A framework for the definition of metrics for actor-dependency models

Actor-dependency models are a formalism aimed at providing intentional descriptions of processes as a network of dependency relationships among actors. This kind of models is currently widely used in the early phase of requirements engineering as well as in other contexts such as organizational analysis and business process reengineering. In this paper, we are interested in the definition of a framework for the formulation of metrics over these models. These metrics are used to analyse the models with respect to some properties that are interesting for the system being modelled, such as security, efficiency or accuracy. The metrics are defined in terms of the actors and dependencies of the model. We distinguish three different kinds of metrics that are formally defined, and then we apply the framework at two different layers of a meeting scheduler system.Postprint (published version

Energy Information Systems: From the Basement to the Boardroom

A significant buildings energy reduction opportunity exists in the office sector, given that this market segment typically is an early adopter of new technology. There is a rising trend towards smart and connected offices through the internet of things (IoT) that provides new opportunities for operational efficiency and environmental sustainability practices. Leading commercial real estate companies have begun to shift from individual building automation systems (BAS) to partially integrated and automated systems such as energy information systems (EIS). In both the United States and India, organizations are seeking operational excellence, enhanced tenant relationships, and topline growth. Hence it is imperative to engage the executives with decision-making power, by tapping into their interest in sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and innovation. This expansion of interest can enable data-driven decisions, strong energy investments, and deeper energy benefits, and would drive innovation in this field. However, none of this would be possible without robust, consistent building energy information to provide visibility across all the levels of decision making, i.e. from the basement where the facilities staff take operational action to the boardroom where the executives make investment decisions. Price, security, and ease of use remain barriers to the adoption and pervasive use of promising EIS technologies in commercial office buildings. We believe that these barriers can be addressed through the development of ready, simplified, consistent, commercially available, low-cost EIS-in-a-box packages, that have a pre-defined set of hardware components and software features and functionality that are pertinent to a particular building sector. These simplified, sector-specific EIS packages can help to obviate the need for customization, and enhance ease of use, thereby enabling scale-up, in order to facilitate building energy savings. The EIS-in-a-box are adaptable in both U.S. and Indian office buildings, and potentially beyond these two countries

Compressed Sensing Based Direct Conversion Receiver With Interference Reducing Sampling

This paper describes a direct conversion receiver applying compressed sensing with the objective to relax the analog filtering requirements seen in the traditional architecture. The analog filter is cumbersome in an \gls{IC} design and relaxing its requirements is an advantage in terms of die area, performance and robustness of the receiver. The objective is met by a selection of sampling pattern matched to the prior knowledge of the frequency placement of the desired and interfering signals. A simple numerical example demonstrates the principle. The work is part of an ongoing research effort and the different project phases are explained.Comment: 3 pages, 5 figures, submitted to IEEE International Conference On Sensing Communication and Networking 2014 (poster

Feasibility Study of RFID Technology for Construction Load Tracking

INE/AUTC 10.0

Management issues in systems engineering

When applied to a system, the doctrine of successive refinement is a divide-and-conquer strategy. Complex systems are sucessively divided into pieces that are less complex, until they are simple enough to be conquered. This decomposition results in several structures for describing the product system and the producing system. These structures play important roles in systems engineering and project management. Many of the remaining sections in this chapter are devoted to describing some of these key structures. Structures that describe the product system include, but are not limited to, the requirements tree, system architecture and certain symbolic information such as system drawings, schematics, and data bases. The structures that describe the producing system include the project's work breakdown, schedules, cost accounts and organization

Production of Reliable Flight Crucial Software: Validation Methods Research for Fault Tolerant Avionics and Control Systems Sub-Working Group Meeting

The state of the art in the production of crucial software for flight control applications was addressed. The association between reliability metrics and software is considered. Thirteen software development projects are discussed. A short term need for research in the areas of tool development and software fault tolerance was indicated. For the long term, research in format verification or proof methods was recommended. Formal specification and software reliability modeling, were recommended as topics for both short and long term research

Using software development progress data to understand threats to project outcomes

Peer reviewe

Automated software quality visualisation using fuzzy logic techniques

In the past decade there has been a concerted effort by the software industry to improve the quality of its products. This has led to the inception of various techniques with which to control and measure the process involved in software development. Methods like the Capability Maturity Model have introduced processes and strategies that require measurement in the form of software metrics. With the ever increasing number of software metrics being introduced by capability based processes, software development organisations are finding it more difficult to understand and interpret metric scores. This is particularly problematic for senior management and project managers where analysis of the actual data is not feasible. This paper proposes a method with which to visually represent metric scores so that managers can easily see how their organisation is performing relative to quality goals set for each type of metric. Acting primarily as a proof of concept and prototype, we suggest ways in which real customer needs can be translated into a feasible technical solution. The solution itself visualises metric scores in the form of a tree structure and utilises Fuzzy Logic techniques, XGMML, Web Services and the .NET Framework. Future work is proposed to extend the system from the prototype stage and to overcome a problem with the masking of poor scores