Open Access

The exponential growth in knowledge coupled with the decreasing knowledge half-life creates a challenging situation for educational programs - particularly those preparing software engineers for their very dynamic high-technology field. Teachers in high technology education areas are challenged in selecting and making relevant knowledge intuitively accessible to students, especially with regard the highly dynamic digital and software technologies. This paper contributes a knowledge nexus-based multimedia approach aligned with Higher Education 4.0 for creating learning apps on mobile devices that support multiple didactic models, leverage intrinsic curiosity and motivation, support gamification, and enable digital collaboration. Object recognition is used to trigger learning paths, and various didactic methods are supported via workflow-like learning flows to support group or team-based learning. A prototype app was realized to demonstrate its feasibility and an empirical evaluation in software engineering shows the didactic potential and advantages of the approach, which can be readily generalized and applied to the arts, sciences, etc.

Nowadays, businesses with focus on consumer-products are challenged by short production cycles, high pricing pressure, and the need to deliver new features and services in a regular interval. Currently, businesses are tackling these challenges by automating their business pro- cesses, while yet trying to be flexible by introducing methods for process variability modeling. However, for larger processes and variability models, it becomes difficult to consider, maintain, and optimize all process variations in the various execution contexts. In software development, highly agile requirements are usually tackled with a flexible microservice architecture. Nonetheless, the fast-changing service landscape is often not fully reflected in the underlying business processes, leading to inefficiency and loss of profit. With this work, we extend our framework for process variability modeling with concepts of Microflows, allowing agile business process modeling and orchestration while utilizing the full flexibility of underlying microservices. In addition, we present a case study, showing how this approach is used in the context of an IoT application

The seamless inclusion of Augmented Reality (AR) with Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) for Smart Factory and Industry 4.0 processes remains a challenge. Towards this end, this paper contributes an approach integrating context-aware AR into intelligent business processes to support and guide manufacturing personnel tasks and enable live task assignment optimization and support task execution quality. Our realization extends two BPMSs (Camunda and AristaFlow) and various AR devices. Various AR capabilities are demonstrated via a simulated industrial case study.

Additive manufacturing of optical elements out of polymer allow new design concepts for optics. The parts are built up layer by layer. Unlike polymer binding with glass particles with its sintering process no secondary step is necessary for polymer printing to create the final part. With more and more printers and transparent materials available, this technology becomes more and more relevant for prototyping or custom optics. Therefor a deep understanding of the optical effects in the part is desirable. Key property of optical elements is the refractive index. The materials for polymer printing are most commonly resins that cure under UV-exposure and show lower refractive indices in liquid phase than cured. Assuming a dependency of the refractive index on the grade of polymerization and therefor the UV-exposure, the layering process of additive manufacturing causes variations of the refractive index within the part. Using the Scanning Focused Refractive Index Microscopy, the distribution of the refractive index within and between the layers is analyzed. The analysis includes comparisons between raw parts after printing and parts after UV post curing. Additionally, layer free samples from a Continuous Liquid Interface Printing System are examined for the homogeneity of the refractive index distribution. The purpose of the presentation is to give a detailed insight into the optical effects occurring at the layer interfaces of elements created by additive manufacturing. Possible use cases of the refractive index distributions within the part are also discussed.