Emergency situations are characterised by their unpredictability as well as by their fatal consequences in terms of human lives and material costs. One way of improving the management of emergency situations is by the definition of suitable emergency plans as well as the training of participants in the application of such plans. An Emergency Plan is defined as a document that compiles both the prevention rules and procedures to be applied in an emergency situation by detailing all potential incidences that might occur and influence its management. In order to design a good emergency plan, experts from different areas need to work collaboratively to identify all the events and the relationships among such events.

The main purpose of this project is to study different information technology techniques in order to ease both the elaboration and the training of emergency plans based on the use of scenarios. The use of such techniques will allow the collaborative development of emergency plans, the use of rich formats that provide different perspectives of a plan, the exportation and sharing of plans in order to increase their evolution and improvement, the instruction of participants as well as a better interaction, participation and exchange of knowledge. The achievement of all of these objectives will require the definition of a process model that guarantees the collaborative participation of stakeholders, the development of an emergency situation metamodel, the application of advanced interaction models, the development of emergency plans and its training and the development of proofs of concepts with advanced interfaces.

The production of quality software, on time, and within budget, remains an open problem of Software Engineering that has been addressed from different approaches. An industrial approach to this problem is to use Software Product Lines (SPL). However, current works on SPL usually focus on a single system view (the feature model of the system). One disadvantage on this is that this single view (even extended with non-functional characteristics) cannot properly define the extent of a software product line. Moreover, this approach assumes a small number of variants perfectly defined as instances of a feature model. However, this situation is not always possible. The variants are beyond the act of monotonically adding/removing functionality to the base architecture of a product line.

The objective of this project is to define and implement a technological framework for developing high-quality software product lines. This framework is based on the existence of several models or system views (functionality, features, quality,…) with relationships among them. This approach implies the parameterization of the software production process by means of a Multimodel which is able to capture the different views of the product and the relationships among them. This approach lead us to re-consider the problems related to the intra (e.g., consistence of the feature model) and inter-model consistency (eg., correspondence between the feature and the quality models) in a broader and realistic context. In the project, we will use a more expressive logic than the propositional (MEL – Membership Equational Logic) and its operationalization in MOMENT2 as back-end which supports the production and edition of the multimodel as well as the software production (SPL instances).

The fact of (i) implementing an operative technological framework (using model transformations), (ii) empirical validating the multimodel through controlled experiments which will allow a feedback for improving the models and metamodels used (which are hypothetically the appropriate ones), (iii) evolving the multimodel based on the empirical evidence gathered, will allow us to implement a software production process that will simultaneously satisfies the required functional and non-functional requirements. We believe that the definition of a technological framework that properly combines the abovementioned technologies represent a critical step towards the production of quality software. The application of this technology for developing products in the domains of games, and Web portals on service-oriented architectures will allow us to put our approach into practice and demonstrate its usefulness.

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One of the main factors of the evolution of organizations are the new commercial conditions which joint with their need to respond to competitive pressure forces them to continuously improve the quality of their products and the efficiency of their services, considering not only the environment (providers, competitors, customers, etc.), but also their information systems. So, it has been observed a growing interest of organizations to analyze and manage their business processes which has turned the Business Process Management (BPM) into a very significant field of interest for them.

The INGENIO Project, jointly by its coordinated subproject AUTOFLEX-PN, aims to tackle the business process improvement in an integrated way by providing diverse solutions both methodological and technical ones. In relation to the methodological aspect, the aim is to provide organizations with the necessary means to effectively define their processes by promoting their evolution faced with changing environments and their flexibility in execution time. Additionally, organizations will be provided with the necessary mechanisms and methods to carry out the measurement of their processes and related artefacts in an effective and consistent way. From the technological perspective, the objective is to provide the necessary means to automate the organizational activities and the communication between automated information systems, for which the approach MDE (Model Driven Engineering) will be applied and the paradigm SOC (Service Oriented Computing) will be adopted. These proposals will be based on the application in the business field of Software Engineering techniques whose practical usefulness has been demonstrated in practice. With all these aspects in mind, the objectives of the current project can be grouped into the management of the following key aspects for process improvement:

• Business Process Modeling. Business process modeling proposals will be empirically evaluated (such as BPMN, YAWL, UML 2, etc..) with the aim to choose the most suitable language in relation to the maintainability of the process models obtained. Mechanisms of product lines variability and their application to business processes lines will be analysed and a technique will be developed to represent the variability in business process lines by enhancing the formerly selected business process modelling language. The necessary support will be provided to manage the flexibility in the execution of business processes. The proposals will be empirically validated by means of experiments and case studies.
• Business Process Measurement, by means of the definition and empirical validation of metrics related to the business process models and their execution. With this objective in mind, families of experiments will be planned and carried out. Methods for the definition of useful indicators in the field of business processes according to the kind of organization, available resources and maturity in their processes will be developed.
• Automation of Business Processes based on MDE and SOC. A framework which facilitates the automation of the activities in the business process and the communication between applications will be developed, considering the diversity of automation options (new systems, network services, legacy systems use, ..). From the business conceptual models, the framework must obtain logical models which are necessary to the later execution of the processes by following the MDE approach. The framework will be based on a methodology of application development according to the SOC (Service-oriented Computing) approach. This methodology will be developed and must provide the necessary means for the communication and orchestration of all the services and application through the definition of communication interfaces based on standards.