We modified a commercial Android TV app to use NetInf ICN transport. It was straightforward to adapt the standard HTTP Live Streaming to NetInf naming and network service. We demonstrate that NetInf's in-network caching and request aggregation result in efficient live TV distribution.

A categorization of telecommunications services is presented, as a deliverable in a project commissioned by TeliaSonera.

A novel Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE) framework is proposed in this work that focuses on enhancing the reuse process by offering support for locating appropriate components. The architecture of the framework comprises of five interrelated layers, namely Description, Location, Analysis, Recommendation and Build. The scope of this work is to describe in detail the first and third layers, and provide the means to evaluate the suitability of candidate software components for reuse. The overall aim is to facilitate components’ profiling and offer efficient matching of system and software requirements to increase the reusability potential of components. A specifications profile is created for each component using a semi-formal natural language that describes certain properties. A dedicated parser recognizes parts of the profile and translates them into in-stance values of a dedicated CBSE ontology that encodes these properties. Matching is then performed at the level of ontology instances between the available components and the components required by the developer. The framework recommends components based on a suitability ratio that calculates their distances from the desired properties.

The research area systems-of-systems engineering has increased rapidly over the last decade and now contains a substantial body of literature. To get an overview of the field, a systematic mapping of the literature has been done, covering over 3000 papers. It revealed a field massively dominated by US researchers, with an emphasis on military and space systems. A large number of people are involved, but few researchers focus on the area, and citations are fairly low compared to other fields. Important research topics include architecture, modeling and simulation, integration and interoperability, communication, sustainability, and safety and security. There are signs of immaturity within the research area, and it is recommended that existing venues are complemented with an international scientific event with very high standards for submissions.

Cyber-physical systems is an extension of traditional embedded systems, where communication to the outside world is given more emphasis. This leads to a new design space also for software development, allowing new allocation strategies for functionality. In traditional embedded systems, all functionality was inside the product, but now it becomes possible to partition the software between the embedded systems and IT systems outside the product. This paper investigates, through a case study from the automotive domain, possible new allocation alternatives where computation is offloaded from the embedded system to a server, and what additional architectural concerns this leads to, including performance, resource utilization, robustness, and lifecycle aspects. In addition, the paper addresses new opportunities created by allocating functionality outside the embedded systems, and thus making data available for extended services, as well as the larger concerns that result on the organizational level, including new competency in architecture and DevOps.

Many industries developing complex products based on embedded systems rely on architecting as a key activity. Furthermore, they use product line approaches to find synergies between their products. This means that they use a base platform which is adapted to different products, and the architecture of the product line thus evolves over time. In previous case studies we have seen that these companies often lack a defined process for the evolutionary architecting of these product lines. The contribution of this paper is to present such a process, which matches key characteristics of mature architecting practices. It is also discussed how this process compares to observations in industry.

This paper discusses the topic of uncertainty in the context of architecting embedded software and systems. It presents links between complexity and uncertainty, and identifies different kinds of uncertainty. Based on this, it elaborates why uncertainty arises in the architecting of software-intensive systems, and presents ten different tactics that can be employed to deal with uncertainty and mitigate the associated risks.

