This paper proposes a novel semiautomatic system domain data analysis method. The method is based on the iterative acquisition and analysis of a large body of bibliometric data, generation of domain taxonomies, and creation of domain models. The method was applied on a smart grid case study through collection and analysis of more than 6000 documents. We have found that our method produces domain models of comparable quality to the traditional manually produced domain models in a more cost-effective way.

A modern and efficient information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure is essential for managing the challenges in the complex urban systems development. The ICT infrastructure is a complex system consisting of many subsystems and interconnections, which makes the process of planning, designing, and maintaining a comprehensive ICT infrastructure expensive and difficult. Most approaches used for the ICT infrastructure modeling focus typically on a single ICT system, for example, a wireless network. This paper presents a systems modeling approach based on integrating different subsystems and their characteristics into a single model, applying system decomposition, establishing the logical relations between system components, and defining relevant key performance indicators. It is shown that this systems modeling approach facilitates holistic planning, design, and evaluation of the complex ICT infrastructure for a sustainable city. This is demonstrated in the form of a two-scenario Masdar city case study. The case study exhibits the practicality of the derived ICT model and the feasibility of the results.

Automation systems become more and more complex, and their traditional hierarchical and centralized control may not be able to deal with this ever-increasing complexity satisfactorily. Decentralized approaches are considered promising, but they are not yet sufficiently understood for widespread industrial application. In particular, agent-based control has not yet achieved its potential, so that more research is still required. Our approach is based on the concept of an automation agent composed of a hardware (HW) component and a software (SW) component, where the HW component can be viewed as an embodiment of this SW component. These agents represent the parts of a flexible automation system. In particular, we propose that each such agent has an explicit symbolic representation of itself and of its relations to its environment. More precisely, this new agent architecture contains a reflective world model that includes a representation of this same agent and of its relations to its environment. In addition, the world model contains representations of situations and activities. We show that and how such a self-representation can be used for self-configuration, as well as monitoring, including failure detection in automation systems. The agent performs this self-configuration without any human intervention and just based on a brief specification of the HW configuration. The monitoring is based on automatically raised expectations for the system's behavior and allows failure detection without any specific failure detection code.

Today's self-managing systems would ideally be able to adapt themselves (their internal structure or behavior), as well as to autonomously participate in larger, self-organizing systems. Analogously, the enterprises or other socio-economic systems autonomously manage themselves - they make decisions on how to adapt their structure and behavior, and how to organize with other entities in the environment. To connect internal self-adaptive with external self-organizational behavior, an enterprise is “aware” of itself and of its environment, and acts according to this awareness. This position paper proposes to address the challenges of a complex distributed self-managing system by making entities in such a system able to adapt themselves similarly to how companies manage themselves in socio-economic systems. To enable the knowledge transfer between these two fields, the paper proposes to utilize symbolic models which will be used by self-managing systems for knowledge representation and reasoning. This will make such systems in a way also self-aware and enable both self-adaptive and self-organizing capabilities. The paper discusses research directions to make this approach possible.

Automatic generation of user interfaces (UIs) has made some progress, but it still faces many challenges, especially when starting from high-level models. We developed an approach and a supporting tool for modeling discourses, from which the tool can generate WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointer) UIs automatically. This involves several complex steps, most of which we have been able to implement using model-driven transformations. When given specific target platform specifications, UIs for a variety of devices such as PCs, mobile phones and PDAs can be generated automatically.

Manufacturing systems have become very complex, and the traditional hierarchical and centralized approaches are not adequate any more. Decentralized approaches are considered promising, but they are not yet sufficiently understood for widespread industrial application. In particular, agent-based control has not yet achieved its potential, so that more research is still required. Therefore, we propose a new architecture of automation agents. Such an agent is composed of a hardware component and a software component, where the hardware component can be viewed as an embodiment of this software component in its manufacturing environment. An important part of the software component is a world model repository of the automation agent. As a special innovation, the world model is reflective in the sense, that it contains a symbolic representation of the automation agent and of its relations to its environment as well. The world model repository is made up of representations of situations and activities. In summary, we propose an automation agent architecture with a reflective world model for use in manufacturing systems.

Instead of developing user interfaces (UIs) directly, we argue for specifying an interaction design from which UIs can be automatically synthesized. We present an approach to using communicative acts in high-level specification of interaction design, which is implemented and allows automated synthesis of interfaces for multiple devices. Communicative acts derive from speech act theory and carry desired intentions in interactions. Models of communicative acts, UI domain objects and interaction sequences comprise interaction design specifications in our approach and are based on a metamodel that we have defined. As a result, the usability of a synthesized user interface of a real-world application turned out to be good

User interfaces are very important for the success of many computer-based applications these days. However, their development takes time, requires experts for user-interface design as well as experienced programmers and is very expensive. This problem becomes even more severe through the ubiquitous use of a variety of devices such as PCs, mobile phones, PDAs etc., since each of these devices has its own specifics that require a special user interface.Therefore, we developed a tool-supported approach to automatically synthesize multi-device user interfaces from high-level specifications in the form of models. In contrast to previous approaches focusing on abstracting the user interface per se, we make use of communicative acts derived from speech act theory for the specification of desired user intentions in interactions. In this way, we approach a solution to the given problem, since user interfaces can be efficiently provided without experience in implementing them.