Certification of IPavement Applications for Smart Cities
A Case Study
Jesús Ramón Oviedo
1
, Moisés Rodríguez
1
and Mario Piattini
1,2
1
Alarcos Quality Center, Paseo de la Universidad 4, 13071, Ciudad Real, Spain
2
Institute of Information Technologies and Systems, University of Castilla–La Mancha,
Camino de Moledores s/n, 13051, Ciudad Real, Spain
Keywords: IPavement, ISO/IEC 25000, Smart Cities, Software Product Quality Evaluation.
Abstract: The installation of Intelligent Pavement (IPavement) in cities highlights the obvious need for the
development of software services that can be offered by this technology. These services should be
developed in conformance with international quality standards such as ISO/IEC 25000, which make it
possible to give assurance that the services must established quality requirements. This paper therefore
presents the environment for the quality certification of the services developed for the IPavement, created
by the authors. This environment is formed by an assessment process, a quality model, and set of
assessment tools. The results of a case study carried out to evaluate the quality of a service developed for
IPavement are also set out; this study has tested the practical application of the environment created and has
proven the need to develop tools to assist in the evaluation of the quality IPavement services.
1 INTRODUCTION
We are witnessing the rise of a new paradigm—the
“cyber-digital-intelligent-smart” city-- which has
emerged as a solution to the challenges of the
twenty-first century: globalization, urbanization and
climate change (Komninos, 2015).
It is precisely the meaning of digital city as an
intelligent environment that fits in with the concept
of the intelligent street; this is ,indeed, the basis of
intelligent cities. As Professor William Mitchell of
MIT points out: “intelligent cities take advantage of
the ‘third wave of technological innovation’, which
means sensors and digital labels, and which will
substitute the two previous waves as regards the
incorporation of computers and the era of
connectivity that the introduction of the Internet
supposed” (Mitchell, 2007).
This same idea could include the concept of a
city as a special case of the Internet of Things
(Telefónica, 2011), in which a smart city is defined
as “an urban space with intelligent infrastructures,
networks and platforms, with millions of sensors and
actuators, within which it is also necessary to
include the people themselves and their mobile
phones. A space that is capable of listening to and
understanding what is happening in the city, which
will help it to make better decisions and provide its
inhabitants with the appropriate information and
services.
All of these considerations highlight the need for
the development of new services from a different
perspective, one that focuses on developing service-
oriented software that would allow citizens to make
the most of the advantages offered by intelligent
cities (López-Sanz, et al., 2014). If city-dwellers are
to appreciate more fully the benefits afforded by
intelligent cities, it is very important for the services
offered by them to comply with quality standards
that are based on international norms such as
ISO/IEC 25000 (ISO/IEC, 2014).
This being so, the remaining part of the paper is
organised as follows: in section 2 there is a
description of Intelligent Pavement (IPavement)
technology, which turns the conventional city into
an intelligent urban place that offers a set of
services. Section 3 presents the environment that has
been built to assess the quality of the services
developed for the IPavement, while in section 4 the
case study of the assessment of an IPavement
service is described. Finally, section 5 sets out the
conclusions obtained and provides work lines future.
244
Oviedo J., Rodriguez M. and Piattini M..
Certification of IPavement Applications for Smart Cities - A Case Study.
DOI: 10.5220/0005431802440249
In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE-2015), pages 244-249
ISBN: 978-989-758-100-7
Copyright
c
2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
2 INTELLIGENT PAVEMENT
The term ‘IPavement’ is currently applied to all
paving that permits the propagation of radio
frequency ‘within the street’s skin’, and is provided
with ‘hotspots’ (service propagation points) which,
over predetermined distances (normally a distance of
20 metres), are able to provide services according to
the range of the repeater (Navarro and Piattini,
2013).
The IPavement is unusual in that it contains
within it elements that are not typical of
conventional paving (electrical, electronic, radio
frequency, etc.) (see Figure 1), which means that in
addition to carrying out its conventional function it
fulfils a second function, which is to support the
intelligent city’s service infrastructures.
Figure 1: Component of the Intelligent Pavement (before
installation of connections and covering) Model 2010.
3 CERTIFICATION
ENVIRONMENT
As pointed out above, it is of the utmost importance
that the services developed for the IPavement should
meet quality standards. It is to that end that the AQC
laboratory (AQC Lab, lab to which the authors
belong) an establishment that has accreditation for
assessment of software product quality based on
conformance with the ISO/IEC 25000 family
(Verdugo et al., 2014), has been working. The
laboratory has adapted a quality assessment
environment (Rodríguez and Piattini, 2014) so as to
be able to tackle assessment of the services
developed by IPavement and assure that quality
standards, such as those of the ISO/IEC 2500 family,
are met.