The rapid digitization of society is to a large extent driven by the interconnection of existing systems in order to co-ordinate their activities. This leads to systems-of-systems (SoS), where the parts more or less voluntarily co-operate for mutual benefits while keeping their autonomy. The term SoS started to become relevant some 20 years ago, and accelerated as a research area about 10 years ago. Although some people tend to take SoS as a synonym for large and complex systems, the research community has arrived at a fairly precise characterization of the term. In an SoS, the elements, or constituent systems, exhibit an operational and managerial independence, meaning that they can operate outside the SoS context, and have different owners. They choose to collaborate in order to achieve a common goal, manifested as an emergent property of the SoS, i.e. a property not existent in any of its parts in isolation. The field so far has been dominated by US researchers focusing on military and space applications. Key topics include architecture, communications, interoperability, modeling and simulation, and also a number of properties where dependability attributes such as safety play an important role. From its origins in the government driven sectors, SoS are now spreading to civilian and commercial usage. To investigate the needs and strategies for Sweden in relation to SoS, VINNOVA in late 2014 commissioned a consortium led by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) to develop a research and innovation agenda for the area. The agenda project has included an industrial perspective captured in a series of workshops with practitioners, and also a research perspective. The latter was handled through an extensive research literature review, which indicated a poor representation of Scandinavia in the SoS research community. Also, a survey was sent to all relevant Swedish universities, research institutes, and funding agencies, and the result of this was somewhat contradictory. Many researchers are indeed working on topics related to SoS, but often use different terms for it, and publish at other venues than the SoS community. Given the large, but scattered, activity in the highly multidisciplinary SoS area, SICS and the Swedish Chapter of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) decided to organize the 1st Scandinavian Workshop on the Engineering of Systems of Systems (SWESoS 2015). The primary purpose of the workshop was to create a meeting place for researchers and practitioners interested in SoS. The workshop was intended to be an informal event, focusing on presentation of results and ongoing research, to stimulate interaction among the researchers. This proceedings volume contains the extended abstracts of those presentations. In many cases, the presentations are based on work already published elsewhere, and the interested reader can find links to more material in each contribution. The scope of the workshop was all aspects related to SoS engineering. This included, but was not restricted to, the following topics when applied to systems of systems: Autonomous and cooperative systems; Business models, including software ecosystems; Case studies of applications in different domains; Control strategies; Communication; Dependability, robustness, and other quality attributes; Enterprise architecture; Governance; Interoperability; Modeling and simulation, including multi-agent systems; Service oriented architecture; Systems engineering methods; and Systems thinking. In total, 16 papers were submitted to the workshop, and 13 were accepted for presentation, whereas the remaining three were somewhat outside the core scope of the event.

Vehicle platooning has been studied for several decades, with objectives such as improved traffic throughput on existing infrastructure or reduced energy consumption. All the time, it has been apparent that safety is an important issue. However, there are no comprehensive analyses of what is needed to achieve safety in platooning, but only scattered pieces of information. This paper investigates, through a systematic literature review, what is known about safety for platooning, including what analysis methods have been used, what hazards and failures have been identified, and solution elements that have been proposed to improve safety. Based on this, a gap analysis is performed to identify outstanding questions that need to be addressed in future research. These include dealing with a business ecosystem of actors that cooperate and compete around platooning, refining safety analysis methods to make them suitable for systems-of-systems, dealing with variability in vehicles, and finding solutions to various human factors issues.

This report constitutes a strategic research and innovation agenda for the area systems-of-systems. The agenda has been developed during the first half of 2015 in a project led by SICS Swedish ICT AB, in collaboration with INCOSE Sweden and a large number of representatives from industry and academia, with financial support from Vinnova. The overall conclusion of the agenda is: Sweden needs a world-leading capability to rapidly develop trustworthy systems-of-systems. A system-of-systems (SoS) can informally be defined as a group of independent collaborating systems. The elements of an SoS, called constituent systems, retain an operational and managerial independence, but when combined in a certain way, they provide together a new capability that is emergent from their cooperation. There are many applications of SoS, often as a consequence of the digitization of society which opens new possibilities for system integration. Examples can be found within command and control systems for defense and civilian crisis management; construction and mining; manufacturing and the reindustrialization; transportation; and health care. System integration is traditionally a Swedish area of strength, and by improving SoS knowledge, competitive advantages can be reached. SoS is also an important enabler for innovation, through the ability to combine existing technical products, processes, and organizations in new ways. Having the ability for rapid SoS development is very important for businesses to bring new innovations to market. However, to advance the practice of SoS engineering, a number of challenges need to be addressed, including improving the theoretical foundations; the socio-technical aspects; architecture; modeling and simulation; interoperability; trust; business and legal aspects; development processes and methods; and standardization. As part of the agenda project, a survey has been done of international and Swedish research in the area. Internationally, the SoS field is dominated by US researchers, with a very strong focus on military and space applications. A large number of people are involved, but few persons focus on the area. In comparison, Sweden has entered the research area much later, and only now is attention growing. As is the case internationally, few researchers focus on SoS, and many of them do not even call their research SoS. Activities are scattered over many organizations throughout the country. Many of the researchers in SoS in Sweden come from a background in Software Engineering or Control Engineering, and this is in contrast with the international research, which has its basis in Systems Engineering. In Sweden, research topics such as business aspects (in particular innovation), control systems, governance, and Internet of Things are more pronounced than internationally. However, there is little research in Sweden on the underlying, fundamental principles of SoS engineering. This is likely to be in part a consequence of the funding strategies currently implemented. The analysis shows a broad but scattered Swedish research community lacking critical mass. There is a high competence in software and control engineering, and in empirical research methods, but the lack of systems engineering competence is alarming, since it is fundamental for desired advances, such as in the reindustrialization (Industry 4.0). To achieve the desired capability in SoS development requires knowledge, competence, and capacity, which are provided through substantially increased research and education actions. It is suggested that research in the area is organized as a national SoS center-of-centers that coordinates activities at different academic member organizations. This requires increased research funding. There is also an urgent need for education in systems engineering, systems thinking, and SoS. It is proposed that the center-of-centers also takes responsibility for this, by developing joint courses in those disciplines, including on-line courses for practitioners, and PhD schools for industrial and academic doctoral students. To complement this, societal actions are needed to remove obstacles for building SoS, and enforcing standards. Finally, it is necessary to create meeting places, including triple helix flagship projects, that can fuel the interactions between individuals and organizations interested in SoS.

