The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated remote working and working at the office. This hybrid working is an indispensable part of today's life even within Agile Software Development (ASD) teams. Before COVID-19 ASD teams were working closely together in an Agile way at the office. The Agile Manifesto describes 12 principles to make agile working successful. These principles are about working closely together, face-to-face contact and continuously responding to changes. To what extent does hybrid working influence these agile principles that have been indispensable in today's software development since its creation in 2001? Based on a quantitative study within 22 Dutch financial institutions and 106 respondents, the relationship between hybrid working and ASD is investigated. The results of this research show that human factors, such as team spirit, feeling responsible and the ability to learn from each other, are the most decisive for the success of ASD. In addition, the research shows that hybrid working creates a distance between the business organization and the IT department. The findings are valuable for Managers, HR professionals and employees working in the field of ASD as emphasizing and fostering Team Spirit, Learning Ability, and a Sense of Responsibility among team members can bolster the Speed of ASD.
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Past research on designing for behavioural change mostly concerned linear design processes, whereas in practice, Agile design methods are increasingly popular. This paper evaluates the possibilities and limitations of using Agile design methods in theory-driven design for behavioural change. We performed a design case study, consisting of a student design team working on improving waiting experiences at Schiphol Airport security and check-in. Our study showed that Agile design methods are usable when designing for behavioural change. Moreover, the Behavioural Lenses toolkit used in the design process is beneficial in facilitating theory-driven Agile design. The combination of an Agile design process and tools to evidentially inform the design enabled the design team to formulate viable and interesting concepts for improving waiting-line experiences. However, limitations also occurred: a mismatch between the rate at which the Scream method proceeded and the time and momentum needed to conduct in-depth research.
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Due to the changing technological possibilities of services, the demands that society places on the level of service provided by the Dutch Central Government (DCG) are changing rapidly. To accommodate this, the Dutch government is improving its processes in such a way that they become more agile and are continuously improved. However, the DCG struggles with the implementation of improvement tools that can support this. The research described in this paper aims to deliver key factors that influence the adoption of tools that improve the agile way of working and continuous improvement at the DCG. Therefore, a literature review has been conducted, from which 24 factors have been derived. Subsequently, 9 semi structured interviews have been conducted to emphasize the perspective of employees at the DCG. In total, 7 key factors have been derived from the interviews. The interviewees consisted of both employees from departments who already worked with tools to improve agile working and continuous improvement as well as employees from departments who haven’t used such tools yet. An important insight based on this research is that the aims, way of working and scope of the improvement tools must be clear for all the involved co-workers
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Author supplied: The production system described in this paper in an implementation of an agile agent-based production system. This system is designed to meet the requirements of modern production, where short time to market, requirementdriven production and low cost small quantity production are important issues. The production is done on special devices called equiplets. A grid of these equiplets connected by a fast network is capable of producing a variety of different products in parallel. The multi-agent-based software infrastructure is responsible for the agile manufacturing. A product agent is responsible for the production of a single product and equiplet agents will perform the production steps to assemble the product. This paper describes this multiagent-based production system with the focus on the product agent. Presented at EUMAS 2013 ( 11th European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems) , At Toulouse.
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Author supplied: The production system described in this paper in an im- plementation of an agile agent-based production system. This system is designed to meet the requirements of modern production, where short time to market, requirement-driven production and low cost small quan- tity production are important issues. The production is done on special devices called equiplets. A grid of these equiplets connected by a fast network is capable of producing a variety of diverent products in parallel. The multi-agent-based software infrastructure is responsible for the agile manufacturing. A product agent is responsible for the production of a single product and equiplet agents will perform the production steps to assemble the product. This paper describes this multiagent-based production system with the focus on the product agent.
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This paper describes an agent-based software infrastructure for agile industrial production. This production is done on special devices called equiplets. A grid of these equiplets connected by a fast network is capable of producing a variety of different products in parallel. The multi-agent-based underlying systems uses two kinds of agents: an agent representing the product and an agent representing the equiplet.