3.1 IPavement Assessment Process
In order to take on the task of assessing the quality
of IPavement services, it has been necessary to adapt
the quality assessment environment of AQC Lab
(Rodríguez and Piattini, 2014), that is based on
ISO/IEC 25040 (ISO, 2011a).
In carrying out this adaptation, a remodelling of
the Assessment Methodology has been undertaken.
This has led to the IPavement Methodology being
composed of three processes, rather than of one
single process, as in the Methodology of AQC Lab.
This may be observed in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Processes of the IPavement Methodology.
It has also been deemed necessary to perform
another adaptation, which consisted in making an
addition to the Quality Assessment Process. The
Vía Inteligente business entity was added as sponsor
of the service, rather than as developer, Figure 3
show the steps needed to carry out the quality
assessment of a service.
Figure 3: Implementation of the process of assessment of
the quality of the services developed for IPavement.
3.2 IPavement Quality Model
The IPavement Model developed by AQC Lab
(Montealegre et al., 2015), is based on the ISO/IEC
25010 (ISO/IEC, 2011b) norm. That being the case,
the following characteristics defined in the ISO/IEC
25010 have been taken into account when assessing
the different quality aspects of the services
developed for the IPavement. In addition, the
IPavement Model should make it possible to assess
whether the services developed for the IPavement
meet the requirements established by ASEPI
(Agrupación Empresarial Innovadora Pavimento
Inteligente The ‘Intelligent Pavement’ Innovative
QUALITY EVALUATION PROCESS
QUALITY ASSURANCE MANAGEMENT PROCESS
INFRAESTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT PROCESS
PHASE 1:
PLANNING
PHASE 2:
SPECIFICATION
PHASE 3:
EXECUTION
PHASE 4:
CONCLUSIÓN
CertificationofIPavementApplicationsforSmartCities-ACaseStudy
245
Cluster) in the EPI standard (ASEPI, 2011),
specifically in the EPI.C standard. It is to that end
that a new characteristic was added to the IPavement
model, one that is not defined in the ISO/IEC 25010
model. Its object is to assess the level of compliance
with the requirements of the EPI.C standard.
In order to align this characteristic with those
established in the ISO/IEC 25010 norm, a set of
subcharacteristics have been defined for the
characteristic of Conformity to the EPI. C standard:
Intellectual Property, Data Protection, RFID
Security and Safety, Security and Privacy of
Geolocation and Multi-language support, that
measures different aspects covered by the EPI.C
standard (Navarro and Piattini, 2013).
Now it should be indicated how the assessment
of these should be carried out. Nevertheless, the
family of ISO/IEC 25000 norms does not as yet have
a set of metrics or measurement functions at its
disposal that would enable a quality value to be
obtained for these characteristics and
subcharacteristics. The scheme employed by AQC
Lab in its quality models has therefore been
followed (Rodríguez and Piattini, 2014). To carry
this out, a set of quality properties and metrics that
allow this model to be operative has been
established. That means first of all obtaining the
metrics values from the work-products and then
going up the results until the value of the quality
characteristics assessment is reached.
For the sake of space, it is not possible to describe
the complete IPavement model.
3.3 Technological Environment
The last element in tackling quality assessments for
IPavement services is the technological environment
of AQC Lab. The following tasks have been
undertaken in carrying out the adaptation of the
technological environment.
Measurement Tools: New tools have been
developed; these enable and facilitate
measurement of the work products generated
during the development of the IPavemnet
services.
Evaluation System: The quality assessment
criteria and the IPavement quality model have
been implemented, making it possible to carry
out quality assessments automatically.
Visualization Environment: A new
visualization environment has been produced,
so that the results obtained after the
assessment of the IPavement services can be
presented.
4 CASE STUDY
The case study describe the quality assessment of a
service developed for IPavement using assessment
enviorement described in the paper. The assessment
was performed on the Viateca service. It is an e-
commerce web platform for the buying and selling
of e-books in ePub format; this carries within it a
complete admin.
4.1 Devices Used in the Assessment
The assessment of Viateca was carried out on two
different types of devices, their characteristics are
displayed in Table 1, since one of the main
characteristics of IPavement is the independence of
the device for the use of its services. The service
quality can, however, be affected by the type of
device (screen size, processing ability, etc.)
employed during the use of the service.
Table 1: Characteristics of Device 1 and Device 2.
