Keywords: Conventional tunneling, Drill and blast, BIM, IFC, Construction phase, Digitalization
Astract: Building Information Modeling (BIM) has become the key technology for the digital transformation of the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), as an open and vendor-neutral data model, play an essential role in this transformation. Despite all the recent advances of BIM, tunneling needs to catch up with other AEC sectors adopting digital technologies. Currently, IFC is mainly used to capture information directly connected to the structural elements of the final tunnel but rarely as a means to document the tunnel excavation and support. This article proposes an IFC-driven process for the execution phase of conventional tunneling projects by extending the usage of IFC to information about the process, labor, equipment, and employed material. The proposed process is evaluated by a case study demonstrating how to represent data from a conventional tunneling project by IFC. The results show that IFC provides the necessary concepts to express the data of the execution phase of conventional tunneling projects. Implementing an IFC-driven process in this phase significantly contributes to the digital transformation of tunneling projects.

Keywords: Circular economy, Digital thread, Digital twins, Sustainability, Systems engineering
Astract: The perception of the value and propriety of modern engineered systems is changing. In addition to their functional and extra-functional properties, nowadays’ systems are also evaluated by their sustainability properties. The next generation of systems will be characterized by an overall elevated sustainability—including their post-life, driven by efficient value retention mechanisms. Current systems engineering practices fall short of supporting these ambitions and need to be revised appropriately. In this paper, we introduce the concept of circular systems engineering, a novel paradigm for systems sustainability, and define two principles to successfully implement it: end-to-end sustainability and bipartite sustainability. We outline typical organizational evolution patterns that lead to the implementation and adoption of circularity principles, and outline key challenges and research opportunities.

Keywords: BIM (Building Information Modeling), IFC (Industry Foundation Classes)

Keywords: agile BPM, BPM, Business Process Management, Social BPM
Astract: Business Process Management (BPM) takes care of the business process (BP) lifecycle using different technologies in organizations to provide value-added services or products for end-users. Although today’s fast-changing business world poses vast variants of business processes (BPs) alongside uncertainty. This situation requires an agile BPM to manage, maintain, and execute different variants of a BP as well as deal with uncertainties and changes. One of the emphasises of agile BPM is involving stakeholders in the BP lifecycle, which requires a standard approach for all stakeholders to have quick and efficient access to the BP lifecycle to prevent problems like cultural resistance. In order to reach a standard approach, social BPM is an emerging concept that can help the easy and efficient involvement of stakeholders in the BP lifecycle. By inspiring form social BPM, this paper propose a new social media-based BPM platform to deal with different varieties of BP and uncertainties by integrating stakeholders in the BP lifecycle. While the platform eases communication, information exchange, and decision-making among stakeholders; it also eliminates the exchange between design-time and run-time while a change occurs by merging design-time and run-time.

Keywords: Agile BPM, Agility, AI agent, Business Process Management, Social BPM
Astract: Business Process Management (BPM) faces increasing societal and business challenges. Societal issues include effectively managing unexpected changes and ensuring employee engagement during process modifications. The former category involves the limitations of technology when introducing process changes while Agile BPM and Social BPM concepts have been explored in previous studies to tackle the latter. These investigations have resulted in the development of a Social-Media (SM) based BPM platform and an agility framework. The SM platform draws inspiration from popular social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. Its primary objective is to merge the design-time and run-time phases of the business process (BP) lifecycle as well as to actively engage stakeholders in the dynamic design and implementation of BPs. By simplifying the response to potential changes and maintaining stakeholder involvement throughout the process, the platform addresses the aforementioned challenges. This article establishes a correlation between SM platform concepts and BPM concepts, emphasizing how they facilitate the concurrent design and execution of BPs. Furthermore, the article demonstrates the application of the SM platform in implementing the agility framework through a use case analysis involving a scientific paper submission process. To overcome the current emphasis on stakeholder involvement and human capabilities in applying the platform, we finally explore the possibilities of employing AI agents as automated assistants.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence, Cloud platform, Conceptual modeling, Knowledge graph, Model transformation, Model-driven engineering
Astract: Semantic processing of conceptual models is a focus of research for several years, bridging the disciplines of knowledge-based systems, conceptual modeling, and model-driven software engineering. With Knowledge Graphs, this research area gained momentum. In this paper, we introduce CM2KGcloud, a generic and extensible Web-based platform for transforming conceptual models into Knowledge Graphs. The platform can work on models created by state-of-the-art metamodeling platforms (e.g., EMF, Papyrus, ADOxx) and transforms models created with them into standardized Knowledge Graph representations like GraphML, RDF, and OWL. CM2KGcloud can be used as a service and can be integrated into software systems by its exposed API.

