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Taking Community Design Centers (CDC) in the USA as case studies, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of a type of service learning increasingly found in colleges of architecture. Typically, the CDC is a model of architecture's civic engagement that makes claims to “give back” to under-served communities and enhance student learning with applied architectural design work.

This project is part of a long-term engagement as participant observer and ethnographer in the field of architecture. Fieldwork in this investigation is presented as four case studies in separate and specific contexts.

Initial findings suggest there are conflicting intentions and aspirations at work through service learning in architecture and its implementation calls into question who or what is served. The author argues architecture's epistemology, pedagogical structure, and ideology precludes effective civic engagement.

The value of this research is the understanding of how those with power and resources are able to frame their work in low-income communities as service, even though there is little of worth given. It also demonstrates how stratification is reinforced through institutional arrangements in the USA.

Modularity promises to relieve problems of complexity in service systems. However, limited evidence exists of its application in specialized hospital services. The purpose of this paper is to identify enablers, constraints, and outcomes of modularization in specialized hospital services.

A qualitative comparative study of a hematology unit with modular service architecture and an oncology unit with integral service architecture in a university hospital is performed to analyze the service architectures, enablers and constraints of modularization, and outcomes.

A framework and five propositions combining the characteristics of specialized hospital services, enabling activities, and outcomes of modularization were developed. Modular service architecture was developed through limiting the number of treatment components, reorganizing production of standardized components into a separate service unit, and standardizing communication and scheduling in interfaces. Modularization increased service efficiency but diluted ownership of services, decreased customization, and diminished informal communication. This is explained by the specific characteristics of the services: fragmented service delivery, professional autonomy, hierarchy, information asymmetry, and requirement to treat all.

Modularization can increase efficiency in specialized hospital services. However, specific characteristics of specialized care may challenge its application and limit its outcomes.

The study identifies enabling activities and constraints that hospital managers should take into account when developing modular service systems.

This is the first empirical study exploring the enablers, constraints, and outcomes of modularization in specialized hospital services. The study complements literature on service modularity with reference to specialized hospital services.

Traditional administration of building services regards them as having confined scope, operating in isolation or tightly coupled and providing minimal support for overall coordination and holistic management hindering the provisioning of advanced services. This approach inherently bears weaknesses related to complex services management, results in increased costs, and formulates rigid architectural design that restricts flexibility and extensibility. Taking into consideration this set of drawbacks, the purpose of this paper is to propose exploiting a service‐oriented architecture that will allow for dynamic, coordinated and distributed building services management.

The paper presents the design of an enterprise‐based networking architecture for building services and systems and specifies its functional components.

The proposed architecture is compliant with established practices in the building automation field and focuses on catering for a wide spectrum of building and enterprise level services. A specific deployment use‐case scenario and its related implementation issues is considered, so as to promote interoperability and adoption of open standards and principles for the system level performance evaluation of the proposed architecture is also examined.

Literature review is not exhaustive and evaluation of the proposed architecture should be performed in a more systematic manner.

Adoption of a service‐oriented view as far as facilities management is concerned.

This paper identifies through a thorough literature review the research problems in the area of building services integration and proposes an approach to enable successful integration. The novelty of this work is based on the application of the state‐of‐the‐art in enterprise networking for integration of building management and IT‐based services.

Electric mobility as a service (eMaaS) is suggested as a possible solution to ease transportation and lessen environmental issues by providing a collaborative transport sharing infrastructure that is based on electric vehicles (EVs) such as electric cars, electric bicycles and so on. Accordingly, this study aims to propose a multi-tier architecture to support the collection, processing, analytics and usage of mobility data in providing eMaaS within smart cities. The architecture uses application programming interfaces to enable interoperability between different infrastructures required for eMaaS and allow multiple partners to exchange and share data for making decision regarding electric mobility services.

Design science methodology based on a case study by interview was used to collect data from an infrastructure company in Norway to verify the applicability of the proposed multi-tier architecture.

Findings suggest that the architecture offers an approach for collecting, aggregating, processing and provisioning of data originating from sources to improve electric mobility in smart cities. More importantly, findings from this study provide guidance for municipalities and policymakers in improving electric mobility services. Moreover, the author’s findings provide a practical data-driven mobility use case that can be used by transport companies in deploying eMaaS in smart cities.