Device PC Smartphone
Operating
System
Windows 7
Enterprise Service
Pack 1
Android 4.1.2
RAM
Memory
8 GB 1 GB
Processor
AMD Phenom
64x4 945
3.00 GHz
Quad-core 1.2
GHz Cortex-A7
4.2 Assessment of Viateca
The quality results obtained are shown in Table 2,
where the quality value reached for each
characteristic in each of the devices employed in the
assessment is indicated.
Table 2: Results of the characteristics in the assessment of
Viateca.
Characteristic Device 1 Device 2
Final
Value
EPI. C 2 2 2
Usability 2 2 2
Reliability 4 4 4
Security 4 4 4
Functional
Suitability
4 4 4
Portability 3 3 3
Compatibility 4 4 4
Performance
Efficiency
5 5 5
The quality values obtained in both of the
ENASE2015-10thInternationalConferenceonEvaluationofNovelSoftwareApproachestoSoftwareEngineering
246
assessments of Viateca are identical, due to the fact
that Viateca was developed to be an IPavement
service. These results have been obtained from the
subcharacteristics of each characteristic, whose
results are presented in the following sub-sections. It
is true that the results of the assessments carried out
on device 1 and 2 are identical, but in the following
sections only the final results of the assessment.
4.2.1 The EPI. C Standard
In the assessment of the EPI. C standard, the
subcharacteristics of Security and RFID Privacy and
the Privacy of Geolocation were not taken into
account. This was because Viateca does not offer
functionalities related to RFID and Geolocation
technologies.
In the assessment of the EPI.C Standard it has
been demonstrated that Viateca has reached quality
level 2 for this characteristic. This value was
obtained from the quality results that its
subcharacteristics have reached in the assessments
conducted, the results of which are displayed in
Table 3. On examining the results, it may be seen
that the lack of support for enabling other languages
to be chosen, and the non-availability of regional
configurations other than those of Spain have led to
the result obtained by Viateca for the characteristic
of Compliance with the EPI.C Standard.
Table 3: Results of the Subcharacteristics of the EPI.C
Standard.
Subcharacteristic Result
Intellectual Property 100
Data Protection 100
RFID Security and Safety -
Security and Privacy of Geolocation -
Multi-language Support 0
4.2.2 Usability
To assess Usability, it has been shown that Viateca
has reached quality level 2 for this characteristic.
This value was attained on the basis of the quality
results reached by its subcharacteristics in the
Table 4: Results of the Subcharacteristics of Usability.
Subcharacteristic Result
Appropriateness recognisability 72,62
Learnability 72,62
Operability 50,00
User Error Protection 100
User Interface Aesthetics 46,37
Accessibility 0,00
assessments performed, the results of which may be
seen in Table 4.
An examination of the results shows that the
non-compliance with the accessibility standards, for
example: (W3C, 2011) and (W3C, 2013), and along
with the impossibility of customising the user
interface, lie behind the results Viateca obtained for
Usability.
4.2.3 Reliability
In the assessment of Reliability, Viateca was shown
to have reached quality level 4 for this characteristic.
This value was obtained on the basis of the quality
results that its subcharacteristics reached in the
assessments carried out, the results of which appear
in Table 5.
On examining Table 5, it may be seen that the
good results obtained by its subcharacteristics are
the reason for the good result reached for the
Reliability characteristic. Nonetheless, the
Reliability level could increase, thereby improving
the availability of the service. That is why
mechanisms should be put in place to make it
possible for the service to be used whenever the user
wishes under the conditions established.
Table 5: Results of the Reliability Subcharacteristics.
Subcharacteristic Result
Maturity 95,87
Fault Tolerance 100
Recoverability 100
Availability 87,79
4.2.4 Security
In the assessment of Security it has been established
that Viateca has reached quality level 4 for this
characteristic. This value was obtained on the basis
of the quality results reached by its
subcharacteristics in the assessments performed, the
results of which are shown in Table 6.
On observing the information in Table 6, it may
be seen that the good results achieved by the
subcharacteristics lie behind the good result reached
for the Security characteristic. Nevertheless, the
Security level could increase and bring with it an
Table 6: Results of the Subcharacteristics of Security.
Subcharacteristic Result
Confidentiality 100
Integrity 100
Non-Repudiation 100
Authenticity 50
Accountability 100
CertificationofIPavementApplicationsforSmartCities-ACaseStudy
247
improvement in the authenticity of the service. To
that end, mechanisms that enable there to be a
strengthening of the measures to control access
should be implemented. These mechanisms should
also cover all the functionalities of the service that
need to be protected by access control mechanisms.
