What makes industries believe in formal methods

The introduction of formal methods in the design and development departments of an industrial company has far reaching and long lasting consequences. In fact it changes the whole environment of methods, tools and skills that determine the design culture of that company. A decision to replace current design practice by formal methods, therefore, appears a vital one and is not lightly taken. The past has shown that efforts to introduce formal methods in industry has faced a lot of controversy and opposition at various hierarchical levels in companies, resulting in a marginal spread of such methods. This paper revisits the requirements for formal description techniques and identifies some critical success and inhibiting factors associated with the introduction of formal methods in the industrial practice. One of the inhibiting factors is the often encountered lack of appropriateness of the formal model to express and manipulate the design concerns that determine the world of the engineer. This factor motivated our research in the area of architectural and implementation design concepts. The last two sections of this paper report on some results of this research

Design Ltd.: Renovated Myths for the Development of Socially Embedded Technologies

This paper argues that traditional and mainstream mythologies, which have been continually told within the Information Technology domain among designers and advocators of conceptual modelling since the 1960s in different fields of computing sciences, could now be renovated or substituted in the mould of more recent discourses about performativity, complexity and end-user creativity that have been constructed across different fields in the meanwhile. In the paper, it is submitted that these discourses could motivate IT professionals in undertaking alternative approaches toward the co-construction of socio-technical systems, i.e., social settings where humans cooperate to reach common goals by means of mediating computational tools. The authors advocate further discussion about and consolidation of some concepts in design research, design practice and more generally Information Technology (IT) development, like those of: task-artifact entanglement, universatility (sic) of End-User Development (EUD) environments, bricolant/bricoleur end-user, logic of bricolage, maieuta-designers (sic), and laissez-faire method to socio-technical construction. Points backing these and similar concepts are made to promote further discussion on the need to rethink the main assumptions underlying IT design and development some fifty years later the coming of age of software and modern IT in the organizational domain.Comment: This is the peer-unreviewed of a manuscript that is to appear in D. Randall, K. Schmidt, & V. Wulf (Eds.), Designing Socially Embedded Technologies: A European Challenge (2013, forthcoming) with the title "Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications on Design" within an EUSSET editorial initiative (www.eusset.eu/

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

CloudHealth: A Model-Driven Approach to Watch the Health of Cloud Services

Cloud systems are complex and large systems where services provided by different operators must coexist and eventually cooperate. In such a complex environment, controlling the health of both the whole environment and the individual services is extremely important to timely and effectively react to misbehaviours, unexpected events, and failures. Although there are solutions to monitor cloud systems at different granularity levels, how to relate the many KPIs that can be collected about the health of the system and how health information can be properly reported to operators are open questions. This paper reports the early results we achieved in the challenge of monitoring the health of cloud systems. In particular we present CloudHealth, a model-based health monitoring approach that can be used by operators to watch specific quality attributes. The CloudHealth Monitoring Model describes how to operationalize high level monitoring goals by dividing them into subgoals, deriving metrics for the subgoals, and using probes to collect the metrics. We use the CloudHealth Monitoring Model to control the probes that must be deployed on the target system, the KPIs that are dynamically collected, and the visualization of the data in dashboards.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl

Clinical Process Management: A model-driven & tool-based proposal

In healthcare institutions it is important to define methodologies and management strategies in order to define, maintain and execute Healthcare Processes (HP) in a simple and effective manner. These needs are necessary because this kind of processes involve many people (software engineer, healthcare teams, and doctors, among others) and must also comply with lots of international clinical standards (such as ISO-EN 13606 or ISO/DIS 13940). This paper presents a formal demonstration of our proposal which is based on the Model-Driven paradigm in order to support modeling, deploying and executing HP. Our tool-based proposal allows reducing costs, improving quality and optimizing HP taking into account the Model-Driven paradigm advantages

Design research in the Netherlands 2005 : proceedings of the symposium held on 19-20 May 2005, Eindhoven University of Technology

