Deriving a systematic approach to changeable manufacturing system design

It has long been argued that Factories are long life and complex products. The complexity of designing factories, and their underlying manufacturing systems, is further amplified when dealing with continuously changing customer demands. At the same time, due to research fragmentation, little if any scientific explanations are available supporting and exploiting the paradigm that "factories are products". In order to address this weakness, this paper presents research results arising from a comparative analysis of systematic "product design" and "manufacturing system design" approaches. The contribution emerging from this research is an integrated systematic design approach to changeable manufacturing systems, based on scientific concepts founded upon product design theories, and is explained through a case study in the paper. This research is part of collaboration between the CERU University of Malta and IAO Fraunhofer aimed at developing a digital decision support tool for planning changeable manufacturing systems.peer-reviewe

Harmfulness of Code Duplication - A Structured Review of the Evidence

Duplication of code has long been thought to decrease changeability of systems, but recently doubts have been expressed whether this is true in general. This is a problem for researchers because it makes the value of research aimed against clones uncertain, and for practitioners as they cannot be sure whether their effort in reducing duplication is well-spent. In this paper we try to shed light on this is-sue by collecting empirical evidence in favor and against the nega-tive effects of duplication on changeability. We go beyond the flat yes/no-question of harmfulness and present an explanatory model to show the mechanisms through which duplication is suspected to affect quality. We aggregate the evidence for each of the causal links in the model. This sheds light on the current state of duplication re-search and helps practitioners choose between the available mitiga-tion strategies

Structured Review of the Evidence for Effects of Code Duplication on Software Quality

This report presents the detailed steps and results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to investigate the evidence for the claim that code duplication has a negative effect on code changeability. This report contains only the details of the review for which there is not enough place to include them in the companion paper published at a conference (Hordijk, Ponisio et al. 2009 - Harmfulness of Code Duplication - A Structured Review of the Evidence)

Structured Review of Code Clone Literature

This report presents the results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to assemble a conceptual model of clone-related concepts which helps us to reason about clones. This conceptual model unifies clone concepts from a wide range of literature, so that findings about clones can be compared with each other

Service architecture design for E-Businesses: A pattern-based approach

E-business involves the implementation of business processes over the Web. At a technical level, this imposes an application integration problem. In a wider sense, the integration of software and business levels across organisations becomes a significant challenge. Service architectures are an increasingly adopted architectural approach for solving Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI). The adoption of this new architectural paradigm requires adaptation or creation of novel methodologies and techniques to solve the integration problem. In this paper we present the pattern-based techniques supporting a methodological framework to design service architectures for EAI. The techniques are used for services identification, for transformation from business models to service architectures and for architecture modifications

Managing uncertainty in systems with a Valuation Approach for Strategic Changeability

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-130).Complex engineering systems are frequently exposed to large amounts of uncertainty, as many exogenous, uncontrollable conditions change over time and can affect the performance and value delivery of a system. Engineering practice has begun to address that need, with recent methods frequently targeting such techniques as uncertainty quantification or robust engineering as key goals. While passive robustness is beneficial for these long-lived systems, designing for passive robustness frequently results in sub-optimal point designs, as optimization is forgone in favor of safety. Changeability offers an alternative means for supporting value throughout a system's lifecycle by allowing the system to change in response to, or in anticipation of, the resolution of uncertainty, potentially enabling the system to perform at- or near-optimally in a wide range of contexts. The state of the practice for valuing changeability in engineering systems relies mostly on options theory, which is associated with a number of assumptions that are frequently inappropriate when applied to change options embedded in systems. This has played a part in limiting the inclusion of changeability in fielded systems, as the standard techniques for calculating the benefits of change are often inapplicable and thus are less trusted than valuations of passive robustness. Without the ability to properly and believably value changeability, system designers will continue to look elsewhere for protection against uncertainty. A more generally applicable method for valuing changeability would greatly enhance the understanding and appeal of changeability early in the design process, and allow for the justification of its associated costs. This research has resulted in a new five-step approach, called the Valuation Approach for Strategic Changeability (VASC). VASC was designed to capture the multi-dimensional value of changeability while limiting the number of necessary assumptions by building off of previous research on Epoch-Era Analysis. A suite of new metrics (including Effective Fuzzy Pareto Trace, Fuzzy Pareto Number, and Fuzzy Pareto Shift), capturing different types of valuable changeability information, are included in the approach, which is capable of delivering insight both with and without the computational burden of simulation. The application of VASC to three space system case studies demonstrates the large range of insight about the usage and value of changeability able to be extracted with the approach. Discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of VASC is included, particularly in comparison with Real Options Analysis, and a number of promising avenues for future improvements and extensions to VASC are identified.by Matthew Edward Fitzgerald.S.M

Knowledge Management for Public Administrations: Technical Realizations of an Enterprise Attention Management System

The improvement of governments’ efficiency has gained great importance and validity especially in the current times of economic downturn. E-Government constitutes the most contemporary techno-managerial proposition in the track of possible interventions. The paper addresses, more specifically, empowerments necessitated by Public Administration (PA) organizations. Anchored on the needs of three real-life cases, the paper describes the conception and the realization of an IT artefact together with its methodological appeals aiming at improving information access and delivery and thus PAs’ decision making capacity. Our proposition constitutes a novel approach for managing users’ attention in knowledge intensive organizations which goes beyond informing a user about changes in relevant information towards proactively supporting the user to react on changes. The approach is based on an expressive attention model, which is realized by combining ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rules with ontologies. The technical realizations described in the paper constitute the underlying infrastructure of an Enterprise Attention Management System

Introducing Energy Efficiency into SQALE

Energy Efficiency is becoming a key factor in software development, given the sharp growth of IT systems and their impact on worldwide energy consumption. We do believe that a quality process infrastructure should be able to consider the Energy Efficiency of a system since its early development: for this reason we propose to introduce Energy Efficiency into the existing quality models. We selected the SQALE model and we tailored it inserting Energy Efficiency as a sub-characteristic of efficiency. We also propose a set of six source code specific requirements for the Java language starting from guidelines currently suggested in the literature. We experienced two major challenges: the identification of measurable, automatically detectable requirements, and the lack of empirical validation on the guidelines currently present in the literature and in the industrial state of the practice as well. We describe an experiment plan to validate the six requirements and evaluate the impact of their violation on Energy Efficiency, which has been partially proved by preliminary results on C code. Having Energy Efficiency in a quality model and well verified code requirements to measure it, will enable a quality process that precisely assesses and monitors the impact of software on energy consumptio