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One of the key areas of digital transformation of modern metallurgical production, which involves a high degree of automation as well as the use of complex technological systems, is the adaptation of production and business processes to new IT technologies for collecting and processing information. The purpose of this work is to study the conditions and business prospects for using big data technologies to improve the efficiency of production and operational activities of metallurgical enterprises in the context of digital transformation. The article examines the problems and prospects of using big data analysis tools to obtain significant economic results in an enterprise, considers the main barriers to the introduction of big data technologies in the industry and ways to overcome them, and analyses the results of the implementation of technologies for the construction of big data platforms of the data lake class at metallurgical enterprises in Russia. The results of the study show that the use of machine learning technologies and predictive analytics tools based on big data platforms could have a significant impact on reducing operating costs, increasing labour productivity, and improving the efficiency of metallurgical production.

This work discusses issues and approaches to organizing training for specialists in the field of engineering of industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPS) at technical universities. An overview of the current state of research in the field of competence models of a future specialist, expectations of industrial enterprises is presented. This work proposes a novel educational approach T-CHAT and its application in education of engineers in the field of ICPS. Additionally, a comprehensive organization and provision of students are examined connecting the competency model, the architectural model of the “smart factory”, the formation of curricula, and individual educational trajectories of students. Furthermore, this work formulates recommendations for the use of the indicated practices and approaches in the training of specialists in the framework of consideration of the educational aspect of the engineering of industrial cyber-physical systems.

In order to meet the increasing demand for industrial cyber physical systems, highly qualified professionals are required who possess both excellent professional knowledge and skills as well as soft skills. The interdisciplinarity of industrial cyber physical systems makes teaching the necessary skill challenging. The approach known from the education of software engineering, in which students form a team to develop a software product, is not sufficient. There is also a lack of soft skills, which are often seen as key success factors for engineering projects. To close the existing gaps in education of industrial cyber-physical systems engineering, the task-centric holistic agile teaching approach (T-CHAT) is proposed. This approach will be implemented in a newly developed curriculum for industrial cyber physical systems at the ITMO University St. Petersburg, Russia. It focuses on teaching of both technical and soft skills.

The academia-industry gap in computer science persists since last two decades at least. Industry expects that computer science graduates possess not only profound technical knowledge and skills but also transferable skills such as communication and collaboration in team, problem-solving ability. Students need to learn those skills during their university studies to be competitive in the market after their graduation. This paper first examines the skill gap between graduates and industry expectations, and the existing didactic approaches in computer science education. The authors then present how the Java programming course has been taught using the task-centric holistic agile teaching approach T-CHAT to enhance both technical skills and transferable skills in students. The learning process is described with learning activities and assessments that are constructively aligned with the intended learning outcomes of the course. This is work in progress, so evaluation of the course is planned for future work.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the similarities and differences in Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) of male and female information technology (IT) professionals in Poland and Germany, which represent a transition economy and a developed economy, respectively. We examined two dimensions of OCB: individually-oriented (OCBI) and organizationally-oriented (OCBO). We conducted an online survey among 282 Polish respondents and 80 German respondents, using a combination of random and snowball sampling. We observed both similarities and differences between Polish and German IT professionals. Overall, female subordinates evaluated their supervisors’ OCB more positively than did male subordinates. In contrast, female supervisors evaluated their subordinates’ OCB less positively than did male supervisors. Also, it was evident that in Germany employees value OCB more than those in Poland. In conclusion, our findings contribute to the stream of existing research on the relationship bet...

In this paper, the actor-oriented Java framework Actor4j is used to implement administration shells in a RAMI4.0 context to enable the implementation of hybrid cloud solutions. A novel architecture is conceptualized around the usage of the Actor Model, especially in the area of edge and cloud computing. The administration shell can be either implemented by an asset that is OPC-UA ready or be mapped to a gateway in the device (service) cloud. The administration shell implemented with the Actor Model (predominantly for the public and private cloud) consists of four modules: the components module (describing the corresponding system), the publish-subscribe module, the additional logic module (conditions, alarms), and the interaction module (behavior). The main idea is to reuse an OPC-UA compliant implementation for the internal actor logic. At the device cloud level, IT/OT entities can be composed together in a domain specific point of view. This is implemented over three abstractions levels (data acquisition, data analytics and control & monitoring). The proposed Actor Model fits very well for the implementation of large scale administrations shells.

