A virtual factory for Smart City Service Integration

Abstract

In the last years, new technologies - referred as emerging information and communication technologies (EICTs), have appeared and are immersed in peoples' lives assisting them and facilitating their daily activities. Taking advantage of the diffusion and infusion of these technologies, governments are using EICTs to deliver better public services to citizens. However, to address citizens' demands and to provide customer oriented services governments face various types of challenges. The aim of this research work is to provide solutions to some of the challenges, in particular to the rapid development of electronic public services (EPS) and the service integration in the context of development of smart cities. Following the aim, we propose an approach, called Virtual Factory for Smart City Service Integration. The idea of the virtual factory is to provide a framework to automatically produce software based on a given set of specifications of a family of EPS taking advantage of similarities in the EPS business processes. The expected contributions of this research work is to produce a domain specific language (DSL) for service specification and supporting tools that based on the produced specifications, workflow techniques and ideas of software product lines (SPL) can automatically produce software applications for EPS that can be easily parameterized and completed. Copyright 2014 ACM.