Literature review and discussion on collaborative decision making approaches in industry 4.0

Nowadays, companies are faced with an increasingly higher level of competition while trying to adapt to the exigencies imposed by the Industry 4.0, regarding its usually referred dimensions and pillars, among which one that although is not so often referred is also expressing an increasing visibility and importance, related to collaboration, and more specifically to collaborative decision making and co-working. Thus, in this paper an analysis is carried out regarding the evolution of publications that have been put available over the last decade about collaborative decision making approaches, varying from approaches based on mathematical models up to the application of artificial intelligence and other kind of approaches. Moreover, a discussion about the relation between collaborative decision making, concurrent engineering and Industry 4.0 dimensions is also done.This work has been supported by FCT -Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020

1990-1991 Louisiana Tech University Catalog

The Louisiana Tech University Catalog includes announcements and course descriptions for courses offered at Louisiana Tech University for the academic year of 1990-1991.https://digitalcommons.latech.edu/university-catalogs/1024/thumbnail.jp

Improving Automated Software Testing while re-engineering legacy systems in the absence of documentation

Legacy software systems are essential assets that contain an organizations' valuable business logic. Because of outdated technologies and methods used in these systems, they are challenging to maintain and expand. Therefore, organizations need to decide whether to redevelop or re-engineer the legacy system. Although in most cases, re-engineering is the safer and less expensive choice, it has risks such as failure to meet the expected quality and delays due to testing blockades. These risks are even more severe when the legacy system does not have adequate documentation. A comprehensive testing strategy, which includes automated tests and reliable test cases, can substantially reduce the risks. To mitigate the hazards associated with re-engineering, we have conducted three studies in this thesis to improve the testing process. Our rst study introduces a new testing model for the re-engineering process and investigates test automation solutions to detect defects in the early re-engineering stages. We implemented this model on the Cold Region Hydrological Model (CRHM) application and discovered bugs that would not likely have been found manually. Although this approach helped us discover great numbers of software defects, designing test cases is very time-consuming due to the lack of documentation, especially for large systems. Therefore, in our second study, we investigated an approach to generate test cases from user footprints automatically. To do this, we extended an existing tool to collect user actions and legacy system reactions, including database and le system changes. Then we analyzed the data based on the order of user actions and time of them and generated human-readable test cases. Our evaluation shows that this approach can detect more bugs than other existing tools. Moreover, the test cases generated using this approach contain detailed oracles that make them suitable for both black-box and white-box testing. Many scienti c legacy systems such as CRHM are data-driven; they take large amounts of data as input and produce massive data after applying mathematical models. Applying test cases and nding bugs is more demanding when we are dealing with large amounts of data. Hence in our third study, we created a comparative visualization tool (ComVis) to compare a legacy system's output after each change. Visualization helps testers to nd data issues resulting from newly introduced bugs. Twenty participants took part in a user study in which they were asked to nd data issued using ComVis and embedded CRHM visualization tool. Our user study shows that ComVis can nd 51% more data issues than embedded visualization tools in the legacy system can. Also, results from the NASA-TLX assessment and thematic analysis of open-ended questions about each task show users prefer to use ComVis over the built-in visualization tool. We believe our introduced approaches and developed systems will signi cantly reduce the risks associated with the re-engineering process. i

1991-1992 Louisiana Tech University Catalog

The Louisiana Tech University Catalog includes announcements and course descriptions for courses offered at Louisiana Tech University for the academic year of 1991-1992.https://digitalcommons.latech.edu/university-catalogs/1023/thumbnail.jp

A Reference Architecture for Natural Language Generation Systems

We present the RAGS (Reference Architecture for Generation Systems) framework: a specification of an abstract Natural Language Generation (NLG) system architecture to support sharing, re-use, comparison and evaluation of NLG technologies. We argue that the evidence from a survey of actual NLG systems calls for a different emphasis in a reference proposal from that seen in similar initiatives in information extraction and multimedia interfaces. We introduce the framework itself, in particular the two-level data model that allows us to support the complex data requirements of NLG systems in a flexible and coherent fashion, and describe our efforts to validate the framework through a range of implementations

1992-1993 Louisiana Tech University Catalog

The Louisiana Tech University Catalog includes announcements and course descriptions for courses offered at Louisiana Tech University for the academic year of 1992-1993.https://digitalcommons.latech.edu/university-catalogs/1022/thumbnail.jp

Holistic training in a corporate environment

textAs the scope of responsibility and the sophistication of each job role changes there is no longer the ability to assume that certain skills/capabilities exist simply because the person has the correct degree or has been to the proper corporate training course. A broader, holistic view, of the person has to be taken. My focus in this paper will be to look at the holistic training and development of employees through the context of Applied Materials. There has been a significant change in training, an evolution in the past several years in training from the learning of specific skills that will enable you to do your job more effectively to one where the whole learner is looked at from the time they are hired, giving them the skills they need to be successful and tying those skills sets into an overall career path. However while this is a long term goal not all training needs to accomplish all of these heady tasks. Some training focuses only on the point skills necessary to be effective in the work place. This paper will break down into four broad sections; the state of adult learning in America and the context of Applied Materials, a holistic view of the technical and sales professional, the value of training and its measurements, and finally I will look at four case studies employing the context and metrics defined earlier and drawing some conclusions about the evolution of training at Applied Materials to one where it is becoming more holistic and looking at the entire employee.Engineering Managemen

A comparative analysis of software engineering with mature engineering disciplines using a problem solving perspective

Software engineering is compared with traditional engineering disciplines using a domain specific problem-solving model called Problem-Solving for Engineering Model (PSEM). The comparative analysis is performed both from a historical and contemporary view. The historical view provides lessons on the evolution of problem-solving and the maturity of an engineering discipline. The contemporary view provides the current state of engineering disciplines and shows to what extent software development can actually be categorized as an engineering discipline. The results from the comparative analysis show that like mature engineering, software engineering also seems to follow the same path of evolution of problem-solving concepts, but despite promising advances it has not reached yet the level of mature engineering yet. The comparative analysis offers the necessary guidelines for improving software engineering to become a professional mature engineering discipline. © 2011, IGI Global

Second Year Report Institute of Making, UCL 2014-15

An account of the activities and impact of the UCL Institute of Making, 2014-201