The Digital Twin (DT) concept has overcome its initial definition based on a purely descriptive approach focusing on modelling physical objects, often using CAD. Today DT often describes a behavioural approach that can simulate an object’s dynamics, monitor its state, and control or predict its behaviour. Although DTs are attracting significant attention and offer many advantages in the design of especially cyber-physical systems, most proposals have focused on developing DTs for a specific use case or need without providing a more holistic approach to its design. We aim to propose a domain-agnostic approach for architecting DTs. Here, DTs are directly supported by Domain-Driven Design’s notion of Bounded Contexts (BCs), hiding all the domain-inherent specifications behind BC boundaries. These BCs are also the central abstraction in many microservice architectures and can be used to describe DTs. A Wind Turbine DT architecture is used as a running example to describe how every relevant DT property can be satisfied following our proposal for architecting digital twins. A qualitative evaluation of this case by five external practitioners shows that our DDD-based proposal consistently outperforms the 5-dimension model used as the reference approach.

Human mobility is one of the most important concerns in smart city initiatives and is especially relevant when combined with accessibility issues. This paper describes work in the context of the Access@City Research Project, which seeks to improve the accessibility in the public transport system by using available information (open data, semantic-aware knowledge) provided by transport organisations. However, these organisations provide partial data, and a lot of information is still available only on their websites, or simply does not exist. This absence can be tackled using a playful approach – the use of gaming apps to obtain and update accessibility information. In this paper, we describe the use of a hybrid reality game (HRG) to enrich information regarding the accessibility of subway stations. In turn, the player improves her score, which is included as part of the game. The correlation between these observations is able to provide, in a relatively short time, an accurate description of the accessibility of these stations. In summary, this playful approach makes it possible to recover a set of accessibility data that ultimately provide these smart capabilities, which are the core of this ‘accessible city’ endeavour.

Nowadays, software systems remain useful and competitive; entail the inevitable need to change over time and to be adapted to new technologies, platforms, and architectures. These quick changes imply following systematic, automated, or standardised processes that provide recommendations and guidelines to architects during software architecture reconstruction. Considerable research work on architecture reconstruction has been conducted. However, it needs to be studied thoroughly to determine what are the common activities and elements to reconstruct software architectures, and to define a reference process for systematically guiding the evolution of software architectures. This work addresses the need for defining a process for software architecture reconstruction called software improvement in the reconstruction of architectures (SIRA). This process has been rigorously designed from the results of a systematic literature review and a small survey of related work. As a result, SIRA integrates and extends previous research and can be conceived as a reference process to reconstruct software architectures in a semi-automated way. In addition, this work also determines the common elements of the architecture reconstruction process: (i) techniques and activities; (ii) architectural elements, patterns, and attributes; (iii) mechanisms and strategies; and (iv) the automation and recommendation tasks of the process.

Systems-of-Systems (SoS) refer to a new class of software-intensive systems, where their constituent systems work cooperatively in order to fulfill specific missions. Characterized by managerial and operational independence, geographic distribution, evolutionary development, and emergent behavior, SoS bring substantial challenges to the software engineering area. SESoS 2015, held in Florence, Italy, on May 17, 2015, as a joint workshop of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), provided a forum to exchange ideas and experiences, analyze current research and development issues, discuss promising solutions, and to explore inspiring visions for the future of Software Engineering (SE) for SoS.

Abstract Software evolution is an increasingly challenging and compelling concern for every developed software system because of the changes in the requirements, the technology, etc. When software evolution is carried out, software architecture emerges as one of the cornerstones that should be considered from two different points of view: as an artifact for the evolution, as it helps the architect plan and restructure the system, and as an artifact of the evolution, because it has to be modified as well. This paper focuses on the second point of view—that is, on the evolution of the software architecture, but taking into account architectural knowledge as a key driver of the process. Given that architecture rationale and design intent are critical in evolving software systems, it is imperative that they be captured in some useful form to aid that evolution process. We present a new approach for evolution styles that extends them by considering in their description the architectural knowledge as a valuable asset of the evolution process. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Model-driven development is recognized as one of the most promising approaches in software engineering. Recent research in the area highlights the importance of using an explicit architectural model in this context. Since service-oriented architectures have also demonstrated to be adequate to overcome current software needs, the idea of using the model-driven approach to generate service-oriented architectural models has successfully flourished in the last years. However, the emphasis on the Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm has led to the design of architectures lacking some desirable features. Knowing the benefits provided by architectural styles, we have found that their use can help us to overcome those needs. Our goal is to obtain a service-oriented model which satisfies the requirements of the concrete architecture and complies with the constraints and vocabulary defined for a specific architectural style. To achieve this, here, we propose to use a weaving model which merges the concrete architectural model with a model of the architectural style of choice.

Although the development of service-based software has evolved greatly in the last years, there is still a lack of accurate development methodologies applied to service orientation. To solve this, we focus on the model- driven development approach, and more specifically in MDA, the proposal by the OMG, as it is one of the main trends in nowadays software engineering. Accordingly, we propose to define a service-oriented software architecture (SOSA) model within a model-driven methodological framework called MIDAS, for the adaptable and flexible development of modern systems. In the present work we study the concepts and elements that need to be defined at a platform independent and neutral abstraction level. This paper reflects our proposal of PIM-level architecture model for service-oriented software architectures within MIDAS.