Data was collected from a single company in Norway, hence, it is required to further verify the architecture with data collected from other companies.

eMaaS operates on heterogeneous data, which are generated from EVs and used by citizens and stakeholders such as city administration, municipality transport providers, charging station providers and so on. Therefore, the proposed architecture enables the sharing and usage of generated data as openly available data to be used in creating value-added services to improve citizen’s quality of life and viability of businesses.

This study proposes the deployment of electric mobility to address increased usage of vehicles, which contributes to pollution of the environment that has a serious effect on citizen’s quality of life.

This study proposes a multi-tier architecture that stores, processes, analyze and provides data and related services to improve electric mobility within smart cities. The multi-tier architecture aims to support and increase eMaaS operation of EVs toward improving transportation services for city transport operators and citizens for sustainable transport and mobility system.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the problems associated with the development of e‐government in Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) countries and propose a novel framework for adopting service orientation. This framework includes a new approach and architecture for implementing service orientation called SBA‐eGOV (Service Based Architecture for E‐Government).

A comprehensive literature review was carried out to study various service oriented architecture (SOA) adoption strategies and implementation methods. The most appropriate adoption strategy and implementation method were selected. Web service adoption and implementation/development methodologies were designed separately, and then integrated to form one single framework. Web services best practices were studied to identify the specificities of web services for e‐government projects in SADC countries. A service orientation framework, which includes a service orientation development/implementation method, was developed for e‐government projects. Data from the UN report on e‐government readiness for year 2004‐2010 were analysed.

The trend showed that the e‐government index of SADC countries has been stagnating (even degrading) since 2005. One of the main reasons is the lack of software application integration. The main area of weakness is the lack of a complete framework for adopting and implementing web services. A framework for adopting service orientation, developing web services and deploying e‐services is required to enable application software integration.

By applying the proposed framework, e‐services can be deployed more rapidly to citizens, businesses and government departments.

SBA‐eGOV can be adopted by countries where e‐government projects have completed the “Internalisation” and “Interaction” stages and use to deliver e‐services to citizens.

This work comprises development of a new framework, SBA‐eGOV, which consists of a service‐orientation adoption methodology, a service‐orientation implementation methodology and a service‐based architecture for government. SBA‐eGOV is a novel and complete framework which addresses service‐orientation adoption, development and implementation. To date, no such research work has been undertaken to analyse and solve the problems surrounding e‐government projects in SADC.

The aim of this paper is to report on the adaptive e-contract information management reference architecture using the systematic literature review (SLR) method. Enterprises need to effectively design and implement complex adaptive e-contract information management architecture to support dynamic service interactions or transactions.

The SLR method is three-fold and was adopted as follows. First, a customized literature search with relevant selection criteria was developed, which was then applied to initially identify a set of 1,573 papers. Second, 55 of 1,573 papers were selected for review based on the initial review of each identified paper title and abstract. Finally, based on the second review, 24 papers relevant to this research were selected and reviewed in detail.

This detailed review resulted in the adaptive e-contract information management reference architecture elements including structure, life cycle and supporting technology.

The reference architecture elements could serve as a taxonomy for researchers and practitioners to develop context-specific service e-contract information management architecture to support dynamic service interactions for value co-creation. The results are limited to the number of selected databases and papers reviewed in this study.

This paper offers a review of the body of knowledge and novel e-contract information management reference architecture, which is important to support the emerging trends of internet of services.

Various forms of IT sourcing used by audit clients create issues of concern for external auditors. This article investigates the nature and basic characteristics of service‐oriented architecture (SOA), a modern information system architecture strategy, to ascertain whether the use of SOA by a service consumer audit client would have an impact on the activities typically performed by the external auditor. It was found that SOA presents a complete shift in the way IT application functionality is constructed and integrated and inevitably effects changes in the accounting system and the related internal controls of the SOA service consumer. As a result SOA has a significant impact on the activities performed during the audit process and introduces various SOA‐related aspects that need to be considered by the external auditor of a SOA service consumer.

The previous generations of implemented B2B e‐commerce hub solutions (e‐Marketplaces) did not successfully fulfil the requirements of buyers and suppliers (“Participants”) in different business domains to carry out their daily business and online commercial transactions with one another because of their inappropriateness, and lack of flexibility. The limitations of these provided solutions came from a lot of architectural and technological challenges in the provided technical architectures that were used to build these solutions. This research aims to provide a proposed architecture to build integrated B2B e‐Commerce hub solutions. It also aims to make use of bottom‐up/top‐down approaches to building an integrated solution and to resolve the reasons for the failure of previous generations of B2B e‐commerce hubs.

