Research Projects

Cosmos
Cosmos aims at developing new methods, models, tools, and theory that help companies to move deeper to services with more customer-oriented solutions - while staying in control and at a profit. Research topics include service modeling, definition and documentation of service offerings, knowledge and information management, and cost management of configurable services. Further, recommender technologies are extended to configurable offerings. The project is a joint effort of SoberIT, Laboratory of Work Psychology at TKK, and Cost Management Center (CMC) of Tampere University of Technology. University of Klagenfurt is our research partner on integrating recommender systems and configurators.
ICT in Built Environment

LIMIT (Lean Information Management In Traditional manufacturing industries)
The project aims to improve engineering change management in collaborative product design and development environments. Principles of Lean Product Development will be applied to engineering change management and product data management processes and tools to make information exchange more efficient.
MapIT
The MaPIT research project addresses the challenges of globally distributed software development projects and aims at finding solutions and useful practices for managing and working in global software development (GSD) projects. The main  GSD themes studied in MaPIT are: software development processes, communication and collaboration practices, IT tool support for collaboration, building and maintaining trust, cultural issues in GSD and management and governance of globally distributed software development projects.
omaHyvinvointi
OmaHyvinvointi project is developing a dual model for citizen-centric information management. TKK is responsible for the infrastructure part.
REFlex
The research goal of the project is to investigate how companies can flexibly and cost-effectively develop whole products that provide value for both customers and users.
SHAPE
Software product Health And Process Excellence (SHAPE)
The SHAPE research project increases the competitivity of the Finnish software product industry through developing an approach and practical guidelines for supporting long-term product health and establishing software process excellence, considering both technical and business aspects.
SOLEA
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is emerging as a central architectural framework in the pursuit of flexible, agile and standardized enterprise-level information systems environment. Service-Oriented Locally adapted Enterprise Architecture project aims to provide answers to following questions:
- How service-orientation should affect EA and how is helps to align Business and IT?
- How the benefits of SOA are gotten and how we adapt general solutions locally?
- How do we identify and define services to maximise the promised business benefits – cost efficiency and adaptability – through reuse?
- How do we deploy solutions effectively and make sure of interoperability in the networked economy (B2B requirements)?
Stakeholders in SOLEA include industrial companies, healthcare providers, systems integrators and standardisation bodies.
TOSI
TOSI research project aims to develop a sound theoretical basis for supporting variability at architectural level in software product families. The more concrete goals are to develop a rigorously defined variability ontology, variability modeling language based on the ontology, and tool support for the modeling languages. The results enable development of models for expressing variability explicitly and use of all variability correctly and efficiently to derive the product variants of a product family.

Completed projects

AMIRE
AMIRE is about efficient creation and modification of mixed reality (MR) applications. The objective of the AMIRE is to enable people to use MR for their applications as well as to create and modify these MR applications with the support of dedicated tools that foster an efficient authoring process for MR. Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) / Software Business and Engineering Institute (SoberIT) / Information Ergonomics Research Group (IERG) participates on AMIRE. IERG is responsible for usability evaluation of authoring tools - as well as MR applications.
ConSerWe
Configurable Services on the Web
The goal of ConSerWe project is to allow cost-effective, semi-automatic or even automatic mass-customisation and individualisation of services offered through the web. This is achieved by developing the business concept of configurable services, modelling and managing services as configurable service product families and by using a service configurator to make sure that a consistent and complete service instance is defined for each customer.
Sarcous
The project studies a new approach to the development of software for network elements based on the concept of configurable software product family. The objectives of this research project are to study and formulate methods for managing software families and re-usable software components on the basis of modeling them as configurable software products.
eGovernment-project
Defining Environmental License Decision Process for Electronic Transacting
FRISBEE
"Freeway to Internatinally Competitive Software Product Business".
Research focuses on internationalization of software product
companies. The project will deliver concrete guidelines and
approaches for preparing, managing, and growing a successful international software product company.
As a whole, the FRISBEE Project aims to help software
product based businesses to become international faster
and more successfully and to substantially strengthen
current knowledge base in the area of software business
research.
Mobix
Mobile Contexts of Use is a 2-year research project. The project develops a framework for modelling mobile contexts of use. The framework provides a method for service and hardware developers, and researchers, who can use it in R&D- processes of mobile devices and services. The developed model takes into account the various aspects of mobile contexts of use combining technical issues with user characteristics and social aspects in the framework of emerging mobile technologies.
WeCoTin
WeCoTin (Web Configuration Technology) -project investigates requirements set by e-commerce and network economy on configuration processes and configurators. The research subjects include management of co-operation of the supply chain, management of delivery and lead times, long term management of configuration models and maintenance of web-based configurator user interfaces. A configurator prototype is developed to demonstrate advanced support for the relevant research results.
Lucos
The goals of the LUCOS project were to develop a method for improving the controllability of product development, as well as tools supporting the method. The focus was on the electronics and telecom industries.
NetData
NetData tries to improve the predictability of lead-time or resources in networked product development projects by better iteration control and integration of information systems involved.
NetSetup
Setup and efficient management of product development projects in a company network: processes for engineering changes and product data management, IT integration, and information flows
NETPROSEC
Data Protection and Security in Electronic Systems and Communication
Qure
Qure (Quality through Requirements) is a research project funded by TEKES and six industrial partners. The research problem of the project is how organisations can cost-effectively develop products that better satisfy users' and customers' needs. The goals of the research are to develop requirements engineering methods and test these methods with the industrial partners.
CORE
Competitive Advantage through Stakeholder-Driven Requirements Engineering. The goal of the project is to develop systematic practices for Finnish software development organisations so that they can cost-efficiently involve stakeholders to develop products that satisfy customer and user needs. In order to reach the goal, the project develops and adapts a set of critical processes, methods, and tools, and support their transfer to practice in participating industrial partners.
PROAKT
Information technology has changed the service and maintenance work: both the tools that the servicemen use and the equipment that they take care of have changed. In this project, we aim to study the service and maintenance work as it is nowadays, and try to find new possibilities for new technical solutions including proactive computing.
ProDoku
"ProDoku"-project is a part of "ProMuovi" technology program which objective is to improve injection molding business network's competitiveness. The research problem in ProDoku is: How to cut down lead-time and improve competitiveness by means of document and product data management?
Product Configuration Survey
The project makes a survey of 10 Finnish companies that manufacture configurable products.
Engineering Document Management
The Product Data Management Group at Helsinki University of Technology has investigated engineering document management for several years together with industrial companies.

