2023, Gachnang, Phillip, Ehrenthal, Joachim, Telesko, Rainer, Hanne, Thomas

Incident management in railway operations includes dealing with complex and multiobjective planning problems with numerous constraints, usually with incomplete information and under time pressure. An incident should be resolved quickly with minor deviations from the original plans and at acceptable costs. The problem formulation usually includes multiple objectives relevant to a railway company and the employees involved in controlling operations. Still, there is little established knowledge and agreement regarding the relative importance of objectives such as expressed by weights. Due to the difficulties in assessing weights in a multiobjective context directly involving decision makers, we elaborate on the autoconfiguration of weighted fitness functions based on nine objectives used in a related Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem. Our approach proposes an evolutionary algorithm and tests it on real-world railway incident management data. The proposed method outperforms the baseline, where weights are equally distributed. Thus, the algorithm shows the capability to learn weights in future applications based on the priorities of employees solving railway incidents which is not yet possible due to an insufficient availability of real-life data from incident management. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10339298&tag=1

2023, Ehrenthal, Joachim, Hanne, Thomas, Telesko, Rainer, Gachnang, Phillip

Zu wenig Personal und Rollmaterial, kurzfristig angesagte Arbeiten an der Infrastruktur mit den entsprechenden betrieblichen Behinderungen und Einschränkungen sowie kurzfristig auftretende Störungen prägen zurzeit die Berichterstattung über die Entwicklungen im öffentlichen Verkehr der Schweiz. Es ist absehbar, dass sich diese unbefriedigende Situation über eine längere Zeitspanne kaum massgeblich verbessern wird. Umso wichtiger ist es, vorhandene Ressourcen optimal einzusetzen und den zukünftigen Bedarf an Mitarbeitenden und Rollmaterial in den Griff zu kriegen. Die Fachhochschulen der Ostschweiz (OST) und der Nordwestschweiz FHNW entwickelten mit der Südostbahn (SOB), den luxemburgischen Eisenbahnen (CFL) und der Eisenbahn-Softwareherstellerin Qnamic eine zukunftsweisende Software zur Unterstützung der Eisenbahn-Disposition, um in Echtzeit über situationsspezifische Massnahmenpakete zur Störungsbehebung zu verfügen.

2020-09-03, Gupta, Varun, Fernandez-Crehuet, Jose Maria, Hanne, Thomas, Telesko, Rainer

Startups have high failure rates due to their inability to attain a sufficient product/market fit, i.e., delivering a solution that best matches the user needs in the market. Requirement engineering is the activity that could help startup teams identify the value proposition that provides high value to the users and continuously innovate it. The objective of the study is to analyse the state of art of the requirement engineering research in the context of startups, as available in the literature. The analysis of the research area highlights the research trends to achieve two things i.e., (a) predict how much support the startups can get from the literature for enhancing their success rates and (b) identify the research gaps to motivate researchers to conduct future research that could be adoptable in startup contexts. Systematic mapping is conducted on studies extracted from the four bibliographic databases (IEEExplore, ACM, Springerlink and ScienceDirect) and studies extracted by using a forward snowballing approach. Individual studies are coded to yield the classification scheme. Formulated schemes and those already available in literature, were populated with information extracted from the abstracts of the studies. The research is mostly focused on generic requirement engineering and product validation activities. The research is conducted mostly as evaluations (empirical studies) with the outcome of providing theory to the research community. Major underlying motivation of the research is to attain the product/market fit. However, research studies focusing on requirement documentation, prioritization and elicitation are losing focus from 2017, 2018 and 2019, respectively. The literature lacks the studies that reports research solutions which are validated in laboratory settings or in real contexts, experience reports, opinion papers and philosophical papers. The positive side of the finding is that the number of requirement engineering research studies in a startup context have increased in the past five years. At this instant, unfortunately the literature has limited ability to support startups by providing solutions (for instance, research solutions, evidence to support decision makings, best practices, experiences etc.) that are adoptable in their real context. Uniform focus of the researchers across all sub-activities of requirement engineering is required with effort distributed across different research types that supports startups, not only by providing validated solutions but experience reports, opinions, new conceptual frameworks and empirical evidence that can aid their decision making.