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Dit proefschrift heeft als onderwerp de toepassing van agenttechnologie in productie en productondersteuning. Onder een agent verstaan we in deze context een autonoom opererende software entiteit die gemaakt is om een zeker doel te realiseren en daartoe met de omgeving comuniceert en zelfstandig acties kan uitvoeren. In moderne productiesystemen streeft men ernaar om de tijd van ontwerp tot productie zo kort mogelijk te houden en de productie af te stemmen op de wensen van de individuele eindgebruiker. Vooral dit laatste streven past niet in het concept van massaproductie. Een methode moet gezocht worden om kleine hoeveelheden of zelfs unieke producten tegen een lage kostprijs te fabriceren. Om dit te verwezenlijken zijn voor dit onderzoek speciale goedkope productieplatforms ontwikkeld. Deze hercongureerbare productiemachines noemen we equiplets. Een verzameling van deze equiplets in een gridopstelling geplaatst en gekoppeld met een snelle netwerkverbinding is in staat om een aantal verschillende producten tegelijk te produceren. Dit noemen we exibele parallelle productie. Voor de softwareinfrastructuur is agenttechnologie toegepast. Twee typen agenten spelen hierin een hoofdrol. Een productagent is verantwoordelijk voor de totstandkoming van een enkel product. De productiemachines worden voorgesteld door zogenoemde equipletagenten. De productagent weet wat er moet gebeuren voor het maken van een product terwijl de equipletagent weet hoe een of meer productiestappen moeten worden uitgevoerd. Het hier voorgesteld concept verschilt in veel opzichten van standaard massaproductie. Elk product in wording volgt zijn eigen, mogelijk unieke pad langs de equiplets, de productie wordt per product gescheduled en niet per batch en er is geen sprake van een productielijn. Dit proefschrift stelt de softwarearchitectuur voor en beschrijft oplossingen voor de routeplanning waarbij het aantal wisselingen tussen equiplets geminimaliseerd is, een scheduling die gebaseerd is op schedulingschema's zoals toegepast in real-time operating systems en een op autonome voertuigen gebaseerd transportsysteem. Bij al deze oplossingen speelt de productagent een belangrijke rol. (uit de samenvatting van het proefschrift) SIKS Dissertation Series No. 2014-31 The research reported in this thesis has been carried out under the auspices of SIKS, the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems.
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Nowadays the interest in Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is rising enormously. There are a lot of software developers and consultancy firms that are jumping to the occasion and are selling Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) that are based on these concepts (Hill, 2006). Hearing these companies talk, it is mostly about What the BPM and SOA concepts are and Why companies should start projects. Often the aim of such projects is turning a companys current application portfolio to a Service Oriented Architecture that can make the business more agile by using Business Process Management concepts and putting the business in the lead where it concerns the use of IT.
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Presented at the 11th International Conference on ICT in Education, Research and Industrial Applications: Integration, Harmonization and Knowledge Transfer Lviv, Ukraine, May 14-16, 2015. Author supplied: Abstract. User requirements and low-cost small quantity production are new challenges for the modern manufacturing industry. This means that small batch sizes or even the manufacturing of one single product should be affordable. To make such a system cost-effective it should be capable to use the available production resources for many different products in parallel. This paper gives a description of the requirements and architecture of an end-user driven production system. The end-user communicates with the production system by a web interface, so this manufacturing system can be characterized in terms of cloud comput- ing as the implementation of manufacturing as a service, abbreviated to MaaS.
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Standard mass-production is a well-known manufacturing concept. To make small quantities or even single items of a product according to user specifications at an affordable price, alternative agile production paradigms should be investigated and developed. The system presented in this article is based on a grid of cheap reconfigurable production units, called equiplets. A grid of these equiplets is capable to produce a variety of different products in parallel at an affordable price. The underlying agent-based software for this system is responsible for the agile manufacturing. An important aspect of this type of manufacturing is the transport of the products along the available equiplets. This transport of the products from equiplet to equiplet is quite different from standard production. Every product can have its own unique path along the equiplets. In this article several topologies are discussed and investigated. Also, the planning and scheduling in relation to the transport constraints is subject of this study. Some possibilities of realization are discussed and simulations are used to generate results with the focus on efficiency and usability for different topologies and layouts of the grid and its internal transport system. Closely related with this problem is the scheduling of the production in the grid. A discussion about the maximum achievable load on the production grid and its relation with the transport system is also included.
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