THE GOLDEN THREAD OF INFORMATION AND FIRE SAFETY IN CONSTRUCTION: Making our buildings safer through the development of a Robust Design Specification Strategy and BIM Framework Integration.

In this research, the development of a novel expert knowledge based system for fire safety building design specification and compliance is discussed. Its purpose is to create a beneficial design aid that is integrated with building information modelling (BIM), for helping to design and maintain safer buildings, to ease the navigation through a complex regulatory compliance regime and to mitigate risk of various potential contributors. The research reflects on the current status of the UK fire safety regulatory system in the construction industry, key professional competencies and the areas in which risk could be mitigated through the implementation of this technology. Whilst the system developed in this research is based upon the UK regulatory framework and guidance, it is adaptable to any international country building regulations and standards. The high-level system framework has been developed, connecting the expert knowledge based system to the proprietary building information modelling (BIM) software and to both a descriptive and performance based specification system. The additional purpose of BIM integration is to create an auditable fire safety design trail of a digital record for the building throughout its lifecycle, from initial design through to construction and subsequent occupancy. The feasibility of implementing an expert knowledge base system to aid both design, specification, and compliance checking was tested through the development of a system prototype. Connectivity to the building model and specification are critical in ensuring all outputs are both aligned and robust. Data is proposed to be captured within a common data environment (CDE), aligned to the UK BIM framework, thus capturing a ‘golden thread of information’. The outcome from testing of the proposed expert knowledge base system demonstrates strong potential for an effective technological aid to mitigate risk of failure or non-compliance of designed and built assets in respect to fire safety

Precise scenarios - a customer-friendly foundation for formal specifications

A formal specification is beyond the comprehension of the average software customer. As a result, the customer cannot provide useful feedback regarding its correctness and completeness. To address this problem, we suggest the formalism expert to work with the customer to create precise scenarios. A precise scenario describes an operation by its effects on the system state with only few simple Z concepts. The customer would find a concrete precise scenario easier to understand than its corresponding abstract schema. The Z expert derives schemas based on the precise scenarios. Precise scenarios affords user involvement that improves the odds of a formal specification fully capturing the user requirements

Integrated design optimization research and development in an industrial environment

An overview is given of a design optimization project that is in progress at the GE Research and Development Center for the past few years. The objective of this project is to develop a methodology and a software system for design automation and optimization of structural/mechanical components and systems. The effort focuses on research and development issues and also on optimization applications that can be related to real-life industrial design problems. The overall technical approach is based on integration of numerical optimization techniques, finite element methods, CAE and software engineering, and artificial intelligence/expert systems (AI/ES) concepts. The role of each of these engineering technologies in the development of a unified design methodology is illustrated. A software system DESIGN-OPT has been developed for both size and shape optimization of structural components subjected to static as well as dynamic loadings. By integrating this software with an automatic mesh generator, a geometric modeler and an attribute specification computer code, a software module SHAPE-OPT has been developed for shape optimization. Details of these software packages together with their applications to some 2- and 3-dimensional design problems are described

Advanced software development workstation project: Engineering scripting language. Graphical editor

Software development is widely considered to be a bottleneck in the development of complex systems, both in terms of development and in terms of maintenance of deployed systems. Cost of software development and maintenance can also be very high. One approach to reducing costs and relieving this bottleneck is increasing the reuse of software designs and software components. A method for achieving such reuse is a software parts composition system. Such a system consists of a language for modeling software parts and their interfaces, a catalog of existing parts, an editor for combining parts, and a code generator that takes a specification and generates code for that application in the target language. The Advanced Software Development Workstation is intended to be an expert system shell designed to provide the capabilities of a software part composition system

Multisensor Data Fusion Implementation for a Sensor Based Fertilizer Application System