2020, Jüngling, Stephan, Telesko, Rainer, Dornberger, Rolf

Many current IT systems are implemented based on the object-oriented (OO) programming paradigm, which over more than two decades has proved to be one of the most successful mechanisms for code re-use and the most powerful extension mechanisms used in many software components and systems. Combined with a solid understanding of business principles and good communication skills, OO is still considered to be one of the core skills in the design of platforms and systems that drive our current IT landscape. The self-evaluation test, which we developed as an early indicator for prospective Business Information Technology (BIT) students, revealed insights about the skill level of beginners and serves as a starting point to reflect on abstraction skills in the context of the current digitalization and the increase in artificial intelligence (AI) components. The article explains the relevance of OO thinking on different levels of abstraction in the context of the lifecycle of current system architectures and provides an outlook on how these abstraction skills can be re-used when switching from an OO development paradigm into a new area where AI and machine learning will steadily increase their influence on the overall design of software systems.

2023, Telesko, Rainer, Jüngling, Stephan, Dornberger, Rolf

Viele aktuelle IT-Systeme werden auf der Grundlage des objektorientierten (OO) Programmierparadigmas implementiert, das sich in mehr als zwei Jahrzehnten als einer der erfolgreichsten Mechanismen für die Wiederverwendung und Erweiterung von Code erwiesen hat und in vielen Softwarekomponenten und -systemen verwendet wird. In Verbindung mit einem soliden Verständnis von Geschäftsprinzipien und guten Kommunikationsfähigkeiten gilt OO immer noch als eine der Kernkompetenzen bei der Entwicklung von Plattformen und Systemen, die unsere heutige IT-Landschaft bestimmen. Der Selbsteinschätzungstest, den wir als Frühindikator für angehende Studierende der Wirtschaftsinformatik (BIT) entwickelt haben, gibt Aufschluss über das Kompetenzniveau von Studienanfängern und -anfängerinnen und dient als Ausgangspunkt, um über Abstraktionsfähigkeiten im Kontext der aktuellen Digitalisierung und der Zunahme von Komponenten der künstlichen Intelligenz (KI) nachzudenken. Der Artikel erläutert die Relevanz des OO-Denkens auf verschiedenen Abstraktionsebenen im Kontext des Lebenszyklus aktueller Systemarchitekturen und gibt einen Ausblick darauf, wie diese Abstraktionsfähigkeiten beim Wechsel von einem OO-Entwicklungs-paradigma in einen neuen Bereich wiederverwendet werden können, in dem KI und maschinelles Lernen ihren Einfluss auf den Gesamtentwurf von Software-systemen stetig vergrößern werden.

2022, Telesko, Rainer, Ochsenbein, Guy, Röhm, Ruth, Reber, Andreas, Pülz, Michael, Loosli, Christina

Before 2014, the quality management process in all our programs has been rather informally and individually organized. In 2014, the management of the School of Business at the FHNW decided to set up a strategic project to achieve the AACSB accreditation to sustainably secure the role among the best business schools. Among other standards, AACSB deals with Assurance of Learning (AoL, standard 5 in the 2020 standards) with the clear goal formulated as "The school uses well-documented, systematic processes for determining and revising degree program learning goals; designing, delivering, and improving degree program curricula to achieve learning goals; and demonstrating that degree program learning goals have been met." The AoL process has been established step by step since 2015 and provided us with a guideline to check the mission-reference of our program goals and learning objectives and to continuously develop the program quality on a common database. This paper describes the implementation of AoL using the four steps "Determining Degree Program Learning Goals", "Measure", "Results" and "Closing the Loop" for the bachelor programs WI (in German "Wirtschaftsinformatik") and BIT (Business Information Technology). As examples, measurements and improvements for various modules (spanning from supply chain to the computer science domain) are discussed, underpinning the clear and significant progress in the management of curricula and in the monitoring of our study programs’ effectiveness regarding student learning. Finally, we outline selected AoL initiatives at other universities and show how we can benefit from them to successfully enhance our project.

