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This paper aims to review current research and developments with particular reference to the emerging technologies.

A general review and survey of selected research and development topics is given, and studies in software‐intensive systems are highlighted.

The paper illustrates the multi‐ and trans‐disciplinary natures of studies in cybernetics, systems and management science with a view to further research and development activity.

The choice of reviews provides an awareness of current trends in these areas of endeavour.

The reviews are selected from a global database and give a studied assessment of current research and development initiatives.

It is important to take into account the trade‐off between hardware and software systems when total computer‐system reliability/performance is evaluated and assessed. Develops an availability model for a hardware‐software system. The system treated here consists of one hardware and one software subsystem. For the software subsystem, in particular, it is supposed that: the restoration actions are not always performed perfectly; the restoration times for later software failures become longer; and reliability growth occurs in the perfect restoration action. The hardware‐ and software‐failure occurrence phenomena are described by a constant and a geometrically decreasing hazard rate, respectively. The time‐dependent behavior of the system is described by a Markov process. Useful expressions for several quantitative measures of system performance are derived from this model. Finally, numerical examples are presented for illustration of system availability measurement and assessment.

The main purpose of this work is to overcome the difficulty to manage large, dynamic business processes formed from the complicated interplay of business processes of distinct organizations, which take part of strategic alliances of organizations (joint ventures and mergers and acquisitions) and have their software systems as part of complex, large software-intensive systems called Systems of Systems (SoS). Hence, the authors introduce the novel concept of Processes-of-Business Processes (PoP), deepening on their characteristics and related key terms.

Based on the systematically retrieved and analyzed literature and on the authors’ experience from research/industrial projects, the authors defined PoP and have applied them in the Brazilian public health SoS, which involve several organizations and their business processes and their independent software systems as well.

Provided by PoP, a new understanding of the large, dynamic business processes of alliances of organizations is fundamental to advance both the state of the art and the state of the practice on business process management.

The adoption of PoP in other real-world scenarios is still required to get quantitative evidence.

The adoption of PoP can certainly contribute to the success of new businesses and even promoting sustainability and longevity of SoS, which are in fact deeply impacted by business processes.

The concept of PoP can change the mindset of the research community and practitioners about how large, dynamic business processes should be seen and further managed.

Nowadays, experience bases are widely used by project companies in designing software-intensive systems (SISs). The efficiency of such informational sources is defined by the “nature” of modeled experience units and approaches that apply to their systematization. This paper aims to increase the efficiency of designing the SISs by the use of an ontological support for interactions with an accessible experience, models of which are understood as intellectually processed conditioned reflexes.

Both of the base of experience (BE) and ontological support in interactions with its units are oriented on precedents built in accordance with the offered normative schema when the occupational work is fulfilled by a team of designers. In creating the BE and the ontology as part of the BE, the team should use a reflection of an operational space of solved tasks on a specialized semantic memory intended for simulating the applied reasoning of the question-answer type.

If the occupational space of designing is reflected on the semantic memory with a programmable shell, then this environment can be adjusted on simulating the intellectual mechanisms flown in a human consciousness when designers ontologically interact with the BE and tasks being solved. The use of simulating the process in consciousness in accordance with their nature facilitates increasing the efficiency of designing the SIS.

An orientation on a precedent model as a basic type of experience unit and an ontological approach to their systematization are defined by the specificity of the study described in this paper. Models of precedents are constructed in accordance with the normative schema when the occupational work is fulfilled by a team of designers.

Investigated and developed means of ontological support are oriented on effective designing of the SISs with the use of the toolkit Working In Questions and Answers (WIQA) by the team of designers. The achieved effects are aimed at increasing the level of success in collaborative designing of SISs.

Offered solutions are applicable in designing the systems which supported different relations of a human with artificial and natural environment. They facilitate the naturalness in interactions of a human with computerized world.

An orientation on the precedent model as a basic type of experience unit and the ontological approach to their systematization are defined by the specificity of the study described in this paper. The novelty of this approach is defined by the framework for the precedent model, understood as the intellectually processed conditioned reflex, in which a reflection on the semantic memory (of the question-answer type) is programmable in a conceptually algorithmic language. The ontological support is implemented in the environment of programming.

A decade and a half after the debut of pervasive computing, a large number of prototypes, applications, and interaction interfaces have emerged. However, there is a lack of consensus about the best approaches to create such systems or how to evaluate them. To address these issues, this paper aims to develop a performance evaluation framework for pervasive computing systems.

Based on the authors' experience in the Gator Tech Smart House – an assistive environment for the elderly, they established a reference scenario that was used to guide the analysis of the large number of systems they studied. An extensive survey of the literature was conducted, and through a thorough analysis, the authors derived and arrived at a broad taxonomy that could form a basic framework for evaluating existing and future pervasive computing systems.