Federated embedded systems (FES) is an approach for systems-of-systems engineering in the domain of cyber-physical systems. It is based on the idea to allow dynamic addition of plug-in software in the embedded system of a product, and through communication between the plug-ins in different products, it becomes possible to build services on the level of a federation of products. In this paper, architectural concerns for FES are elicited, and are used as rationale for a number of decisions in the architecture of products that are enabled for FES, as well as in the application architecture of a federation. A concrete implementation of a FES from the automotive domain is also described, as a validation of the architectural concepts presented.

The automotive industry has recently developed the embedded software standard AUTOSAR, which is now being introduced widely in production vehicles. The standard structures the application into reusable components that can be deployed in a specific vehicle using a configuration scheme. However, this configuration takes place at design time, with no provision for dynamically installing components to reconfigure the system. In this paper, we present the conceptual design of a dynamic component model that extends an AUTOSAR based control unit with the possibility to add plug-in components that execute on a virtual machine. This concept is intended to give benefits in terms of much shorter deployment time for new functions, even into vehicles that have already been produced. Further, it creates opportunities for vehicles to take part in federated embedded systems together with other products. It also opens up a market for third-party developers, and fosters open innovation in an ecosystem around the automotive software business.

Due to the increasing importance of cyber-physical and embedded systems in industry, there is a strong demand for engineers with an updated knowledge on contemporary technology and methods in the area. This is a challenge for educators, in particular when it comes to creating hands-on experiences of real systems, due to their complexity and the fact that they are usually proprietary. Therefore, a laboratory environment that is representative of the industrial solutions is needed, with a focus on software and systems engineering issues. This paper describes such an environment, called the Mobile Open Platform for Experimental Design (MOPED). It consists of a model car chassis, equipped with a network of three control units based on standard hardware, and running the automotive software standard AUTOSAR, which consists of operating system, middleware, and application software structures. It is equipped with various sensors and actuators, and is open to extensions both in hardware and software. It also contains elements of future systems, since it allows connectivity to cloud services, development of federated embedded systems, and continuous deployment of new functionality. In this way, the platform provides a very relevant learning environment for cyber-physical systems, today and in the future.

