Unlocking and managing flexibility is an important contribution to the integration of renewable energy and an efficient and resilient operation of the power system. In this paper, we discuss how the potential of a fleet of battery-electric transportation vehicles can be used to provide frequency containment reserve. To this end, we first examine the use case in detail and then present the system designed to meet this challenge. We give an overview of the tasks and individual sub-components, consisting of (a) an artificial neural network to predict the availability of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) day-ahead, (b) a heuristic approach to compute marketable flexibility, (c) a simulation to check the plausibility of flexibility schedules, (d) a multi-agent system to continuously monitor and control the AGVs and (e) the integration of fleet flexibility into a virtual power plant. We also present our approach to the economic analysis of this provision of a system-critical service in a logistical context characterised by high uncertainty and variability.

Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit dem Thema Digitalisierung von nicht-digitalen Geschäftsprozessen. Der Digitalisierungsgrad eines Unternehmens stellt mittlerweile einen erfolgsentscheidenden Wettbewerbsfaktor dar, um in modernen Märkten nachhaltig existieren und sich weiterentwickeln zu können. Die digitale Transformation von Geschäftsprozessen eines Unternehmens ist nicht trivial und stellt Unternehmen und deren Mitarbeiter vor große Herausforderungen. Es wurden verschiedene Geschäftsprozesscharakteristika identifiziert, die maßgeblichen Einfluss auf die Digitalisierung eines Geschäftsprozesses nehmen. Diese Charakteristika wurden unter Nutzung von Methoden aus dem Bereich der multikriteriellen Entscheidungsunterstützung in ein Konzept überführt, um die Digitalisierungspotenziale eines Geschäftsprozesses ermitteln zu können. Die Anwendung dieses Konzeptes erfolgt in drei separaten Schritten: Gewichtung der Kriterien, Bewertung der Kriterien und Ergebnisauswertung. Die Ergebnisse der Erprobung ließen sich durch eine prototypische Digitalisierung eines zuvor nicht-digitalen Geschäftsprozesses erfolgreich validieren. Es hat sich dabei gezeigt, dass Entscheidungen innerhalb von Geschäftsprozessen eine wichtige Rolle im Hinblick auf deren Digitalisierung inne haben. Diese Rolle muss weiterhin hinsichtlich der Digitalisierungspotenziale, aber auch Hemmnisse verstärkt untersucht werden muss. Das erstellte Bewertungskonzept erweitert die bisherige Literatur und bietet eine breite Grundlage für weiterführende Forschungs- und Entwicklungsarbeiten.

It is quite common that most of companies’ decisions are made based on feelings, intuitions or personal experiences. The reasons for such patterns have organizational, technical and process oriented backgrounds. For instance, there is no structured way to deal with the analytical results on both sides simultaneously – organizational and technical. Usually, in case of analytics the ones doing analysis (e.g. data scientists) and the ones using results of analytics (e.g. decision makers) are different persons. As a result, such a structure leads to ambiguity and misunderstanding between the involved parties. In order to bridge the existing gap between data scientists and decision makers, we introduced the Data Product Profile which links both data science and data-driven decision processes.

Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit dem Thema Digitalisierung von nicht-digitalen Geschäftsprozessen. Der Digitalisierungsgrad eines Unternehmens stellt mittlerweile einen erfolgsentscheidenden Wettbewerbsfaktor dar, um in modernen Märkten nachhaltig existieren und sich weiterentwickeln zu können. Die digitale Transformation von Geschäftsprozessen eines Unternehmens ist nicht trivial und stellt Unternehmen und deren Mitarbeiter vor großen Herausforderungen. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist die Identifikation von Geschäftsprozesscharakteristika, die maßgeblichen Einfluss auf die Digitalisierung eines Geschäftsprozesses haben. Die identifizierten Charakteristika werden unter Nutzung von Methoden aus dem Bereich der multikriteriellen Entscheidungsunterstützung in ein geeignetes Konzept überführt, um die Digitalisierungspotenziale eines Geschäftsprozesses ermitteln zu können. Das Konzept umfasst insgesamt fünf verschiedene Kriterienkataloge und 15 unterschiedliche Bewertungskriterien. Die Anwendung dieses Konzeptes erfolgt in drei separaten Schritten: Gewichtung der Kriterien, Bewertung der Kriterien und Ergebnisauswertung. Die Ergebnisse der Erprobung ließen sich durch eine prototypische Digitalisierung eines zuvor nicht-digitalen Geschäftsprozesses erfolgreich validieren. Das erstellte Bewertungskonzept erweitert die bisherige Literatur und bietet eine breite Grundlage für weiterführende Forschungs- und Entwicklungsarbeiten.