Lucos Tools
Lucos Tools are a comprehensive collection of tools for defining, collecting, editing, storing, maintaining and publishing measurement and measurement system data. Lucos Tools were originally developed in the Lucos research project 1997-2000. After that they are applied and further developed in the SEMS and VeTo research projects.
Comet
The project researches content management of a media company based on metadata. Its main focus is to develop a system which supports both selective dissemination of information, and personalized newspapers.
Product Data Management
The project investigates product data management and especially generic product structures together with industrial partners.
mc2
The project mc2 has the goal of understanding the roles of mobility, community and user experience in playing games. The project studies the social meaning and impact of new communications technology for communities that are interested in mobile gaming. It builds an environment for monitoring and modeling the ecosystem of communities and commercial actors around open and collaboratively created game-related content.
NETPRIVACY
Privacy and Data Protection issues related the use of DigitalTV-, Mobile- and Localisation Technology as well as Electronic Sertification in the company.
Oskari
Oskari is an annually implemented survey on Finnish software product industry. The purpose of the survey is to:
OVA
The project aims to develop a web-based system to support course lectures. the system supports the students' learning by orientating the students to the subject of the lecture beforehand and by giving a tool to assess one's learning already during the course.
REALISE
The REALISE research project aims to provide new understanding about workplace, and workplace services from a multidisciplinary point of view. The goal is to identify and analyze different actors in workplace environment, their roles and knowledge needs and describe ICT solutions and implement them in the form of prototypes to support the overall activities at the workplace. The project also includes a focused study on the workplace industry, its current practises and formative drivers.
TechMedia
TechMedia is a three year research project funded by Tekes and participating companies. The goal of the project is to study and explore possible concepts for future knowledge management applications and services. The particular application domain is distributed industrial work environments.
SEMS
The SEMS research project develops a Software Engineering Management System for small and medium-sized software enterprises. Software process models for different business models are created inthe SEMS project, together with instructions and measures. A model for estimating the quality of software engineering is also created. This model can be used by venture capitalists to assess the capability of enterprises to develop top-quality products. The model can also be used by the enterprises for self-assessment.
Svamp
The goal of the Svamp-project is to study thorough and comprehensive understanding of functional and quality variability in software. To achieve this goal, the project will study the existing and define new ontologies that cover the essential concepts of functional and quality variability. In addition, special effort is put on interrelationships between the ontologies. The project will also develop languages and prototype tools for variability.
VeTO
The goals of the VeTO project are to understand how work is organised and performed in a globally networked product development project in different environments, and to develop a procedure that gives basis for successful execution of a globally networked product development project, especially by supporting the setup phase of a project. Additional objective is to estimate needs for and develop supporting IT tools for project metrics and status visualisation.
WISE
WISE (Web-enabled Information Services for Engineering) will propose and demonstrate an efficient and integrated environment for modelling, acquiring, maintaining, retrieving, distributing, and re-using knowledge throughout complete industrial product creation processes including the associated supply chains. This environment will provide IT tools and methods for handling knowledge assets - but will also specify processes and organisational change for deploying knowledge management in the engineers' working environment.