Design Research in the Netherlands 2005 is the third instalment of a symposium that intends to provide a forum for researchers across the academic and designing disciplines. The five-year interval (1995, 2000, and 2005) allows participants to take a step back from daily considerations and to reflect on their basic methodological assumptions, research programmes, and outcomes. Work on design research is organised in this book in three main parts: Design Research, Design Processes, and Design Tools. The part on Design Research contains papers from the Designed Intelligence Group of Industrial Design TU Eindhoven, the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management TU Delft, Design Theory and Methodology group of Industrial Design TU Delft, Form and Media Studies of Architecture TU Delft, and Technical Ecology of Architecture TU Delft. The part on Design Processes contains papers from Construction Management & Engineering of Engineering Technology University Twente, Construction Management of Architecture TU Eindhoven, Physical Aspects of the Built Environment Architecture TU Eindhoven, Technical Design & Informatics of Architecture TU Delft, and Knowledge Centre Buildings & Systems TU/e-TNO. The part on Design Tools contains contributions from the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam, Technical Design & Informatics of Architecture TU Delft, Design, Integration and Operations of Aircraft and Rotorcraft of Aerospace Engineering TU Delft, TNO Delft, Computational Design of Architecture TU Delft, ID StudioLab of Industrial Design TU Delft, and Design Systems of Architecture TU Eindhoven. Design Research in the Netherlands 2005 in this way provides a sample sheet of the many varied ways in which design is investigated in the Netherlands

Design research in the Netherlands 2005 : proceedings of the symposium held on 19-20 May 2005, Eindhoven University of Technology

Design Research in the Netherlands 2005 is the third instalment of a symposium that intends to provide a forum for researchers across the academic and designing disciplines. The five-year interval (1995, 2000, and 2005) allows participants to take a step back from daily considerations and to reflect on their basic methodological assumptions, research programmes, and outcomes. Work on design research is organised in this book in three main parts: Design Research, Design Processes, and Design Tools. The part on Design Research contains papers from the Designed Intelligence Group of Industrial Design TU Eindhoven, the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management TU Delft, Design Theory and Methodology group of Industrial Design TU Delft, Form and Media Studies of Architecture TU Delft, and Technical Ecology of Architecture TU Delft. The part on Design Processes contains papers from Construction Management & Engineering of Engineering Technology University Twente, Construction Management of Architecture TU Eindhoven, Physical Aspects of the Built Environment Architecture TU Eindhoven, Technical Design & Informatics of Architecture TU Delft, and Knowledge Centre Buildings & Systems TU/e-TNO. The part on Design Tools contains contributions from the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam, Technical Design & Informatics of Architecture TU Delft, Design, Integration and Operations of Aircraft and Rotorcraft of Aerospace Engineering TU Delft, TNO Delft, Computational Design of Architecture TU Delft, ID StudioLab of Industrial Design TU Delft, and Design Systems of Architecture TU Eindhoven. Design Research in the Netherlands 2005 in this way provides a sample sheet of the many varied ways in which design is investigated in the Netherlands

An integrated framework for the next generation of Risk-Informed Performance-Based Design approach used in Fire Safety Engineering

Review of decades of worldwide experience using standards, codes and guidelines related to performance-based fire protection design for buildings has identified shortcomings in the interpretation, application and implementation of the performance-based design process, wide variation in the resulting levels of performance achieved by such designs, and several opportunities to enhance the process. While others have highlighted shortcomings in the past, as well as some ideas to enhance the process, it is proposed that a more fundamental change is needed. First, the political and technical components of the process need to be clearly delineated to facilitate better analysis and decision-making within each component. Second, the process needs to be changed from one which focuses only on fire safety systems to one which views buildings, their occupants and their contents as integrated systems. In doing so, the activities associated with the normal operation of a building and how they might be impacted by the occurrence of a fire event become clearer, as do mitigation options which account for the behaviors and activities associated with normal use. To support these changes, a new framework for a risk-informed performance-based process for fire protection design is proposed: one which is better integrated than current processes, that treats a fire event as a disruptive event of a larger and more complex building-occupant system, and that provides more specific guidance for engineering analysis with the aim to achieve more complete and consistent analysis. This Ph.D. Dissertation outlines the challenges with the existing approaches, presents the building-occupant system paradigm, illustrates how viewing fire (or any other hazard) as a disruptive event within an holistic building-occupant system can benefit the overall performance of this system over its lifespan, and outlines a framework for a risk-informed performance-based process for fire protection design. Case studies are used to illustrate shortcomings in the existing processes and how the proposed process will address these. This Dissertation also includes a plan of action needed to establish guidelines to conduct each of the technical steps of the process and briefly introduces the future work about how this plan could be practically facilitated via a web-platform as a collaborative environment