Joaquin Peña

Universidad de Sevilla | US · Languages and Systems

Board-Based Collaborative Work Management Tools (BBTs) like Trello and Microsoft Planner are commonly used as low-code tools to manage the data and processes that support the services an organization provides. Their main advantage over other process execution platforms like traditional business process management systems is that they can be adapted...

Digital transformation (DT) has brought an unprecedented pace of change. At the same time, it has also created an environment where knowledge workers have to deal with an increasingly Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) workplace. In this scenario, the design, development, implementation, execution, and evolution of business processe...

Board-based software tools for managing collaborative work (e.g. Trello or Microsoft Planner) are highly configurable information systems. Their structure is based on boards that contain cards organized in lists. This structure allows users to organize a wide variety of formal or informal information and work processes in a very flexible way. Howev...

Systems, methods and apparatus are provided through which an evolutionary system is managed and viewed as a software product line. In some embodiments, the core architecture is a relatively unchanging part of the system, and each version of the system is viewed as a product from the product line. Each software product is generated from the core arc...

Purpose The specification of business services (BS) is one of the key factors for success in service provision. Researchers and practitioners have identified a set of problems in BS specification, namely: communication problems between providers and buyers, inaccurate specifications and changes in requirements. These problems were identified in the...

Agent Oriented Software Engineering was born with the promise of allowing more complex systems to be built than can be with traditional OO techniques. This promise is supported by mimicking human organizations and, thus, using “agents”, rather than Objects, as the main modelling artifact. Systems developed this way usually present features that mak...

The main goal of business modelling is to understand the operation of companies in order to provide software solutions with high added value. However, this is a hard task, and becomes more complex when we are modeling not an isolated organization, but several organizations that interact with each other. The current proposals for business modelling...

The need to collect new data and perform new science is causing the complexity of NASA missions to continually increase. This complexity needs to be controlled via new technological advancements and balanced with a reduction in mission and operation costs. Planned and hypothesized missions involve self-management, biological-inspiration based on sw...

Despite importance of business modeling, there are still unresolved problems. One problem consists on that models used by software engineers have a semantics with which a business manager is usually unfamiliar. This causes the validation of models to be a complex task. A possible solution to this problem is develop a textual document for business r...

The variability level of average-size business information systems (BIS) is highly enough for making the design of this kind of systems a complex task. There is an approach called process family engineering (PFE) that tries to ease the design of BIS using ideas from the software product lines (SPL) field. Roughly speaking, they propose to, first, s...

The activities developed by a company (business processes) have to change frequently to adapt to the environment. The implementation of business processes should support these changes without any receding. In this work, we provide with an approach for modelling and executing agile and adaptable business processes. Our approach is based on UML2 sepa...

There is a set of techniques that build Business Infor- mation Systems (BIS) deploying business processes of the company directly on a process engine. Business processes of companies are continuously changing in order to adapt to changes in the environment. This kind of variability ap- pears at runtime, when a business subprocess is enabled or disa...

NASA is conducting research on advanced technologies for future exploration using intelligent swarms of robotic vehicles. One of these missions is the Autonomous Nano Technology Swarm (ANTS) mission that will explore the asteroid belt using 1,000 cooperative autonomous spacecraft. From an engineering point of view, the complexity and emergent behav...

We view an evolutionary system as being a software product line. The core architecture is the unchanging part of the system, and each version of the system may be viewed as a product from the product line. Each “product” may be described as the core architecture with some agent-based additions. The result is a multiagent system software product lin...

Autonomic Computing, self-management based on high level guidance from humans, is increasingly being accepted as a means forward in designing reliable systems that both hide complexity from the user and control IT management costs. Effectively, AC may be viewed as policy-based self-management. We look at ways of achieving this, with particular focu...

Nowadays most companies in whichever field have a software system that helps managing all the aspects of the company, from the strategic management to daily activities. Companies are in continuous evolution to adapt to market changes, and consequently, the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure that supports it must also evolve. Thus, software...