A taxonomy of pervasive systems is instrumental to their successful evaluation and assessment. The process of creating such taxonomy is cumbersome, and as pervasive systems evolve with new technological advances, such taxonomy is bound to change by way of refinement or extension. This paper found that a taxonomy for something so broad as pervasive systems is very complex. It overcomes the complexity by focusing the classifications on key aspects of pervasive systems, decided purely empirically and based on the authors own experience in a real‐life, large‐scale pervasive system project.

There are currently no methods or frameworks for comparing, classifying, or evaluating pervasive systems. The paper establishes a taxonomy – a first step toward a larger evaluation methodology. It also provides a wealth of information, derived from a survey of a broad collection of pervasive systems.

Notes that as we move towards an information‐based society, information technologies will play a key role in establishing and maintaining economic competitiveness and that while the systems development life cycle approach has brought some order to the software development process, information engineering brings additional structure to the process. Points out that re‐engineering techniques are used to align every area of the enterprise: people, strategy, technology and business processes. Describes software re‐engineering activities and processes with a special emphasis on developing and maintaining quality systems.

The paper proposes the development of a graphical architecture description language (ADL) that allows a better understanding of software architectures for nontechnical actors and purposes and, beyond, can serve as a communication tool between domain experts and IT experts, for instance, in a software development process.

The paper follows the methods and guidelines of design science research. By deriving characteristics and general requirements for ADLs from a research literature review and from industry standards, the paper provides a conceptual modeling approach for an ADL. The model design is based on typical requirements and suggestions derived from literature and related work. The application possibilities and advantages are then demonstrated with a usage scenario.

The paper elaborates a user-oriented ADL that makes software architecture comprehensible for stakeholders and end users. It provides a high level of abstraction and, thus, is not restricted to a particular domain. The paper also provides a corresponding modeling editor as well as an underlying catalogue with symbols and rules for the ADL.

As this is a conceptual study, the ADL has not been practically evaluated yet. Thus, the usefulness of this academic approach for the industry remains to be validated.

The elaborated ADL can serve as a language to visualize software architectures, particularly in the business domain, in a comprehensible manner. Still, it retains the structured character of ADLs to facilitate communication on an IT-near level. In including nontechnical actors, the approach broadens the overall application capabilities of ADLs.

This paper presents M-PoP, a method to model large, complex, and dynamic business processes. These processes have sometimes resulted from alliances of organizations (i.e. joint ventures and mergers and acquisitions) and are referred to as Processes-of-Business Processes (PoP). Due to the difficulty of modeling these dynamic processes, alliances of organizations have often lost opportunities, competitiveness, and profitability, so requiring suitable modeling methods.

The authors proposed M-PoP that can model PoP through three views in different abstraction levels and using well-known techniques in industry and academia, mainly those from Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). For this, M-PoP presents three main steps: identification of PoP elements, modeling of PoP, and verification of PoP models. To evaluate M-PoP, we applied it in a real-world business process in the health domain.

The evaluation results point out the capability and viability of M-PoP to deal with dynamic business processes.

M-PoP still needs to be applied in various real-world scenarios to gather evidence of its productivity, efficiency, and scalability.

This novel method could change the way organizations model their business processes and, as a consequence, it could leverage strategic business opportunities.

M-PoP is the first method that makes it possible to model large and complex business processes and, most importantly, dynamic processes.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a pragmatic approach to components off‐the‐shelf (COTS)‐based development. Software product line (SPL) is at the forefront among the techniques for reducing costs, decreasing schedule time, and ensuring commonality of features across a family of products – as COTS are reused in multiple products.

A disciplined process for SPL development is still needed. This paper proposes the Y‐model for COTS‐based SPL development. The model put forward identifies and elaborates the essential phases and activities of SPL development from COTS‐based repository.

The Y‐model provides an efficient way of integrating the approaches of SPL and COTS‐based development as a cohesive software development model.

The model has the potential to tremendously increase software engineers' productivity. Thus, software architects, domain engineers and component designers should become aware of how to use these ideas to structure their models and designs.

This paper describes a systematic approach for COTS‐based development that takes into account the cataloguing and retrieval of software assets permeating a process that encompasses all stages of software development, from system product requirements engineering to system deployment.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a generic software framework for development of agricultural and forestry robots. The primary goal is to provide generic high‐level functionality and to encourage distributed and structured programming, thus leading to faster and simplified development of robots. A secondary goal is to investigate the value of several architecture views when describing different software aspects of a robotics system.

The framework is constructed with a hybrid robot architecture, with a static state machine that implements a flow diagram describing each specific robot. Furthermore, generic modules for GUI, resource management, performance monitoring, and error handling are included. The framework is described with logical, development, process, and physical architecture views.

The multiple architecture views provide complementary information that is valuable both during and after the design phase. The framework has been shown to be efficient and time saving when integrating work by several partners in several robotics projects. Although the framework is guided by the specific needs of harvesting agricultural robots, the result is believed to be of general value for development also of other types of robots.

In this paper, the authors present a novel generic framework for development of agricultural and forestry robots. The robot architecture uses a state machine as replacement for the planner commonly found in other hybrid architectures. The framework is described with multiple architecture views.