Keywords: BIM, Construction phase, Digitalization, Equipment, IFC, Labor, Material, Process, Tunneling
Astract: The documentation process of conventional tunneling projects is time-consuming and costly. Building Information Modeling (BIM) has enabled substantial productivity gains in the Architecture, Engineering, & Construction (AEC) sector. However, BIM has only been marginally adopted in the execution phase of conventional tunneling projects. For this purpose, we propose a BIM model that facilitates fully digital and automated data exchange between project stakeholders. We use the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) as a basis and identify concepts potentially useful to represent data from the execution phase of construction projects. We demonstrate how IFC concepts are utilized to represent a shift report of a conventional tunneling project. Thereby, we deliver a reference model as an implementation guide for software developers in this domain. This may serve as a blueprint for handling construction management data in a machine-readable format, laying the foundations for Big Open BIM in the execution phase of construction projects.

Keywords: conceptual modelling, Docker-compose, feature modelling, machine learning, microservices, OMSAC, ontology population, OpenAPI
Astract: Applying the Ontology of Microservices Architecture Concepts (OMSAC) as a modelling language calls users to have expertise in ontology engineering. However, ontology practice remains restricted to a limited pool of practitioners, leading to a barrier to widely adopting such a modelling approach. Here, we present x2OMSAC, an ontology population framework that enhances the modelling of microservices architectures using OMSAC. We instantiate our framework by FOD2OMSAC, which limits modellers’ manual tasks to data selection, cleaning, and validation of created models, thereby eliminating the need for ontology expertise and, consequently, expanding the potential of OMSAC adopters for modelling microservices architectures.

Keywords: Graph Neural Networks, Ontology-Driven Conceptual Models, Pre-trained Language Model, Representation Learning
Astract: Conceptual models (CMs) offer a structured way to organize and communicate information in information systems. However, current models lack adequate semantics of the terminology of the underlying domain model, leading to inconsistent interpretations and uses of information. Ontology-driven conceptual modeling languages provide primitives for articulating these domain notions based on the ontological categories, i.e., stereotypes put forth by upper-level (or foundational) ontologies. Existing CMs have been created using ontologically-neutral languages (e.g., UML, ER). Enriching these models with ontological categories can better support model evaluation, meaning negotiation, semantic interoperability, and complexity management. However, manual stereotyping is prohibitive, given the sheer size of the legacy base of ontologically-neutral models. In this paper, we present a graph language modeling framework for conceptual models that combines finetuning pre-trained language models to learn the vector representation of OntoUML models’ data and then perform a graph neural networks-based node classification that exploits the model’s graph structure to predict the stereotype of model classes and relations. We show with an extensive comparative evaluation that our approach significantly outperforms existing stereotype prediction approaches.

Keywords: autonomy, digital transformation, information value
Astract: High autonomy is challenging to achieve in digital twins. This is due to the lack of understanding of the socio-technical challenges and the information needs of digital twin autonomy. In this paper, we contextualize digital twin autonomy in terms of human and technical factors, identify novel socio-technical classes of digital twins with varying levels of autonomy, and define strategies that help improve autonomy across these classes. Our strategies are governed by information valuation models we developed specifically for digital twins. Our approach fosters a systematic top-down technique to improve the autonomy of digital twins.