The current chapter explains challenging task in identifying the most suitable way to establish a research topic. The work demonstrates how to follow a proper research methodology in information systems. It explains what process of a research is all about and why it’s important to follow a proper research approach in order to successfully reach approached research goals. The chapter analyses variety of existing research methodologies in order to provide researcher with an overview of available within the field of information systems research methodologies.

ABSTRACT Thinking outside of the box is an important part of education. However, using innovative teaching methods in education can be very challenging for educators. They are directly involved into a teaching process and upcoming changes should be well planned and the impact of the introduced innovations/changes should be estimated in advance. Innovations can be also challenging for a management part of a particular higher education institution, whose major goal is to organize a smooth learning process. Current work presents software empowered innovation in the domain of teaching physics at universities. Authors demonstrate how particular software artefacts could be possible integrated into existing curriculum in order to help students at universities in mastering particular natural science subject (e.g., “Physics‐1,” “Physics‐2”). Software is based on the ideas of virtual laboratories, whether implementation is based on Microsoft. NET XNA Framework and 3D modeling. Paper shows that the introduction of modern information and computer technologies along with the traditional forms of education are significantly enhancing teaching experience and improving education quality. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 25:39–47, 2017; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae ; DOI 10.1002/cae.21777

The current paper shows an end-to-end approach how to process XML files in the Hadoop ecosystem. The work demonstrates a way how to handle problems faced during the analysis of a large amounts of XML files. The paper presents a completed Extract, Load and Transform (ELT) cycle, which is based on the open source software stack Apache Hadoop, which became a standard for processing of a huge amounts of data. This work shows that applying open source solutions to a particular set of problems could not be enough. In fact, most of big data processing open source tools were implemented only to address a limited number of the use cases. This work explains and shows, why exactly specific use cases may require significant extension with a self-developed multiple software components. The use case described in the paper deals with huge amounts of semi-structured XML files, which supposed to be persisted and processed daily.

Daten werden fur Unternehmen immer mehr zu einem wichtigen Rohstoff, um ihre Prozesse und Wettbewerbsvorteile zu verbessern. Bisher werden allerdings hauptsachlich strukturierte Daten analysiert. Jedoch werden laut einer Studie des IDC in den nachsten Jahren lediglich 10 Prozent strukturierte Daten erzeugt – den verbleibenden groseren Teil machen semi- und unstrukturierte Daten wie XML-, JSON-, Bild- und Textdateien aus Int12. Haufig liegen diese Daten bereits heute in grosen Mengen vor. Diese meist ungenutzten semi- und unstrukturierten Datenmassen bieten Unternehmen enorme Potenziale, um mittels Advanced und Predictive Analytics Wissen und Erkenntnisse zu generieren. Um jedoch diese Daten fur Advanced und Predictive Analytics uberhaupt nutzbar zu machen, sind neue Technologien wie das Hadoop Ecosystem und NoSQL-Datenbanken entstanden. Dabei kann fur mittelstandische Unternehmen das Hadoop Ecosystem eine Alternative zu proprietaren Softwarelosungen sein, da es als Open-Source-Software gut verfugbar und durch eine entsprechende Community unterlegt ist.

Mobile devices currently offer many value-added applications and services such as messaging, navigation, social networking, finance, and entertainment. As these mobile applications have access to users' personal information and are capable of gathering and transmitting trust sensitive information, posing security and privacy risks. In this paper, we propose a context-aware adaptive security framework for eliciting users' context information and adapting this information with mobile applications' network access control mechanism. The framework enforces the execution of mobile applications inside security incubators to control the communication between mobile applications and mobile device resources. Applications' access requests are analyzed based on user's context information collected from the mobile device sensors and the application security configuration.