2020, Gupta, Varun, Fernandez-Crehuet, Jose Maria, Hanne, Thomas, Telesko, Rainer

This research paper explores the involvement of freelancers in requirement engineering activities to continuously innovating the value propositions and utilizing their expertise in various requirement engineering tasks. This paper reports the case study conducted with the startups that involve freelancers for the requirement engineering activities. The findings are then compared with the literature to explore the freelancer supported requirement engineering domain. Results indicate that the freelancers could help innovate value proposition by providing different perspectives of the global segments and also expertise in executing requirement engineering activities. The freelancers have varying levels of involvement in requirement engineering activities depending on on startup contexts and is highly challenged by various inhibitors. The inhibitors include difficulty to select freelancers optimally, ensuring their long term association for continuous rework arising because of continuous learnings in the market, building trust, mechanism to integrate their perspective, establishing communication, negotiations and strategic pricings. However, there is a need to optimally establish the freelancer involvement from beginning of the startup life cycle with a promise for long term benefits in exchange for their trustworthy and accurate perspectives, which is harder to get by involving crowds of customers due to resource limitations. Further research is required to investigate how freelancers could represent the samples of globally distributed customer segments as input source of information on one side and on another side become startup team representatives to establish direct interactions with global customer segments.

2023, Telesko, Rainer, Spahic, Maja, Hinkelmann, Knut, Pande, Charuta

Designing courses for introductory programming courses with a heterogeneous audience (business and IT background as well) is a challenging task. In an internal project of the School of Business at the FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) a group of lecturers developed a concept entitled “Model-based agile development” (MBAD) which supports the learning of elementary programming concepts in an agile environment and builds the basis for advanced courses. MBAD will be used as a basic learning module for various Bachelor programs at the FHNW.

2021, Gupta, Varun, Hanne, Thomas, Telesko, Rainer, Silhavy, Radek

This exploratory case study was conducted with five IT startups in order to investigate how requirement engineering-related activities are performed and what is the state of maturity with the practices & tools used. Another objective was to study that how the startups managed their practices during Corona Virus (COVID19) pandemic time. The results indicate that flexibility and access to the online tools were the main strengths of the startups to cope up with the pandemic situation while fluctuating market demands affected them marginally. The startups do vary in domain, team size, practices and selection of the tools, with matured startups having more structured (but flexible) processes compared to younger startups. The young startups have the opportunity to learn from the practices of the matured startups, to adopt the learning in their working context. The previous software development experience of the startups and its founders does affect the maturity of the practices and selection of the tools. The flexibility and agility as evident in the working context of the startups helped them to turn pandemic situation into their business opportunities.

2020, Telesko, Rainer, Jüngling, Stephan, Gachnang, Phillip, Martin, Andreas, Hinkelmann, Knut, Fill, Hans-Georg, Gerber, Aurona, Lenat, Doug, Stolle, Reinhard, van Harmelen, Frank

Abstraction abilities are key to successfully mastering the Business Information Technology Programme (BIT) at the FHNW (Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz). Object-Orientation (OO) is one example - which extensively requires analytical capabilities. For testing the OO-related capabilities a questionnaire (OO SET) for prospective and 1st year students was developed based on the Blackjack scenario. Our main target of the OO SET is to identify clusters of students which are likely to fail in the OO-related modules without a substantial amount of training. For the interpretation of the data the Kohonen Feature Map (KFM) is used which is nowadays very popular for data mining and exploratory data analysis. However, like all sub-symbolic approaches the KFM lacks to interpret and explain its results. Therefore, we plan to add - based on existing algorithms - a “postprocessing” component which generates propositional rules for the clusters and helps to improve quality management in the admission and teaching process. With such an approach we synergistically integrate symbolic and sub-symbolic artificial intelligence by building a bridge between machine learning and knowledge engineering.