented model driven product line engineering approach for synergistic and dynamic service evolution in Clouds: four kinds of schema.

The proposed research will focus on developing a novel approach to solve Software Service Evolution problems in Computing Clouds. The approach will support dynamic evolution of the software service in clouds via a set of discovered evolution patterns. An initial survey informed us that such an approach does not exist yet and is in urgent need. Evolution Requirement can be classified into evolution features; researchers can describe the whole requirement by using evolution feature typology, the typology will define the relation and dependency between each features. After the evolution feature typology has been constructed, evolution model will be created to make the evolution more specific. Aspect oriented approach can be used for enhance evolution feature-model modularity. Aspect template code generation technique will be used for model transformation in the end. Product Line Engineering contains all the essential components for driving the whole evolution process.

Adapting Home Service Robot Behaviours by Experience Reuse and Interaction with Humans

Meng, Q., Lee, M. (2003). Adapting Home Service Robot Behaviours by Experience Reuse and Interaction with Humans. 673-678. Paper presented at IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM 2003), Port Island, Kobe, Japan