Current work demonstrates an usage of the 3D Physics Virtual Laboratory within the teaching process of the students who are getting their bachelor degrees at a technical universities. The main advantages of presented software package is an utilization of the complete simulation of the real world physics in an virtual environment. Additional advantage of work is that it’s flexibility-by-design. The flexibility of the 3D Physics Virtual Laboratory software package is achieved through the completed development loop adapted under agile methodology. The work also shows the overall structure of the components within the software package, technological foundation and description of the laboratory. The Microsoft .NET with it’s framework .NET XNA were used as an software foundation for building core elements of the current 3D Physics Virtual Laboratory.

Intensive usage of an information and communication technology (ICT) in an education process is a promising and rapidly evolving topic or exploration. One of the ways, how a particular ICT can be used for teaching is a creation of specialized software applications, which are able to demonstrate physical or chemical process to a students on very granular level. Current work describes an implementation of such specialized software applications primary dedicated to enhance experience in teaching physics subject. The work includes theoretical foundation of a physics experiment, in particular a description of Atwood's machine, and the technological foundation that lead to creation of virtual laboratory work for described physics experiment. Besides describing technological foundation, it's also demonstrates software implementations process in details.

Issues related to a properly collection, management and analysis of data are the very first ones to be solved while working with any data source. Especially, it's true for the data sources, which have a property to grow very rapidly and without any clear structure underneath, and such behavior is very typical for the data generated by mobile devices. Thus, current work suggest an principle architecture design of a mobile software platform whose main goal is to collect, store and provide further access to the mobile context data generated mainly by mobile devices such as smartphones.

Significant advancement in mobile devices coupled with high speed networks have shifted personal computing towards pervasive environments. Mobile devices currently offer many value-added applications and services such as emailing, messaging, navigation, social networking, finance, and entertainment. Typically, such value-added applications have access to users' personal information and are capable of gathering and transmitting trust sensitive information, hence posing security risks and/or privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a context-based analytic hierarchy process (AHP) framework for eliciting context information and adapting this information with network access control measures for mobile devices. The framework enforces the execution of mobile applications inside security incubators to control the communication between mobile applications and mobile device resources. Mobile applications' access requests are analyzed based on user's context information collected from the mobile device sensors and the application network access control configuration. We use the Facebook mobile application, as a test case, to evaluate our proposed framework. Evaluation results have demonstrated the efficacy of the framework in providing network access control measures based on real-time assessment of user's context.

Problems of data migrations from one data storage to another are always existed, and in era of big data, such problems becoming more crucial. When data started to grow, there is no chance of termination of such process, and in such situation, the important point is not only to just store the data, but also to process on the different levels of granularity. Current work is focused on today's situation of complex data analysis. It mainly concerning data exportation issues and challenges that must be faced by academia and industry in order to solve related problem. Publication sates problematic, provides review of related literature, proposes ideas of solution, that should be implemented, and provides methodology that need to be followed in order to conduct relevant, scientific value adding research.

The results of the software module "Virtual Physics Laboratory" were presented in the Higher Education system of the International University of Information Technologies (IITU). The information technology design and development, the structure of the virtual laboratory and its place in the system of Higher Education of IITU were described the same way as the principal regimes of operation of the program module in the system and methods for its use in the educational process.

The current work presents a new approach for designing business intelligence solutions. In the Era of Big Data, former and robust analytical concepts and utilities need to adapt themselves to the changed market circumstances. The main focus of this work is to address the acceleration of building process of a "data-centric" Business Intelligence (BI) solution besides preparing BI solutions for Big Data utilization. This research addresses the following goals: reducing the time spent during business intelligence solution's design phase; achieving flexibility of BI solution by adding new data sources; and preparing BI solution for utilizing Big Data concepts. This research proposes an extension of the existing Extract, Load and Transform (ELT) approach to the new one Extract, Load, Transform and Analyze (ELTA) supported by service-orientation concept. Additionally, the proposed model incorporates Service-Oriented Architecture concept as a mediator for the transformation phase. On one side, such incorporation brings flexibility to the BI solution and on the other side; it reduces the complexity of the whole system by moving some responsibilities to external authorities.