Context: Traditionally, Embedded Systems (ES) are tightly linked to physical products, and closed both for communication to the surrounding world and to additions or modifications by third parties. New technical solutions are however emerging that allow addition of plug-in software, as well as external communication for both software installation and data exchange. These mechanisms in combination will allow for the construction of Federated Embedded Systems (FES). Expected benefits include the possibility of third-party actors developing add-on functionality; a shorter time to market for new functions; and the ability to upgrade existing products in the field. This will however require not only new technical solutions, but also a transformation of the software ecosystems for ES. Objective: This paper aims at providing an initial characterization of the mechanisms that need to be present to make a FES ecosystem successful. This includes identification of the actors, the possible business models, the effects on product development processes, methods and tools, as well as on the product architecture. Method: The research was carried out as an explorative case study based on interviews with 15 senior staff members at 9 companies related to ES that represent different roles in a future ecosystem for FES. The interview data was analyzed and the findings were mapped according to the Business Model Canvas (BMC). Results: The findings from the study describe the main characteristics of a FES ecosystem, and identify the challenges for future research and practice. Conclusions: The case study indicates that new actors exist in the FES ecosystem compared to a traditional supply chain, and that their roles and relations are redefined. The business models include new revenue streams and services, but also create the need for trade-offs between, e.g., openness and dependability in the architecture, as well as new ways of working.

Agile approaches have been highly influential to the software engineering practices in many organizations, and are increasingly being applied in larger companies, and for developing systems outside the pure software domain. To understand more about the current state of agile, its applications to safety-critical systems, and the consequences on innovation and large organizations, a seminar was organized in Stockholm in 2014. This paper gives an overview of the topics discussed at that seminar, a summary of the main results and suggestions for future work as input to a research agenda for agile development of safety-critical software.

Abstract Software ecosystems are becoming a common model for software development in which different actors cooperate around a shared platform. However, it is not clear what the implications are on software quality when moving from a traditional approach to an ecosystem, and this is becoming increasingly important as ecosystems emerge in critical domains such as embedded applications. Therefore, this paper investigates the challenges related to quality assurance in software ecosystems, and identifies what approaches have been proposed in the literature. The research method used is a systematic literature mapping, which however only resulted in a small set of six papers. The literature findings are complemented with a constructive approach where areas are identified that merit further research, resulting in a set of research topics that form a research agenda for quality assurance in software ecosystems. The agenda spans the entire system life-cycle, and focuses on challenges particular to an ecosystem setting, which are mainly the results of the interactions across organizational borders, and the dynamic system integration being controlled by the users.

This paper discusses an experiment examining the impact of interaction memory on user perceptions of a virtual agent with multiple embodiments and migration between them. The outcome showed users perceived agents with memory as more competent, but it had no significant effect on a strong perception of consistent identity across multiple embodiments.

This paper investigates user perceptions of continuous identity as agents migrate between different embodiments. It reports an experiment seeking to establish whether migrating or not migrating the interaction memory of the agent would affect the user’s perception of consistent agent identity over different embodiments. The experiment involved a treasure hunt in which a virtual agent migrated from a screen to a mobile phone in order to accompany a user while they searched for clues. A total of 45 subjects took part in three different conditions with 15 subjects in each. The outcome showed that the presence of memory affected the competence users ascribed to the virtual agent but had no significant effect on a strong perception of consistent identity across multiple embodiments.

Opportunistic augmentation denotes connecting a personal mobile device to another device to gain a transient advantage for the user. For example, a mobile phone user might borrow a large display and keyboard from a desktop personal computer. This uniquely ubiquitous computing activity requires effective device and service discovery as well as appropriate media usable across two or more devices. In this paper we show how Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the call signaling protocol for Voice over IP, effectively separates discovery from media-rendering selection in opportunistic augmentation. This separation improves system flexibility while allowing users or system administrators to choose the most appropriate discovery technologies for the environment. We also describe two phone-centric discovery mechanisms and demonstrate the practicality of the system by implementation and use in a test environment.

The product line engineering approach is a promising concept to identify and manage reuse in a structured and efficient way and is even applied for the development of safety critical embedded systems. Managing the complexity of variability and addressing functional safety at the same time is challenging and is not yet solved. Variability management is an enabler to both establish traceability and making necessary information visible for safety engineers. We identify a set of requirements for such a method and evaluate existing variability management methods. We apply the most promising method to an industrial case and study its suitability for developing safety critical product family members. This study provides positive feedback on the potential of the model-based method PLUS in supporting the development of functional safety critical embedded systems in product lines. As a result of our analysis we suggest potential improvements for it.