4.2.5 Functional Suitability
In the assessment of Functional Suitability, Viateca
has demonstrated that it has reached quality level 4
for this characteristic. This value was obtained from
the quality results achieved by its subcharacteristics
in the assessments performed, the results of which
are shown in Table 7.
An examination of Table 7 demonstrates that the
good results achieved by the subcharacteristics led to
the good result obtained for the characteristic of
Functional Suitability. However, the Functional
Suitability level could rise, with a consequent
improvement in the Functional Appropriateness of
the service. This means that the functionalities of the
service which have not been described in the
requirements, and which are therefore neither
necessary nor appropriate for the user, should be
eliminated.
Table 7: Results of Subcharacteristics of Functional
Suitability.
Subcharacteristic Result
Functional Completeness 95,87
Functional Correctness 98,23
Functional Appropriateness 93,81
4.2.6 Portability
The assessment of the Portability showed that
Viateca has reached quality level 3 for this
characteristic. This value was obtained on the basis
of the quality results that its subcharacteristics
reached in the assessments performed, the results of
which are set out in Table 8.
On examining the results in Table 8, it may be
seen that the low result obtained in Adaptability due
to lack of customization of the service, has led to the
result obtained by Viateca for the Portability
characteristic.
Table 8: Results of the Subcharacteristics of Portability.
Subcharacteristic Result
Adaptability 38,13
Instalability 100
Replaceability 100
4.2.7 Compatibility
Viateca was found to have reached quality level 4
for this characteristic in the assessment of
Compatibility. This value was obtained from the
quality results which its subcharacteristics reached
in the assessments undertaken, the results of which
may be seen in Table 9.
An examination of Table 9 leads us to affirm that
the good results achieved by the subcharacteristics
have led to the good result reached for the
subcharacteristic of Compatibility. However, the
Functional Suitability level could increase, thereby
solving the problems detected in the exchange of
service data with other services, such as e-mail.
Table 9: Results of the Subcharacteristics of
Compatibility.
Subcharacteristic Result
Co-existence 100
Interoperability 66,67
4.2.8 Performance Efficiency
Viateca was shown to have reached quality level 5
for this characteristic. This value was obtained from
the quality results achieved by its subcharacteristics
in the assessments carried out, the results of which
are set out in Table 10.
Table 10: Results of the Subcharacteristics of
Performance.
Subcharacteristic Result
Time-behaviour 100
Resource utilisation 97,71
Capacity 100
Table 10 shows, on examination, that the excellent
results obtained by its subcharacteristics have caused
the good result for the Performance characteristic.
Thus, because level 5 has been reached, no other
improvement in the service needs to be made to raise
the quality level for that characteristic. However, if
new assessments are undertaken for this service, this
characteristic ought to be assessed along with the
rest; it should be checked that the changes
introduced into the service have not had negative
consequences for this characteristic.
5 CONCLUSIONS
IPavement is innovative technology which places in
the hands of citizens a set of services that make it
ENASE2015-10thInternationalConferenceonEvaluationofNovelSoftwareApproachestoSoftwareEngineering
248
easier for them to be more integrated in the city. If
these services are to be of any benefit they must
meet some quality requirements. This paper has
presented an environment for the quality assessment
of services developed for IPavement. In addition,
details on a case study carried out have been
provided, to show the practical application of the
quality assessment of a service.
During the development of the environment for
the quality assessment of the services of IPavement,
it was shown that the type of device employed to use
the IPavement services could affect the different
aspects related to quality of service. It was thus
determined that a quality assessment for an
IPavement service should consist of various
assessments (one by type of device). After this,
during the case study, it was observed:
Quality assessment of the IPavement services
is independent of the technology and
language.
IPavment services shoud have techincal
documentation.
Evaluation is largel manual because there
aren't tools to automate the assessment.
Easy to introduces errors by the evaluator.
Bearing all these considerations in mind, we are
working on the following lines:
Increasing the set of devices on which to carry
out the simulation and assessment of the
services.
Automatising the assessment tasks as far as
possible, aiming to reduce the time frames and
improve the reliability of the results.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been funded by the ENVIA project by
the (Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER
and Ministerio de Industria, Energía y Turismo
within in the National Plan for Scientific Research,
Development and Technological Innovation 2008-
2011 TSI-020302-2011-6), by the BIOPAVEMENT
project (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
CDTI-MINECO y Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo
Regional FEDER IDI-20120804) and by the
GEODAS-BC project (Ministerio de Economía y
Competitividad and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo
Regional FEDER, TIN2012-37493-C03-01).
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