"Mapping systems" (“mapping approach”), real-time sensor-actuator systems ("sensor approach") or the combination of both (“Real-time approach with map overlay”) determine the process control in mobile application systems for spatially variable fertilization. Within the integrated research project “Information Systems Precision Farming Duernast” (IKB Duernast) the implementation of the “Real-time approach with map overlay” was done for intensive nitrogen fertilization. The bottom line of this sophisticated approach is a comprehensive situation assessment, a typical multisensor data fusion task. Based on a functional and procedural modelling of the multisensor data fusion and decision making process, it could be pointed out that an expert system is an adequate fusion paradigm and algorithm. Therefore, a software simulation with an expert system as core element was implemented to fuse on-line sensor technology measurements (REIP), maps (yield, EM38, environmental constraints, draft force) and user inputs in order to derive an application set point in real-time. The development of an expert system can be viewed as a structured transformation in five levels from the “specification level”, the “task level”, the “problem solving level” and the “knowledge base level” to the “tool level”. In the “tool level” the hybrid expert system shell JESS (Java Expert System Shell) was selected for implementation due to the results of preceding levels. Knowledge acquisition was done within another IKB-subproject by the means of data mining. Typical and maximal times of 10 ms and 60 ms for one fusion cycle were measured running this application on a 32-bit processor hardware (Intel Pentium III Mobile, 1 GHz)

The Specification Problem of Legal Expert Systems

Automated legal decision-making relies on computer programs called legal expert systems, that are executed on machines not capable of legal reasoning by themselves. Rather, it is up to the programmer to ensure that the behavior of the computer program faithfully captures the letter and intent of the law. This situation is merely an instance of the more general specification problem of computer science. Indeed, the way programs are written and executed requires the programmer to express her intention in a particular form of logic or statistical model imposed by the programming language or framework. On the other hand, the intended behavior of the program or specification, here communicated through the law, is usually described using natural language or domain-specific insights. Hence, every software endeavor begins with a requirement analysis, which consistsin extracting from the specification corpus a set of requirements that the computer system must obey.In the case of automated legal decision-making and legal expert systems, the members of this set of requirements are the possible legal reasoningbits that the computer program is expected to perform. Viewing the problem through this lens immediately allows for identifying the key questions forassessing the safety and correctness of legal expert systems. First, when and how is it possible to express legal reasoning as a set of requirements for a computer system? Second, how to check that these requirements are correctly translated to computer code? Third, can we ensure that the computer code does not introduced unwanted, unlawful behavior? In this article, we take a tour of the general computer science answers to these three questions and assess their efficiency in the particular situation of legal expert systems. To do so, we introduce the distinction between result-constrained and process-constrained legal specifications. From this distinction naturally stem different software solutions, ranging from machine-learning-based to algorithm-based. Finally, we conclude by a discussion about the critical software qualification for legal expert systems, and what this qualification could entail in terms of technical and organizational change

Evolutionary computing driven search based software testing and correction

For a given program, testing, locating the errors identified, and correcting those errors is a critical, yet expensive process. The field of Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) addresses these phases by formulating them as search problems. This dissertation addresses these challenging problems through the use of two complimentary evolutionary computing based systems. The first one is the Fitness Guided Fault Localization (FGFL) system, which novelly uses a specification based fitness function to perform fault localization. The second is the Coevolutionary Automated Software Correction (CASC) system, which employs a variety of evolutionary computing techniques to perform testing, correction, and verification of software. In support of the real world application of these systems, a practitioner\u27s guide to fitness function design is provided. For the FGFL system, experimental results are presented that demonstrate the applicability of fitness guided fault localization to automate this important phase of software correction in general, and the potential of the FGFL system in particular. For the fitness function design guide, the performance of a guide generated fitness function is compared to that of an expert designed fitness function demonstrating the competitiveness of the guide generated fitness function. For the CASC system, results are presented that demonstrate the system\u27s abilities on a series of problems of both increasing size as well as number of bugs present. The system presented solutions more than 90% of the time for versions of the programs containing one or two bugs. Additionally, scalability results are presented for the CASC system that indicate that success rate linearly decreases with problem size and that the estimated convergence rate scales at worst linearly with problem size --Abstract, page ii

Codeless App Development: Evaluating A Cloud-Native Domain-Specific Functions Approach

Mobile applications play an important role in the economy today and there is an increasing trend for app enablement on multiple platforms. However, creating, distributing, and maintaining an application remain expert tasks. Even for software developers, the process can be error-prone and resource-consuming, especially when targeting different platforms simultaneously. Researchers have proposed several frameworks to facilitate cross-platform app development, but little attention has been paid to non-technical users. In this paper, we described the Flow framework, which takes the advantage of domain-specific languages to enable no-code specification for app modeling. The cloud-native coordination mechanism further supports non-technical users to execute, monitor, and maintain apps for any target platforms. User evaluations were conducted to assess the usability and user experience with the system. The results indicated that users can develop apps in Flow with ease, but the prototype could be optimized to reduce learning time and workload