In 2017 and 2018, two events were held—in Marburg, Germany, and San Vigilio di Marebbe, Italy, respectively—focusing on an analysis of the state of research, state of practice, and state of the art in model-driven engineering (MDE). The events brought together experts from industry, academia, and the open-source community to assess what has changed in research in MDE over the last 10 years, what challenges remain, and what new challenges have arisen. This article reports on the results of those meetings, and presents a set of grand challenges that emerged from discussions and synthesis. These challenges could lead to research initiatives for the community going forward.

Microservices have seen their popularity blossoming with an explosion of concrete applications in real-life software. Several companies are currently involved in a major refactoring of their back-end systems in order to improve scalability. This article presents an experience report of a real-world case study, from the banking domain, in order to demonstrate how scalability is positively affected by reimplementing a monolithic architecture into microservices. The case study is based on the FX Core system for converting from one currency to another. FX Core is a mission-critical system of Danske Bank, the largest bank in Denmark and one of the leading financial institutions in Northern Europe.

Gamification, which refers to the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, provides similar experiences and motivations as games do; this makes gamification a useful approach to promote positive behaviors. As a useful tool for keeping users motivated, engaged and active, there is a wide interest in adopting gamification solutions for supporting and promoting positive behaviors and behavior change (e.g. quit smoking, ecological behaviors, food choices, civic engagement, mental healthcare, sustainability, etc.). In this study, we use the CiteSpace software to examine 984 publications and their 46,609 unique references on gamification applied for behavior change. The corpus of studies was downloaded from the Scopus database and refers to studies published between 2011 and the beginning of 2022. Several methods were used to analyze these data: (1) document co-citation analysis (DCA) was performed to identify the pivotal researches and the research areas; (2) author cocitation analysis (ACA) was performed to identify the main authors; (3) and keyword analysis was performed to detect the most influential keywords and their change over time. The results of the analysis provide an overview of the influential documents, authors and keywords that have given shape to the literature of the field, and how it has evolved, showing an initial interest in motivational and persuasion techniques, and in the gamification design, and subsequently in the development of more rigorous methodologies for both design and use. As the first scientometric review of gamification applied to behavior change, this study will be of interest to junior and senior researchers, graduate students, and professors seeking to identify research trends, topics, major publications, and influential scholars.

Providing mobility services effectively to residents and visitors is a complex socio-technical system task to city public managers. Smart mobility systems aim to support the efficient exploitation of city transport facilities and sustainable mobility within the urban environment. People need to travel quickly and conveniently between locations at different scales, ranging from a few blocks within a city to a journey across cities. At the same time, goods need to be timely delivered, considering both the users and the businesses' needs. Several cities indicated an interest in using Autonomous Vehicles (AV) for the ``last-mile'' mobility services in the last few years. With them, it seems to be easier to get people and goods around using fewer vehicles. In this context, Autonomous Shuttles (AS) are beginning to be thought of as a new mobility/delivery service into the city center where narrow streets are not easily served by traditional buses. They allow them to perform critical areas with minimal new infrastructure and reduce noise and pollution. The article analyses the state-of-art on autonomous shuttles by proposing four application scenarios targeting the last-mile delivery of goods, the tourist experiences, and the shared and integrated mobility. Furthermore, we contribute with the proposition of the Autonomous Shuttles-as-a service (ASaaS) concept as the key pillar for the realization of innovative and sustainable proximity mobility. Our research proposed new research challenges for ASaaS, and we discuss social implications and governance challenges that consider user engagement and sustainability. It also recommended extending new research to focus on simulation and machine learning techniques for last-mile mobility planning and explore the journeys tracking certification via artificial intelligence and blockchain-based techniques.

An increasing interest is growing around the idea of microservices and the promise of improving scalability when compared to monolithic systems. Several companies are evaluating pros and cons of a complex migration. In particular, financial institutions are positioned in a difficult situation due to the economic climate and the appearance of agile competitors that can navigate in a more flexible legal framework and started their business since day one with more agile architectures and without being bounded to outdated technological standard. In this paper, we present a real world case study in order to demonstrate how scalability is positively affected by re-implementing a monolithic architecture (MA) into a microservices architecture (MSA). The case study is based on the FX Core system, a mission critical system of Danske Bank, the largest bank in Denmark and one of the leading financial institutions in Northern Europe. The technical problem that has been addressed and solved in this paper is the identification of a repeatable migration process that can be used to convert a real world Monolithic architecture into a Microservices architecture in the specific setting of financial domain, typically characterized by legacy systems and batch-based processing on heterogeneous data sources.