Automatic Pattern Proposition in Transformation Life Cycle is authored

In this 20th issue of the International Journal of Information Technology and the Systems Approach (IJITSA), we report four high-quality research papers. The third and fourth papers were accepted as part of the special issue on “Computing Challenges on IoT and Pervasive Systems”, co-edited by Luiz A. Steffenel, at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France, and Manuele Kirsch Pinheiro, at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France. The first and second papers were accepted as regular submissions. The first paper Automatic Pattern Proposition in Transformation Life Cycle is authored by Mahsa Sadat Panahandeh and Bahman Zamani, both at the University of Isfahan, Iran. These authors reported a method that automatically proposes and applies transformational patterns in the design and implementation phases of the software development life cycle. They advance on previous similar semi-automatic methods. The authors evaluated also automatically the method with metrics regarding quality of transformation specification and design, modularity, simplicity of transformation, efficiency, redundancy, duplication, complexity, execution time and memory usage. Their method is reported with positive improvements on such metrics. This paper, thus, contributes to the advance on software engineering automated design methods. The second paper entitled Privacy Aware Access Control: A Literature Survey & Novel Framework is authored by Rekha Bhatia at Punjabi University Regional Centre, India, and Manpreet Singh at Chandigarh College of Engineering and Technology, India. The authors reviewed current security access mechanisms in the arena of web service-based applications. They found benefits and shortcomings, and thus they advance with the proposal of a novel framework on privacy and secure access based on the recent Hippocratic database concept. The main contribution of authors is the creation of awareness on keeping privacy on web service-based applications through potential solutions, such as the proposed in this paper from a high-level view. Thus, the authors contribute to the software engineering field with another potential overall solution to the relevant dual problem of keeping security and privacy status from users of web service-based applications. The next two papers were accepted as part of the special issue on “Computing Challenges on IoT and Pervasive Systems.” This special issue pursued at promoting and disseminating the recent advances in the field of computing and data management on Internet of Things (IoT) and Pervasive Systems, both at academic and industry level, with a special focus on dynamicity and scalability issues. In the next 25 years, most of the things and devices we interact with will be linked to a global computing infrastructure (Broy & Schmidt, 2014). This massive integration of communicating capabilities on physical objects symbolizes the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT represents a new tendency on IT industry, in which physical environment is populated by interconnected and communicating objects, capable of interacting with each other and with the environment itself. The strength of this concept lies in the seamlessly integration of sensors, actuators and other devices in the Luiz Angelo Steffenel, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France