The research uses the EDI reference model, which is provided by the ISO organization to survey and analyze the challenges of previous generations of B2B e‐Commerce hubs solutions and their architectures. The study develops a proposed solution architecture based on the recent approaches to building IOSs to build a B2B e‐commerce hub solution architecture that can be used to implement vertical B2B e‐commerce hubs (vertical e‐Marketplaces). The paper assesses the capabilities of the proposed solution architecture for building vertical B2B e‐Marketplaces by applying the proposed architecture to the building of a vertical B2B e‐Marketplace for the oil and gas sector in Egypt.

Previous B2B e‐Commerce hub initiatives failed to extend their products and services to their “Participants”, and required substantial investment and effort from each “Participant” to join such a B2B e‐Commerce hub. The failure of these IOS projects lies in their inability to integrate B2B e‐Commerce networks based on IOS and consequently, they supported very few partners and “Participants”. These IOS approaches did not resolve the existing challenges of B2B e‐Commerce hubs, especially in the realm of interoperability.

The main contribution of the proposed architecture comes from the creation of a clear automatic path between a business requirements layer and a technology layer by combining both Service Oriented Architecture and management requirements in a single framework to provide dynamic products and flexible services. It provides a complete Multi Channel Framework to resolve the interoperability challenges.

Internet has changed radically in the way people interact in the virtual world, in their careers or social relationships. IoT technology has added a new vision to this process by enabling connections between smart objects and humans, and also between smart objects themselves, which leads to anything, anytime, anywhere, and any media communications. IoT allows objects to physically see, hear, think, and perform tasks by making them talk to each other, share information and coordinate decisions. To enable the vision of IoT, it utilizes technologies such as ubiquitous computing, context awareness, RFID, WSN, embedded devices, CPS, communication technologies, and internet protocols. IoT is considered to be the future internet, which is significantly different from the Internet we use today. The purpose of this paper is to provide up-to-date literature on trends of IoT research which is driven by the need for convergence of several interdisciplinary technologies and new applications.

A comprehensive IoT literature review has been performed in this paper as a survey. The survey starts by providing an overview of IoT concepts, visions and evolutions. IoT architectures are also explored. Then, the most important components of IoT are discussed including a thorough discussion of IoT operating systems such as Tiny OS, Contiki OS, FreeRTOS, and RIOT. A review of IoT applications is also presented in this paper and finally, IoT challenges that can be recently encountered by researchers are introduced.

Studies of IoT literature and projects show the disproportionate importance of technology in IoT projects, which are often driven by technological interventions rather than innovation in the business model. There are a number of serious concerns about the dangers of IoT growth, particularly in the areas of privacy and security; hence, industry and government began addressing these concerns. At the end, what makes IoT exciting is that we do not yet know the exact use cases which would have the ability to significantly influence our lives.

This survey provides a comprehensive literature review on IoT techniques, operating systems and trends.

Services are highly important in a world economy which has increasingly become service driven. There is a growing need to better understand the possibilities for, and requirements of, designing modular service architectures. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the roots of the emerging research stream on service modularity, provide a concise overview of existing work on the subject, and outline an agenda for future research on service modularity and architecture. The articles in the special issue offer four diverse sets of research on service modularity and architecture.

The paper is built on a literature review mapping the current body of literature on the topic and developing future research directions in service modularity and architecture.

The growing focus on services has triggered needs to investigate the suitability and implementation of physical-product-focused modularity principles and theories in service contexts, and to search for principles/theories that enhance services. The expanding research stream has explored various aspects of service modularity in empirical contexts. Future research should focus on service-specific modularity theories and principles, platform-based and mass-customized service business models, comparative research designs, customer perspectives and service experience, performance in context of modular services, empirical evidence of benefits and challenges, architectural innovation in services, modularization in multi-provider contexts, and modularity in hybrid offerings combining service and tangible product modules.

Nine areas are recommended for further research on service modularity and architecture. The introductory piece also discusses the roots of service modularity and provides an overview of current contributions.