In mobile computing developers will need to develop applications that will interact with the end user. Context-aware applications notify or ask users what they want based on what they have sensed or on a user profile. Event-driven mobile computing detects conditions of interest to users and notifies them accordingly. In this paper we discuss the importance and challenges in designing event-driven applications through a comparison between some event-driven metamodels and propose an event metamodel to instantiate productive and comprehensible models.

Due to the cut throat competition among organizations, business process improvement is now an everyday activity. A relentless activity that makes business processes more complex than ever. As they get more complex, the improvement rounds become time-consuming, costly and the quality of each outcome is put into jeopardy, which is somehow paradoxical with the concept of improvement. In this paper, we propose a business process improvement technique based on ubiquitous computing. First, we couple business processes with ubiquitous computing and define a ubiquitous business process. Then, we explain how ubiquitous computing positively impacts the performance metrics of business processes. Afterwards, we set a specification for designing ubiquitous business processes by extending BPMN. Finally, we propose a concrete case study about time-banking to corroborate our theory. A comparative study of the same process, in ubiquitous and non-ubiquitous versions, is established. The results clearly illustrate that ubiquitous computing impacts positively the business process performance metrics. Still, the case study corroborates that ubiquitous computing not only improves a business process but also enables it to get improved with the least of human interventions.

This article addresses the design of Information System (IS) within a vision including business process and business service concepts. Indeed, the concept of business service has quickly become more important in the context of information systems engineering. It is proposed as a new paradigm that promotes the reuse of conceptual units in order to improve the flexibility and efficiency of the business processes of the company. To do this, we propose a model of business service that encapsulate an elementary business unit accompanied by an assembly approach to allow the reuse of the business service for the design of business processes.

Component-based development methods (CBDM) become largely adopted and used. They replace the traditional methods by the introduction, in their development lifecycle, of two processes: design for reuse and design by reuse. However, these two processes are not clearly established and are combined in the majority of the CBDM. This paper aims to propose an approach to extend a CBDM by the reuse processes, using the Symphony method as a reference. A special interest is given to the reuse of business component for which we propose a conceptual model based on the variability concept that we consider a key property in a reuse process.

Since a component-based information system has different requirements, components customization for various constraints is needed. Thus, the ability of reusable components to be varied and appropriate to different information systems requirements is a key property in reusable component development, especially in business component (BC) development. In this paper, a BC customization approach is presented. In order to do this, we focus on the variability concept, which is defined as the ability of a software artefact to be changed or customized to be reused in multiple contexts. Hence, the objective of this work is to specify business components with the consideration of commonality and variability in a business domain, in order to increase their reusability and applicability.