We assumed that high level of quality of life sense of IT leaders can lead to their better productivity and management of their IT teams. Therefore we investigate the correlations between leadership competencies, spirituality - sensitivity and quality of life of IT professionals in Poland, a transition economy. The research data is collected by an online survey with the use of our novel questionnaires among 420 IT professionals in the region of Lower Silesia of Poland. The results of this study indicate that leadership competencies correlate with spirituality and quality life of IT professionals in transition economies. The highest quality of life seems to be in companies where the managers manifest a high level of leadership competencies.

Cyber physical systems (CPS) consist of physical and cyber components seamlessly integrated with each other. Being a core and an essential component within the digitalization process, CPS are becoming pervasive in all spheres of modern society. Understanding CPS structures and associated functionalities requires a multidisciplinary body of knowledge and engineering capabilities. Moreover, they are laying on the edge of a broad spectrum of methodologies and technologies, from mechatronics, communication, control and automation to information technologies, which are penetrating each corner of the society. It is obvious from the lifecycle of CPS, i.e., life cycle of the physical-part and the digital thread of the cyber-part, that developers, operators and managers of CPS have to acquire an essential interdisciplinary engineering qualification and a combination of skills and competencies from many different disciplines, including social and psychological aspects, among others. In order to develop and implement an adequate educational programme, two major aspects have been analysed in this paper: (i) identification and understanding of the minimal set of multidisciplinary competencies and qualifications needed and (ii) identification and classification of the critical gaps in the existing engineering curricula. The analysis is based on the findings of a survey conducted in two IEEE conferences closely related to the engineering disciplines associated with CPS.\ud

CPS engineers need to possess both technical and social skills to run CPS-engineering projects successfully. Especially social skills are crucial as the project fails are mostly caused because of lacking social skills of project members. Besides strong social skills, CPS engineers need to have a wide range of various technical skills as the products they deal with are getting increasingly complex integrating hardware, software and some kinds of communication mechanism with their environment. Students studying CPS engineering need to be well prepared for their future jobs. Therefore, they need to get an opportunity to face with realistic project situations. In this work we describe our experience gathered during the first run of a CPS engineering course based on a novel task-centric holistic agile teaching approach (T-CHAT).

This paper explores the socio-economic aspects of human capital, especially the IT users' innovation capability in regional cross-border small and medium-sized enterprises in Poland and in Germany. Socio-economic aspects of human capital are crucial for the socioeconomic development that may be achieved through virtual access to online learning tools and by diagnosing IT users' innovation capability and their business competencies, in relation to information and communication technologies. This paper presents an initial report on experimental research that was conducted online using the author's diagnostic tools. Conclusions and findings of this work contribute to socioeconomic development of cross-border regions in both countries. This research fulfills the gap in the sphere of connecting simultaneously three aspects — research, learning, and practice for socioeconomic development of both countries.

Context: Cyber physical systems are getting pervasive in our every-day life. For their development the industry needs highly-qualified and skilled employees. The employees need to have a wide breadth of knowledge in many engineering disciplines and possess excellent soft skills. Ideally, the needed skills are taught in practical settings.

In the context of Global Software Development (GSD), team members face a number of challenges that needs to be solved. One of them relates to the transfer of knowledge needed to fulfil the required tasks. The knowledge transfer process may be organized and implemented in various ways, as companies use varying strategies to transfer knowledge from onsite to offshore sites. However, without effective knowledge management practices, success in GSD will be difficult. In this paper, we aims to identify the process activities of knowledge transfer in globally distributed teams, challenges and suitable solutions for effective knowledge transfer. In order to achieve this objective, a systematic literature review (SLR) of the existing knowledge transfer literature is conducted. Our findings describing the process of knowledge transfer in globally distributed teams, a set of challenges and recommended practices for effective knowledge transfer. Finally, we conclude this study with a discussion of the directions for further and future research.

