A Smart City Application Modeling Framework: A Case Study on Re-engineering a Smart Retail Platform

摘要

Smart City Application Engineering is a challenging task due to the constantly evolving environment in which these applications operate and the variability of the different types of technologies that synthesize them. Therefore, flexibility and extendibility are two important quality attributes that should be taken into consideration when designing Smart City Applications. In this paper, we propose the Smart City Application Modeling Framework (SCAMF) for analyzing and designing Smart City applications that is based on the concept of Clean Architecture and adopts the representation formalism of feature models. SCAMF methodology is evaluated through a case study on a Smart Retail Platform. Quality indices like flexibility, extendibility along with metrics as complexity, cohesion and design size are compared to the initial version of the application that was completely re-engineered due to maintenance problems. The results of the study suggest that the proposed methodology improves quality indices like flexibility and extendibility up to 120%.