Agile software development is increasingly adopted by companies evolving and maintaining software products to support better planning and tracking the realization of user stories and features. While convincing success stories help to further spread the adoption of Agile, mechatronics-driven companies need guidance to implement Agile for non-software teams. In this comparative case study of three companies from the Nordic region, we systematically investigate expectations and challenges from scaling Agile in organizations dealing with mechatronics development by conducting on-site workshops and surveys. Our findings show that all companies have already successfully implemented Agile in their software teams. The expected main benefit of successfully scaling agile development is a faster time-to-market product development; however, the two main challenges are: (a) An inflexible test environment that inhibits fast feedback to changed or added features, and (b) the existing organizational structure including the company’s mind-set that needs to be opened-up for agile principles. 

Interoperability is one of the key challenges in present and future software-intensive systems that are large, distributed, and increasingly built as integration of existing and third parties components or systems, of legacy parts, and of newly developed parts. Moreover, such systems evolve over time due to different reasons, e.g., features are added, changed or removed, new protocols are supported, standards are changed, refactoring.To help large companies identifying how to manage and improve interoperability among their evolving software systems, our objective is to develop an interoperability model for large systems by focusing on software development.Our method to conceive and evaluate the model is through a tight collaboration among two universities and five large international companies.The results of our work are the INTERO model and the INTERO evaluation framework. They permit to analyse the specific interoperability problem, to conceive strategies to enhance interoperability, and finally to re-evaluate the problem in order to understand whether there is an improvement in terms of software interoperability.

The recent years have witnessed an enormous growth of mobile services for energy management in buildings. However, these solutions are often proprietary, non-interoperable, and handle only a limited function, such as lighting, ventilation, or heating. To address these issues, we have developed an open platform that is an integrated energy management solution for buildings. It includes an ecosystem of mobile services and open APIs as well as protocols for the development of new services and products. Moreover, it has an adapter layer that enables the platform to interoperate with any building management system (BMS) or individual device. Thus, the platform makes it possible for third-party developers to produce mobile energy efficiency applications that will work independently of which BMS and devices are used in the building. To validate the platform, a number of services have been implemented and evaluated in existing buildings. This has been done in cooperation with energy companies and property owners, together with the residents and other users of the buildings. The platform, which we call Elis, has been made available as open source software under an MIT license. View Full-Text

Recent proliferation of surveillance systems is mostly attributed to advances in both image-processing techniques and hardware enhancement of smart cameras, as well as the ubiquity of sensor-driven architectures. Owing to these capabilities, new aspects are coming to the forefront. This paper addresses the current state-of-the-art and provides researchers with an overview of existing surveillance solutions, analyzing their properties as a system and drawing attention to relevant challenges when developing, deploying and managing them. Also, some of the more prominent application domains are highlighted here. In an effort to understand the development of the advanced solutions, based on their most distinctive characteristics, we propose a taxonomy for surveillance systems to help classify them and reveal gaps in existing research. We conclude by identifying promising future research lines.

Agile software development principles enable companies to successfully and quickly deliver software by meeting their customers' expectations while focusing on high quality. Many companies working with pure software systems have adopted these principles, but implementing them in companies dealing with non-pure software products is challenging. We identified a set of goals and practices to support large-scale agile development in companies that develop software-intense mechatronic systems. We used an inductive approach based on empirical data collected during a longitudinal study with six companies in the Nordic region. The data collection took place over two years through focus group workshops, individual on-site interviews, and complementary surveys. The primary benefit of large-scale agile development is improved quality, enabled by practices that support regular or continuous integration between teams delivering software, hardware, and mechanics. In this regard, the most beneficial integration cycle for deliveries is every four weeks; while continuous integration on a daily basis would favor software teams, other disciplines does not seem to benefit from faster integration cycles. We identified 108 goals and development practices supporting agile principles among the companies, most of them concerned with integration; therefrom, 26 agile practices are unique to the mechatronics domain to support adopting agile beyond pure software development teams. 16 of these practices are considered as key enablers, confirmed by our control cases.