Digitalization is changing the global business ecosystem at an unimaginable speed. Although previous industrial revolutions took dozens of years to transform the existing markets, internet-based companies like Google, Amazon and Uber have done it in less than ten years. Business models in the nearest future – how will they look like? Where will the extensive process of the fourth industrial revolution take us? How will our role as entrepreneurs, managers or consumers change in the new business ecosystem? In this paper we consider the changes concerning the process of digitalization as the main prerequisites for transformation of business models. We combine them into three main aspects that influence modern business modeling approaches: technological, social and economic. This prospective gives insight into the way the future business models will look like and leads us to practical recommendations for companies to follow when digitizing their business.

This paper summarizes the results of the First Workshop on Arc-hitecting in Global Software Engineering (GSE), which was or-ganized in conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2011). The workshop aimed to bring together researchers and practitioners for defining and advancing the state-of-the-art and state-of-the practice in architecture design of global software development systems.

Offshore outsourcing software development (OOSD) is increasingly being used by the Software Industry. OOSD is a specific variant of Geographically Distributed Software Development (GDSD). Compared to the traditional mode of software development (i.e., in-house) GDSD is more edgy and puts at risk the attainment of the expected results. Although the failure of an offshore outsourcing software project may be caused by a variety of factors, one major complication is geographical distance. Consequently we argue that risk avoidance in outshore software development should be undertaken well in advance of the development launch. This could be done by testing the offshore outsourcing relevance of each software project and then the offshore outsourcing company involved. With this in mind we have developed the OUTSHORE Maturity Model – OMM.

Globally distributed software development is widely used in industry, for example, to stay competitive in the market. To achieve competitiveness one needs cost reduction, delivery of best quality, use of latest high-tech skills, as well as reliability and creativity. The key criteria for all these factors is well educated people. Yet, software engineering education hardly focuses the needs of distributed software development. Consequently, the graduated students rarely posses necessary skills and hands-on experience required for such projects; e.g. communication skills, project and process management as well as knowledge management. This paper reports on a collaborative education project between the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, Research Centre for Information Technology (FZI) in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Polytechnic State University of St. Petersburg, Russia. The main goal of that project was to convey necessary skills to our students. The second goal was to investigate how different models of communication impact the project results.

Offshoring is a widely used practice in the software development. It is mainly employed to reduce development costs. However, as in a number of studies have been shown, about 40 percent of offshore software development projects are flops. One predominant reason for it is the lack of standardized and practicable methods of risk management due to the inherent complexity of software development offshoring. Therefore, suitable methods and tools for the risk management specific to such projects are required. Firstly, this workshop will provide an insight into various aspects of the risk management of offshore software development. Secondly, tools and methods for the risk management will be discussed and presented. Thirdly, priorities for further research will be identified. The results of this workshop will, on the one hand, benefit companies sharing in the software development offshoring and, on the other hand, academics to identify the demand in the further research.

Double-sided auctions are popular market mechanisms for determining the price of standardized commodities. However, many trades - like for example OTC trades of financial derivatives and bonds - require multi-attribute handling. To this end, the class of continuous-time multi-attribute double auction mechanisms is introduced. The paper outlines requirements, characterizes the class of auction mechanisms, points out design options, and discusses the implementation in the meet2trade/sup 2/ system.

Our approach to market modelling is based on analysis of the negotiation process execution tasks. We use this for extraction of the offer life cycle, which provides tasks to be modelled. Combined, these tasks constitute the process. In addition to the offer life cycle, the information flow in the market also needs to be modelled. For each task, we propose the use of components that can be concatenated to concrete market models, whereby each component encapsulates one or more functional parts forming the complete process. We arrive at a structured approach to market modelling that is reduced in complexity because of the fragmentation of the modelling tasks. This approach is promising as it raises the modelling task to a high level of abstraction freeing the modeller from the implementation details. By way of example, we demonstrate how this approach can be employed to complete market models by using appropriate components.