Developing safety critical products demands a clear safety argumentation for each product in spite of whether it has been derived from a product line or not. The functional safety standards do not explain how to develop safety critical products in product lines, and the product line concept is lacking specific approaches to develop safety critical products. Nonetheless, product lines are well-established concepts even in companies developing safety critical products. In this paper we present the results of an exploratory study interviewing 15 practitioners from 6 different companies. We identify typical challenges and approaches from industry and discuss their suitability. The challenges and approaches brought out by this study help us to identify and enhance applicable methods from the product line engineering domain that can meet the challenges in the safety critical domain as well.

This paper focuses on modeling users’ cognitive styles based on a set of Web usage mining techniques on user navigation patterns and clickstream data. Main aim is to investigate whether specific clustering techniques can group users of particular cognitive style using measures obtained from psychometric tests and content navigation behavior. Three navigation metrics are proposed and utilized to find identifiable groups of users that have similar navigation patterns in relation to their cognitive style. The proposed work has been evaluated with two user studies which entail a psychometric-based survey for extracting the users’ cognitive styles, combined with a real usage scenario of users navigating in a controlled Web 2.0 environment. A total of 106 participants of age between 17 and 25 participated in the study providing interesting insights with respect to cognitive styles and navigation behavior of users. Studies like the reported one can be useful for modeling users and assist adaptive Web 2.0 environments to organize and present information and functionalities in an adaptive format to diverse user groups.

We describe the iterative design of two collaborative storytelling technologies for young children, KidPad and the Klump. We focus on the idea of designing interfaces to subtly encourage collaboration so that children are invited to discover the added benefits of working together. This idea has been motivated by our experiences of using early versions of our technologies in schools in Sweden and the UK. We compare the approach of encouraging collaboration with other approaches to synchronizing shared interfaces. We describe how we have revised the technologies to encourage collaboration and to reflect design suggestions made by the children themselves.

Today, enterprise integration and cross-enterprise collaboration is becoming evermore important. The Internet of things, digitization and globalization are pushing continuous growth in the integration market. However, setting up integration systems today is still largely a manual endeavor. Most probably, future integration will need to leverage more automation in order to keep up with demand. This paper presents a first version of a system that uses tools from artificial intelligence and machine learning to ease the integration of information systems, aiming to automate parts of it. Three models are presented and evaluated for precision and recall using data from real, past, integration projects. The results show that it is possible to obtain F0.5 scores in the order of 80% for models trained on a particular kind of data, and in the order of 60%-70% for less specific models trained on a several kinds of data. Such models would be valuable enablers for integration brokers to keep up with demand, and obtain a competitive advantage. Future work includes fusing the results from the different models, and enabling continuous learning from an operational production system.

In order to be able to successfully defend an IT system it is useful to have an accurate appreciation of the cyber threat that goes beyond stereotypes. To effectively counter potentially decisive and skilled attackers it is necessary to understand, or at least model, their behavior. Although the real motives for untraceable anonymous attackers will remain a mystery, a thorough understanding of their observable actions can still help to create well-founded attacker profiles that can be used to design effective countermeasures and in other ways enhance cyber defense efforts. In recent work empirically founded attacker profiles, so-called attacker personas, have been used to assess the overall threat situation for an organization. In this paper we elaborate on 1) the use of attacker personas as a technique for attacker profiling, 2) the design of tailor-made cyber defense exercises for the purpose of obtaining the necessary empirical data for the construction of such attacker personas, and 3) how attacker personas can be used for enhancing the situational awareness within the cyber domain. The paper concludes by discussing the possibilities and limitations of using cyber defense exercises for data gathering, and what can and cannot be studied in such exercises.

We describe our experiences of creating and using a wide variety of techniques and applications to support collaboration in virtual environments for different activities and user groups. Our aim is to offer plentiful and rich possibilities for interaction across and between both real and virtual environments.

