3D models (or assets) that are present in many of modern software applications are first modeled by graphic designers using dedicated computer graphic tools and then integrated into such software applications or apps by software developers. This simple workflow/procedure requires developers to have a basic grounding in computer graphics, since 3D engines, libraries and third-party software are needed for this kind of integrations. Oftentimes, 3D designers are also required to customize or produce versions of a 3D model and thus, they must re-model all the assets before they are returned back to the developers for integration into the applications. This procedure also occurs whenever a modification or customization is requested. One possible significant improvement to this traditional, poorly automated workflow is to use services-oriented technology and features servitization to carry out the customization of 3D assets on-demand. In this article, we introduce$ \mu $S3D, an open-source microservices-based platform designed to support features relating to the customization of 3D models.$ \mu $S3D not only enables 3D assets to be customized without the need for computer graphic tools or designers, but also allows 3D models to be visualized through web technologies (e.g., HTML, Javascript and web component to visualize and interact with 3D models), thereby avoiding the development of computer graphics libraries or components in final software products. The article describes the elements that$ \mu $S3D comprises, explains how it works and presents a series of load tests to compare the performance (time consumption, CPU and memory utilization) of$ \mu $S3D when implemented and deployed as a microservices platform against a monolithic-based implementation, showing similar results with a low number of users (and requests) but reducing, on average, 64.32% the response time in the microservice-based implementation for a large number of users; reducing CPU utilization on microservice-based implementation and remaining the memory usage more or less constant in both implementations.

T e-Coaches are promising intelligent systems that aims at supporting human everyday life, dispatching advices through different interfaces, such as apps, conversational interfaces and augmented reality interfaces. This workshop aims at exploring how e-coaches might benefit from spatially and time-multiplexed interfaces and from different communication modalities (e.g., text, visual, audio, etc.) according to the context of the interaction.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a set of massively emerging technologies that aim to make our lives better. One of the most suitable application domains is healthcare and wellbeing, where IoT technologies can enhance living environments (ELE). IoT applications are deployed into an IoT ecosystem, which is supported by a specific architecture. The usual IoT architecture model has three different layers (Acquisition, Network and Application), where all the different IoT elements are organized. This architecture has been designed for general purposes, but the deployment of IoT healthcare applications supported by this architecture model exhibits important drawbacks. In particular, this architecture model does not consider IoT devices coexisting with wearables devices, which hinders the design of smart habitats. In this paper we present an IoT-aware architectural model for smart habitats with special emphasis on healthcare domain. The new architecture adds a fourth layer to the traditional IoT architecture, describing the software artefacts and tips needed to support context-aware habitats through the interaction between wearable computing devices and IoT devices. The main goal of the IoT architecture presented is to enhance living environments for elderly people.

Requirements traceability helps to ensure that a re- quirements specification is aligned with the intended stakehold- ers' needs. Such alignment should involve the consideration of why such needs arise, in terms of what problems the stakeholders are faced with, and what kinds of software system may help alle- viate or eliminate the problems. However, little work can be found on requirements traceability that explicitly considers the problems. In this paper, we propose an problem-aware frame- work for establishing requirements traceability, in the context of goal-oriented requirements engineering, which explicitly models problems and their root causes, together with other important ontological concepts, stakeholders' goals, and both functional and non-functional requirements as a solution, and issues. In this framework, ontological concepts are partitioned into layers, re- flecting which traceability links are classified into intra- and in- ter-traceabilities leading to several kinds of links. Additionally, undesirable consequences of inappropriate traceabilities are also categorized. A case study shows some key benefits of the frame- work.

Abstract The awareness and familiarity of elderly people with the use of new technologies have increased considerably in the last few years, which consequently cause a higher willingness to the use of these technologies in their daily lives. This allows the elderly to benefit from technology through active and conscious participation in activities related to health, leisure and promotion of social relationships, fostering active ageing. Three large dimensions cover almost a major part of health care within the framework of early and intermediate stages of active ageing: physical exercise, healthy nutrition and cognitive stimulation. In this paper, we present a nutritional recommender system, Nutrition for Elder Care, intended to help elderly users to draw up their own healthy diet plans following the nutritional experts guidelines. The system has been developed with the intensive use of Semantic Web technologies pursuing knowledge sharing and reuse between different applications and agents and the discovering of implicit new knowledge.

Patients with chronic diseases or people with special health care needs are typically monitored by various health experts that address the problem from several perspectives. These experts usually do not interact directly between them; therefore, the instructions given to the patient by one of them are provided disregarding advices and instructions provided by the others. The collaboration between different health experts in a real context is mandatory to ensure the proper monitoring of the patient. This kind of collaboration, supported by technology, benefits the users' health condition and helps the patient achieve their goals in terms of wellbeing. This paper presents an approach for collaborative management of events related to activity supervisions and monitoring of these patients types. It also introduces a model and a mobile application to support this collaborative work.

Patterns aid in the development of software for micro-businesses. However, capturing recurring concepts in good representations for the purpose of requirements engineering is challenging. Such representations need to be intuitive enough so that non-technical people such as micro-business owners can understand them. At the same time, the representations have to be technical enough so that software developers can use them for software design and development. In this paper, we propose a requirements-based approach for representing micro-business patterns. We describe pattern emergence from observation and analysis. We list down and specify both the functional and nonfunctional requirements of the micro-business in a table and then represent the workflows using diagrams. We use a combination of a business process modeling notation, softgoal interdependency graphs, and our own customized symbols. Four real-world micro-business cases are discussed in the paper in order to see both the strengths and weaknesses of our approach.

In real world, most business processes are subject to time constraints. Equally important as the execution of a process is the time in which it is to be performed. A time constrained business process can be defined as a process whose correct behavior depends not only on the results obtained, but also on the time it is carried out. UML has become an important tool for model-driven software development, perhaps partly thanks to its visually oriented modeling concepts, and it is increasingly being used in business process modeling too. In this paper, we extend UML 2.0 Activity Diagrams with time annotations and new modelling constructs inspired of the Timed CSP language. Furthermore, in order to overcome the lack of formal semantics that these diagrams suffer from, we introduce a set of mapping rules to derive formal specifications in terms of Timed CSP processes from models in the extended Activity Diagrams being proposed. Timed CSP has several features that make it well suited to give a formal semantics for extended Activity Diagrams (e.g., compositionality, well defined denotational and operational semantics, etc.). The proposed mapping rules enable checking whether the model described in an Activity Diagram satisfies such properties as timeliness, deadlock freeness, liveness, etc. In order to show the applicability of our approach, we present a case study from a manufacturing domain.

One of the possibilities for improving decision processes, and the knowledge management across interacting organizations is to explore successful past experiences. Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a problem solving strategy which is based on the reuse of past solutions (cases) to address new problems. Ontologies are a means to facilitate sharing and reuse of bodies of knowledge across organizations and applications on the basis of a well-defined and precise semantics for concepts and terms. This work presents a proposal aimed at knowledge reuse, during the decision activities by means of interwoven concepts from the knowledge management, CBR and ontologies research. This blended approach presents an ontological case construction for CBR systems as theoretical and empirical support for knowledge sharing. We obtain a formal characterization of a case by means of an ontological description of particular cases, and their interrelationships with cases stored in different case-repositories. An architecture for a distributed CBR system is proposed on the basis of a multiagent setting for semantic-based access to knowledge.