The recent advent of ’Internet of Things’ technologies is set to bring about a plethora of heterogeneous data sources to our immediate environment. In this work, we put forward a novel concept of dynamic intelligent virtual sensors (DIVS) in order to support the creation of services designed to tackle complex problems based on reasoning about various types of data. While in most of works presented in the literature virtual sensors are concerned with homogeneous data and/or static aggregation of data sources, we define DIVS to integrate heterogeneous and distributed sensors in a dynamic manner. This paper illustrates how to design and build such systems based on a smart building case study. Moreover, we propose a versatile framework that supports collaboration between DIVS, via a semantics- empowered search heuristic, aimed towards improving their performance.

Agile software development is increasingly adopted by companies evolving and maintaining software products to support better planning and tracking the realization of user stories and features. While convincing success stories help to further spread the adoption of Agile, mechatronics-driven companies need guidance to implement Agile for non-software teams. In this comparative case study of three companies from the Nordic region, we systematically investigate expectations and challenges from scaling Agile in organizations dealing with mechatronics development by conducting on-site workshops and surveys. Our findings show that all companies have already successfully implemented Agile in their software teams. The expected main benefit of successfully scaling agile development is a faster time-to-market product development; however, the two main challenges are: (a) An inflexible test environment that inhibits fast feedback to changed or added features, and (b) the existing organizational structure including the company’s mind-set that needs to be opened-up for agile principles.

Software is prevalent in embedded products and may be critical for the success of the products, but manufacturers may view software as a necessary evil rather than as a key strategic opportunity and business differentiator. One of the reasons for this can be extensive supplier and subcontractor relationships and the cost, effort or unpredictability of the deliverables from the subcontractors are experienced as a major problem. The paper proposes open software ecosystem as an alternative approach to develop software for embedded systems, and elaborates on the necessary quality attributes of an embedded platform underlying such an ecosystem. The paper then defines a reference architecture consisting of 17 key decisions together with four architectural patterns, and provides the rationale why they are essential for an open software ecosystem platform for embedded systems in general and automotive systems in particular. The reference architecture is validated through a prototypical platform implementation in an industrial setting, providing a deeper understanding of how the architecture could be realised in the automotive domain. Four potential existing platforms, all targeted at the embedded domain (Android, OKL4, AUTOSAR and Robocop), are evaluated against the identified quality attributes to see how they could serve as a basis for an open software ecosystem platform with the conclusion that while none of them is a perfect fit they all have fundamental mechanisms necessary for an open software ecosystem approach.

When individual teams in mechatronic organizations attempt to adopt agile software practices, these practices tend to only affect mod- ules or sub-systems. The short iterations on team level do not lead to short lead-times in launching new or updated products since the overall R&D approach on an organization level is still governed by an overall stage gate or single cycle V-model. This paper identifies challenges for future research on how to combine the predictability and planning desired of mechanical manufacturing with the dynamic capabilities of modern agile software development. Scaling agile in this context requires an expansion in two dimensions: First, scal- ing the number of involved teams. Second, traversing necessary systems engineering activities in each sprint due to the co-dependency of software and hardware development.

This paper describes the problem context of software development for mass-produced embedded systems, with distinguishing factors such as the co-design of software and hardware, strong focus on manufacturing aspects, supplier involvement and safety-critical functionality. In this context there is a need for a holistic model to explain the failures and successes industrial projects, where just investigating a single dimension, e.g. chosen ways-of-working or architecture is not sufficient. The main contribution is a holistic model consisting of five archetypical approaches to embedded software development, based on a mapping study over industrial cases in literature. The approaches range from "traditional" stage-gate projects focusing on product qualities and large integration efforts, to fast development in short loops by autonomous teams based on a compos able software platform. The model aligns the processes with the architecture of the embedded software, and the implications on the business and the organisation. The model allows an research &development(R&D) organisation to identify where it is positioned and to evolve its software development approach. The model is elucidated by two empirical cases from a Swedish company.