Developing  efficient  and  effective  decision  making support  includes  identifying  means  to  reduce  repeated  manual work  and  providing  possibilities  to  take  advantage  of  the  experience  gained  in  previous  decision  situations.  For  this  to  be possible,  there  is  a  need  to  explicitly  model  the  context  of  a decision  case,  for  example  to  determine  how  much  the  evidence from one decision case can be trusted in another, similar context. In earlier work, context has been recognized as important when transferring  and  understanding  outcomes  between  cases.  The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we describe different ways   of   utilizing   context   in   an   envisioned   decision   support system.  Thereby,  we  distinguish  between  internal  and  external context  usage,  possibilities  of  context  representation,  and  context  inheritance.  Second,  we  present  a  systematically  developed context  model  comprised  of  five  types  of  context  information, namely organization, product, stakeholder, development method &  technology,  and  market  &  business.  Third,  we  exemplary illustrate the relation of the context information to architectural decision  making  using  existing  literature.

Software architecture is no more a mere system specification as resulting from the design phase, but it includes the process by which its specification was carried out. In this respect, design decisions in component-based software engineering play an important role: they are used to enhance the quality of the system, keep the current market level, keep partnership relationships, reduce costs, and so forth. For non trivial systems, a recurring situation is the selection of an asset origin, that is if going for in-house, outsourcing, open-source, or COTS, when in the need of a certain missing functionality. Usually, the decision making process follows a case-by-case approach, in which historical information is largely neglected. This solution avoids the overhead of keeping detailed documentation about past decisions, but hampers consistency among multiple, possibly related, decisions. The ORION project aims at developing a decision support framework in which historical decision information plays a pivotal role: it is used to analyse current decision scenarios, take well-founded decisions, and store the collected data for future exploitation. In this paper, we outline the potentials of such a knowledge repository, including the information it is intended to be stored in it, and when and how to retrieve it within a decision case.

It has been suggested in the literature to organize software in autonomous vehicles as hierarchical layers where each layer makes its own decisions based on its own world model. This paper presents two alternative designs for autonomous construction vehicles based on the layered framework 4D/RCS. As a first step, the typical use cases for these vehicles were defined. Then one use case for a hauler was traversed through the two alternatives to see how they supported safety, flexibility and the use of a product platform. We found that the coordination between bucket control and motion control must be done at a low level in the hierarchy and that the relationship between the vehicle actuators and the built-in autonomous system is important for how the software is organized.

Autonomous and intelligent construction equipment is an emergent area of research, which shares many characteristics with on-road autonomous vehicles, but also have fundamental differences. Construction vehicles usually perform repetitive tasks in confined sites, such as quarries, and cooperate with other vehicles to complete common missions. A quarry can be viewed as a system-of-systems and the vehicles are individual systems within the site system. Therefore it is important to analyze the site system, i.e. included vehicles, surrounding systems, and system context, before the introduction of autonomous vehicles. It is necessary to map the needed infrastructure, and the needed input information from on-board sensors and off-board information suppliers, before designing the vehicle electronics system. This paper describes how we identified sensory and input signal needs for an autonomous articulated hauler in a scenario at a quarry site. Different architectural alternatives are evaluated and a set-up for a quarry site is suggested.

As part of the project DUST financed by Vinnova, we have investigated whether event data generated on trains can be used for finding evidence of wear on train doors. We have compared the event data and maintenance reports relating to doors of Regina trains. Although some interesting relations were found, the overall result is that the information in event data about wear of doors is very limited.

An increasing share of the innovations emerging in the vehicular industry are implemented in software. Consequently, vehicular electrical systems are becoming more and more complex with an increasing number of functions, computational nodes and complex sensors, e.g., cameras and radars. The introduction of autonomous functional components, such as advanced driver assistance systems, highlight the foreseeable complexity of different parts of the system interacting with each other and with the human driver. It is of utmost importance that the testing effort can scale with this increasing complexity. In this paper, we review the challenges that we are facing in integration testing of complex embedded vehicular systems. Further, based on these challenges we outline a set of research directions for semi-automated or automated test design and execution in integration testing of vehicular systems. While the discussion is exemplified with our hands-on experience of the automotive industry, much of the concepts can be generalised to a broader setting of complex embedded systems.

