A novel "resilience viewpoint" to aid in engineering resilience in systems of systems (SoS)

Designing evolutionary systems to meet stakeholder expectations on safety, reliability and overall resilience is of great importance in an age of interconnectivity and high dependency systems. With incidents and disruptions becoming more frequent in recent years, the requirement for systems to demonstrate high levels of resilience given the economic, political and temporal dimensions of complexity, resilience is of great significance today. Systemic resilience is of high importance at the global level. Therefore, the role of the system engineer and architect is becoming more demanding due to the need to consider requirements from a broader range of stakeholders and to implement them into early conceptual designs. The early modeling process of all systems is common ground for most engineering projects, creating an architecture to both understand a system and to design future iterations by applying model-based processes has become the norm. With the concept of systems-ofsystems (SoS) becoming common language across multiple engineering domains, model-based systems engineering techniques are evolving hand-in-hand to provide a paradigm to better analyse current and future SoS. The intrinsic characteristics of the constituent systems that make up the SoS make the challenge of designing and maintaining the reliability and resilience of a systems extremely difficult. This paper proposes a novel viewpoint, within an architecture framework (based around DoDAF, MoDAF and UPDM) to aid systems architects explore and design resilient SoS. This is known as the Resilience Viewpoint. Much of the research in the area is focussed on critical infrastructure (CI), looking at telecommunication networks, electric grid, supply networks etc, and little has been done on a generalizable tool for SoS architecture analysis, especially using existing modeling languages. Here, the application of the ‘Resilience Viewpoint’ is demonstrated using a case study from an integrated water supply system of systems, to portray its potential analytical capabilities

Supporting 'design for reuse' with modular design

Engineering design reuse refers to the utilization of any knowledge gained from the design activity to support future design. As such, engineering design reuse approaches are concerned with the support, exploration, and enhancement of design knowledge prior, during, and after a design activity. Modular design is a product structuring principle whereby products are developed with distinct modules for rapid product development, efficient upgrades, and possible reuse (of the physical modules). The benefits of modular design center on a greater capacity for structuring component parts to better manage the relation between market requirements and the designed product. This study explores the capabilities of modular design principles to provide improved support for the engineering design reuse concept. The correlations between modular design and 'reuse' are highlighted, with the aim of identifying its potential to aid the little-supported process of design for reuse. In fulfilment of this objective the authors not only identify the requirements of design for reuse, but also propose how modular design principles can be extended to support design for reuse

Concept Blending and Dissimilarity: Factors for Creative Design Process: A Comparison between the Linguistic Interpretation Process and Design Process

This study investigated the design process in order to clarify the characteristics of the essence of the creative design process vis-à-vis the interpretation process, by carrying out design experiments. The authors analyzed the characteristics of the creative design process by comparing it with the linguistic interpretation process, from the viewpoints of thought types (analogy, blending, and thematic relation) and recognition types (commonalities and alignable and nonalignable differences). A new concept can be created by using the noun-noun phrase as the process of synthesizing two concepts—the simplest and most essential process in formulating a new concept from existing ones. Furthermore, the noun-noun phrase can be interpreted in a natural way. In our experiment, the subjects were required to interpret a novel noun-noun phrase, create a design concept from the same noun-noun phrase, and list the similarities and dissimilarities between the two nouns. The authors compare the results of the thought types and recognition types, focusing on the perspective of the manner in which things were viewed, i.e., in terms of similarities and dissimilarities. A comparison of the results reveals that blending and nonalignable differences characterize the creative design process. The findings of this research will contribute a framework of design practice, to enhance both students’ and designers’ creativity for concept formation in design, which relates to the development of innovative design. Keywords: Noun-Noun phrase; Design; Creativity; Blending; Nonalignable difference</p

Consistency in Multi-Viewpoint Architectural Design of Enterprise Information Systems

Different stakeholders in the design of an enterprise information system have their own view on that design. To help produce a coherent design this paper presents a framework that aids in specifying relations between such views. To help produce a consistent design the framework also aids in specifying consistency rules that apply to the view relations and in checking the consistency according to those rules. The framework focuses on the higher levels of abstraction in a design, we refer to design at those levels of abstraction as architectural design. The highest level of abstraction that we consider is that of business process design and the lowest level is that of software component design. The contribution of our framework is that it provides a collection of basic concepts that is common to viewpoints in the area of enterprise information systems. These basic concepts aid in relating viewpoints by providing: (i) a common terminology that helps stakeholders to understand each others concepts; and (ii) a basis for defining re-usable consistency rules. In particular we define re-usable rules to check consistency between behavioural views that overlap or are a refinement of each other. We also present an architecture for a tool suite that supports our framework. We show that our framework can be applied, by performing a case study in which we specify the relations and consistency rules between the RM-ODP enterprise, computational and information viewpoints

Modularity in support of design for re-use

We explore the structuring principle of modularity with the objective of analysing its current ability to meet the requirements of a 're-use' centred approach to design. We aim to highlight the correlation's between modular design and 're-use', and argue that it has the potential to aid the little-supported process of 'design-for-re-use'. In fulfilment of this objective we not only identify the requirements of 'design-for-re-use', but also propose how modular design principles can be extended to support 'design-for-re-use'

Refinement of SDBC Business Process Models Using ISDL

Aiming at aligning business process modeling and software specification, the SDBC approach considers a multi-viewpoint modeling where static, dynamic, and data business process aspect models have to be mapped adequately to corresponding static, dynamic, and data software specification aspect models. Next to that, the approach considers also a business process modeling viewpoint which concerns real-life communication and coordination issues, such as meanings, intentions, negotiations, commitments, and obligations. Hence, in order to adequately align communication and dynamic aspect models, SDBC should use at least two modeling techniques. However, the transformation between two techniques unnecessarily complicates the modeling process. Next to that, different techniques use different modeling formalisms whose reflection sometimes causes limitations. For this reason, we explore in the current paper the value which the (modeling) language ISDL could bring to SDBC in the alignment of communication and behavioral (dynamic) business process aspect models; ISDL can usefully refine dynamic process models. Thus, it is feasible to expect that ISDL can complement the SDBC approach, allowing refinement of dynamic business process aspect models, by adding communication and coordination actions. Furthermore, SDBC could benefit from ISDL-related methods assessing whether a realized refinement conforms to the original process model. Our studies in the paper are supported by an illustrative example

Developing and applying an integrated modular design methodology within a SME

Modularity within a product can bring advantages to the design process by facilitating enhanced design reuse, reduced lead times, decreased cost and higher levels of quality. While the benefits of modularity are becoming increasingly better known, at present it is usually left to the designers themselves to introduce modularity into products. Studies into modularity have shown that byimplementing 'formal' methods, further benefits can be made in terms of time, cost, quality and performance. Current approaches that have been proposed for the formal development of modular design methodologies fail to accurately represent knowledge that is inherently produced during design projects and fail to consider design from the different viewpoints of the development process. This work, built on previous work on modularity and design for reuse, aims to develop an integrated design methodology that will optimise the modules created through the design process and allow for modularity to be 'built-in' to product development from the initial stages. The methodology andassociated tools have been developed to provide an easy-to-use approach to modularity that has support for design rationales and company knowledge that aid in effective design decision making. The methodology, named GeMoCURE, provides an integrated total solution to modular design based on reuse of proven physical and knowledge modules. Its incremental nature allows for the optimalstructure to be maintained as the design progresses. A special focus has been on the application of this approach for Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs), which are typically challenged by a lack of design human resources and expertise