The feasibility and benefits of multi-agent systems product lines (MAS-PL) are discussed. The SPL emphasizes the analysis of the scope of the SPL and the analysis of common and variable features across the SPL, which is not carried out by the agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE). The main benefit of combining both AOSE and SPL is that SPL wil...

We discuss two software engineering aspects in the development of complex swarm-based systems.

The field of Software Product Lines (SPL) emphasizes building a family of software products from which concrete products can be derived rapidly. This helps to reduce time-to-market, costs, etc., and can result in improved software quality and safety. Current Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies are concerned with developing a si...

Autonomic computing (AC), self-management based on high level guidance from humans, is increasingly gaining momentum as the way forward in designing reliable systems that hide complexity and conquer IT management costs. Effectively, AC may be viewed as policy-based self-management. We look at ways to achieve this, and in particular focus on agent-o...

Digital technology is easing access and lowering barriers for a new generation of criminal.

Autonomic computing (AC), self-management based on high level guidance from humans, is increasingly gaining momentum as the way forward in designing reliable systems that hide complexity and conquer IT management costs. Effectively, AC may be viewed as policy-based self-management. The model driven architecture (MDA) approach focuses on building mo...

We view an evolutionary system as being a software product line. The core architecture is the unchanging part o f the system, and each version of the system may be viewed as a product from the product line. Each "product" may be de- scribed as the core architecture with some agent-based ad- ditions. The result is a multiagent system software produc...

On the one hand, the Software Product Lines (SPL) field is devoted to build a core architecture for a family of products from which concrete products can be derived rapidly by means of reuse. On the other hand, Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is a software engineering paradigms dedicated to build software applications composed of organiz...

Interactions between subparts of a system have been recognized as the source of complexity in many fields ranging from physics, sociology, neurology, to software engineering. Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) was born under the promise of conquering complexity and enabling the development of more complex software. However, current AOSE app...

Interaction has been proved one of the main sources of com- plexity in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and many researches are working on techniques to palliate it. Furthermore, Organization modelling tech- niques lies on representing the groups of agents which are related by some kind of interaction. Current UML approaches represent these rela- tionship...

It is widely accepted that role-based modelling is quite adequate in the context of multi-agent systems (MAS) modelling techniques. Unfortunately, very little work has been reported on how to describe the relationships between several role models. Furthermore, many authors agree on that protocols need to be encapsulated into high-level abstractions...

In this paper, we present a new framework to extract knowledge from today's non-semantic web. It associates semantics with the information extracted, which improves agent interoperability; it can also deal with changes to the structure of a web page, which improves adaptability; furthermore, it achieves to delegate the knowledge extraction procedur...

The web seems to be the biggest existing information repository. The extraction of information from this repository has attracted the interest of many researchers, who have developed intelligent algorithms (wrappers) able to extract structured syntactic information automatically. In this article, we formalise a new solution in order to extract kno...

When the protocol of a complex Multi-Agent System (MAS) needs to be developed, the top-down approach emphasises to start with abstract descriptions that should be refined incrementally until we achieve the detail level necessary to implement it. Unfortunately, there exist a semantic gap in protocol description methodologies because most of them fir...

In this paper, we present a new framework to extract knowl- edge from today's non-semantic web. It associates semantics with the information extracted, which improves agent interoperability; it can also deal with changes to the structure of a web page, which improves adapt- ability; furthermore, it achieves to delegate the knowledge extraction proc...

Modern software systems are increasingly complex, and their construction benefits from the use of tailored software engineering tools that support abstraction and re-finement. Multiagent systems are particularly complex, and specialised methodologies and tools for their construction are becoming available. In this paper, we propose a technique for...

The variability level of average-size Business Informa- tion Systems (BIS) is highly enough for making the design of this kind of systems a complex task. There is an approach, called Process Family Engineering (PFE), that tries to ease the design of BIS using ideas from the Software Product Lines (SPL) field. Roughly speaking, they propose to, firs...