Vertical test reuse refers to the the reuse of test cases or other test artifacts over different integration levels in the software or system engineering process. Vertical test reuse has previously been proposed for reducing test effort and improving test effectiveness, particularly for embedded system development. The goal of this study is to provide an overview of the state of the art in the field of vertical test reuse for embedded system development. For this purpose, a systematic mapping study has been performed, identifying 11 papers on vertical test reuse for embedded systems. The primary result from the mapping is a classification of published work on vertical test reuse in the embedded system domain, covering motivations for reuse, reuse techniques, test levels and reusable test artifacts considered, and to what extent the effects of reuse have been evaluated.

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence have spawned a prolific debate about the future of employment and labour in a world where even intellectual work can be performed by algorithms and robots rather than humans. This article discusses the impact of this development on military professions, and on the very concept of military professionalism. Considering military capability to be built from physical, conceptual, and moral factors, it is observed that with increasing automation of the first and second factors, the human contribution will increasingly be in the third, moral, realm. It is also argued that such a human contribution can still tip the scales, even in a high-­tech conflict. Reasoning by analogies, it is claimed that ‘man or machine’ is a false dichotomy, that the challenge is, rather, to find the best combination of the two and that this holds true also in highly intellectual aspects of warfighting, such as intelligence analysis. The article is concluded with some reflections on the challenge of creating innovative military organizations that are tolerant to new divisions of labour between man and machine.

This article is a characterization of the cyber insurance market in Sweden. As empirical investigations of cyber insurance are rarely reported in the literature, the results are novel. The investigation is based on semi-structured interviews with 10 insurance companies active on the Swedish market, and additional interviews with 2 re-insurance companies and 3 insurance intermediaries. These informants represent essentially all companies selling cyber insurance on the Swedish market. Findings include descriptions of the coverages offered, including discrepancies between insurers, and the underwriting process used. Typical annual premiums are found to be in the span of some 5–10 kSEK per MSEK indemnity limit, i.e. 0.5–1% of the indemnity limit. For business interruption coverage, waiting periods are found to be relatively long compared to many outages. Furthermore, insurance companies impose information and IT security requirements on their customers, and do not insure customers that are too immature or have too poor security. Thus cyber insurance, in practice, is not merely an instrument of risk transfer, but also contains aspects of avoidance and mitigation. Based on the findings, market segmentation, pricing, business continuity, and asymmetry of information are discussed, and some future work is suggested.

In the design and evolution of software intensive systems, it is desirable to make informed decisions as early as possible in the life cycle. To do this, it is both necessary to be able to predict properties of these future systems and to know how one would like to prioritize among those properties. This paper addresses the latter problem of how to make trade-offs between non-functional properties of software intensive systems. An approach based on the elicitation of utility functions from stake-holders and subsequent checks for consistency among these functions is proposed. A sample GUI is presented, along with some examples. Limitations are discussed and several avenues for future work, including empirical validation, are proposed.

As more enterprises buy information technology services, studying their underpinning contracts becomes more important. With cloud computing and outsourcing, these service level agreements (SLAs) are now often the only link between the business and the supporting IT services. This paper presents an experimental economics investigation of decision-making with regard to availability SLAs, among enterprise IT professionals. The method and the ecologically valid subjects make the study unique to date among IT service SLA studies. The experiment consisted of pairwise choices under uncertainty, and subjects (N=46) were incentivized by payments based on one of their choices, randomly selected. The research question investigated in this paper is: Do enterprise IT professionals maximize expected value when procuring availability SLAs, as would be optimal from the business point of view? The main result is that enterprise IT professionals fail to maximize expected value. Whereas some subjects do maximize expected value, others are risk-seeking, risk-averse, or exhibit nonmonotonic preferences. The nonmonotonic behavior in particular is an interesting observation, which has no obvious explanation in the literature. For a subset of the subjects (N=29), a few further hypotheses related to associations between general attitude to risk or professional experience on the one hand, and behavior in SLAs on the other hand, were investigated. No support for these associations was found. The results should be interpreted with caution, due to the limited number of subjects. However, given the prominence of SLAs in modern IT service management, the results are interesting and call for further research, as they indicate that current professional decision-making regarding SLAs can be improved. In particular, if general attitude to risk and professional experience do not impact decision-making with regard to SLAs, more extensive use of decision-support systems might be called for in order to facilitate proper risk management.

