Framework for engineering design systems architectures evaluation and selection: case study

Engineering companies face the challenge of developing complex Engineering Design Systems. These systems involve huge financial, people, and time investments within an environment that is characterised by continuously changing technologies and processes. Systems architecture provides the strategies and modelling approaches to ensure that adequate resources are spent in developing the possible To Be states for a target system. Architecture selection and evaluation involves evaluating different architectural alternatives with respect to multiple criteria, hence an Architecture Evaluation Framework which evaluates and down selects the appropriate architectures solutions is crucial to assess how these systems will deliver value over their lifetime, and where to channel the financial and human investments to maximize benefit delivered to the business’ bottom line. In this paper, an evaluation and selection architecture framework is proposed, which targets to maximise the alignment of Engineering Design Systems with business goals based on a quality centric architecture evaluation approach. The framework utilised software Quality Attributes as well as SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) and PEST (Political, Economic, Social, Technological) analyses to capture different viewpoints related to technical, political and business context. The framework proposed employing AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) to quantitatively elicit relationships between Quality Attributes trade-offs and architectural characteristics. The framework was applied to a real case study considering five Engineering Design Systems alternative architectures, where workshops with subject matter experts and stakeholders were held to reach an informative decision, that maximise architectural quality, whilst maintaining business alignment

Designing a novel virtual collaborative environment to support collaboration in design review meetings

Project review meetings are part of the project management process and are organised to assess progress and resolve any design conflicts to avoid delays in construction. One of the key challenges during a project review meeting is to bring the stakeholders together and use this time effectively to address design issues as quickly as possible. At present, current technology solutions based on BIM or CAD are information-centric and do not allow project teams to collectively explore the design from a range of perspectives and brainstorm ideas when design conflicts are encountered. This paper presents a system architecture that can be used to support multi-functional team collaboration more effectively during such design review meetings. The proposed architecture illustrates how information-centric BIM or CAD systems can be made human- and team-centric to enhance team communication and problem solving. An implementation of the proposed system architecture has been tested for its utility, likability and usefulness during design review meetings. The evaluation results suggest that the collaboration platform has the potential to enhance collaboration among multi-functional teams

Techniques and Practices for Software Architecture Work in Agile Software Development

Since the publishing of Agile Manifesto in 2001, the agile software development has taken the world by storm. Agile software development does not emphasize the importance of software architecture, even though software architecture is often seen as a key factor for achieving the quality goals set for the software system. It has been even said that agile software development and software architecture are a clash of two cultures.In many software projects there is no need to consider software architecture anymore. For example, when designing a mobile application, the ecosystem forces the developer to use certain architecture style provided by the platform. In web development ready-made frameworks and project templates are available offering complete software architecture designs for the application developer.There are still domains and systems where careful architecture design is needed. When developing complex systems or systems with a long lifecycle, diligent software architecture design is a key to avoid massive rework during the development. It cannot be a coincidence that companies developing these kinds of systems struggle with agile software development the most.On the one hand, the goal of this thesis was to study software architecture practices used in agile software development in the industry. On the other hand, the goal was to develop new methods and techniques to support incremental software architecture working practices which can be aligned with agile methods such as Scrum. The study applied case study, interviews and design science as the main research methods.The results show that there are four main ways to carry out software architecture work while using agile methods. Basing on this result, models for aligning software architec-ture knowledge management were developed. These models can be used as guidelines for selecting the appropriate software architecture practices in an organization.As a part of the research work, an architecture knowledge repository was developed for sharing the knowledge in agile projects and for automatic software architecture document generation. Additionally, the results of this study show that by taking a decision-centric approach to software architecture evaluation, the evaluation method can be lightweight enough to make incremental evaluation a viable option. Similarly, existing software architecture evaluation methods can be boosted to fit agile software development by utilizing domain knowledge

Integrating information and knowledge for enterprise innovation

It has widely been accepted that enterprise integration, can be a source of socio-technical and cultural problems within organisations wishing to provide a focussed end-to-end business service. This can cause possible “straitjacketing” of business process architectures, thus suppressing responsive business re-engineering and competitive advantage for some companies. Accordingly, the current typology and emergent forms of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies are set in the context of understanding information and knowledge integration philosophies. As such, key influences and trends in emerging IS integration choices, for end-to-end, cost-effective and flexible knowledge integration, are examined. As touch points across and outside organisations proliferate, via work-flow and relationship management-driven value innovation, aspects of knowledge refinement and knowledge integration pose challenges to maximising the potential of innovation and sustainable success, within enterprises. This is in terms of the increasing propensity for data fragmentation and the lack of effective information management, in the light of information overload. Furthermore, the nature of IS mediation which is inherent within decision making and workflow-based business processes, provides the basis for evaluation of the effects of information and knowledge integration. Hence, the authors propose a conceptual, holistic evaluation framework which encompasses these ideas. It is thus argued that such trends, and their implications regarding enterprise IS integration to engender sustainable competitive advantage, require fundamental re-thinking

Quality-aware model-driven service engineering

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Quality aspects ranging from interoperability to maintainability to performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Architecture models can substantially influence quality attributes of the implemented software systems. Besides the benefits of explicit architectures on maintainability and reuse, architectural constraints such as styles, reference architectures and architectural patterns can influence observable software properties such as performance. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and evaluating the performance of implemented software. We present an approach for addressing the quality of services and service-based systems at the model-level in the context of model-driven service engineering. The focus on architecture-level models is a consequence of the black-box character of services

Design choices for agent-based control of AGVs in the dough making process

In this paper we consider a multi-agent system (MAS) for the logistics control of Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) that are used in the dough making process at an industrial bakery. Here, logistics control refers to constructing robust schedules for all transportation jobs. The paper discusses how alternative MAS designs can be developed and compared using cost, frequency of messages between agents, and computation time for evaluating control rules as performance indicators. Qualitative design guidelines turn out to be insufficient to select the best agent architecture. Therefore, we also use simulation to support decision making, where we use real-life data from the bakery to evaluate several alternative designs. We find that architectures in which line agents initiate allocation of transportation jobs, and AGV agents schedule multiple jobs in advance, perform best. We conclude by discussing the benefits of our MAS systems design approach for real-life applications