Engineering system architectures for complex systems involves the tasks of analyzing architectural drivers, identifying architectural concerns, identifying valid architecture candidates, and evaluation of alternatives. One problem to overcome when architecting a system is the identification of valid of architectural candidates. We have developed a step-wise method for performing system architecture analysis and tested it on a sub-system in a project developing a drive system for heavy automotive applications. In this paper we present the complete method of nine steps for engineering an architecture and we elaborate in detail on the procedure to identify architectural candidates based on previously identified architectural drivers. We present a diagram depicting the proposed information model, its concepts and their relationships. In addition, the expectations on such a method as expressed by practitioners have been elicited, and we elaborate on the validity by examining how well the method indicate fulfillment. Our conclusion is that the proposed method does not fail to deliver on any of the needs and this gives an indication of usefulness. When identifying architectural candidates it is important to use proper criteria in the process. Our conclusion is that the practitioners should focus on candidates that affect the system at hand (within system boundaries), and on the candidates that address the architecturally significant system use. This is reflected in our method where we prescribe evaluation of the design candidates by validating that they solve only the right problem and by ensuring that they address the system at hand.

A modern mine involves increasingly smart and connected products that are integrated in a mine automation system. Integration enable many possible applications that could substantially aid in achieving the goals of increased safety and productivity of the mine operation including the machine maintenance process. What data will be shared by the involved organizations and products, heavily affects how successful improvements of operation can be accommodated. We have devised a method to map out and evaluate envisioned new collaborative functions for a complex System-of-systems such as the mine maintenance operation. The proposed method map user stories for the involved stakeholders and estimate the value of fulfillment based on different candidates of data sharing architectures. The method is explained and exemplified by a realistic example based the real case. There seems to be a need for a method such as the presented one just to map out what new applications are really feasible. By estimating value in terms of stakeholder benefits and identifying possible showstoppers in terms of protected data, the method seems to help reveal what improvements in the mine operation is in fact possible. Deciding on a data-sharing architecture for a collaborative mine seems to provide useful design prerequisites to a developing organization improving their smart connected products.

In this paper we extend the Granovetter threshold model with partial participation towards a collective action. That is, agents may partake by conducting an action that is less costly than the ultimate collective action, but costly enough to signal a commitment to the cause. We show that it is not just the exact distribution of thresholds, but also the distribution of available actions that determines whether a collective action will be achieved. We suggest and prove propositions for how both an inventive “activist” and a “dictator” may strategically change the signaling value of existing actions, or introduce new ones, in order to either instigate or stifle collective action. Applying the theory to revolutions, we argue that new technology can play a role beyond that of communication and synchronization, viz. that of adding modes of partial, less arduous, participation.

Enterprise architecture (EA) offers steering instruments to aid architects in their decision-making process. However, the management of such a process is a challenging task for enterprise architects, due to the complex dependencies amongst EA models when evolving from an initial to a subsequent state. In this paper, we design, present and analyze an approach supporting EA model evolution. In doing so, we define EA artifacts dependencies and model their corresponding evolutions during change. Then, this model is processed using a feedback control schema to fully inform the EA design decisions. An access control model for an inventory case study is introduced to reason on issues connected to this evolution. The results obtained by a stochastic solution (Markov Decision Processes) are used to argue about the usefulness and applicability of our proposal.

Testing is a key activity in industry to verify and validate products before they reach end customers. In hardwarein- the-loop system-level verification of automotive systems, testing is often performed using sequential execution of test scripts, each containing a mix of stimuli and assertions. In this paper, we propose and study an alternative approach for automated system-level testing automotive systems. In our approach, assertion-only test scripts and one (or several) stimulionly script(s), execute concurrently on the test driver. By separating the stimuli from the assertions, with each assertion independently determining when the system under test shall be verified, we seek to achieve three things: 1) tests that better represent real-world handling of the product, 2) reduced test execution time, and 3) increased defect detection. In addition to describing our proposed approach in detail, we provide experimental results from an industrial case study evaluating the approach in an automotive system test environment.