Implementation of ISO standards through formalization of requirements for process management

Companies always seek ways to increase their competitiveness and performances by implementing defined quality methodologies. The present thesis aims at providing companies with a methodology that identifies specific requirements for process management using ISO standards (IST). IST implementation can be very costly. This is due to the fact that it requires specific knowledge, resources (financial, time and others) as well as motivation on the part of organizations to pursue ISO certification. The present thesis provides a specific methodology to identify IST requirements. This methodology uses a different approach to carry out the necessary interpretation. Its advantages lie in its reduction of the apprehension time and in the enhancement of its overall understanding. Furthermore, the present thesis proposes an effective approach for IST implementation by applying a methodology called Environment Based Design (EBD) theory and a model called Quality Implementation Practical Flowchart (QIPF). In EBD a graphical language called Recursive Object Modeling (ROM) is developed to design the graphical representation of IST requirements, thus, providing an easy and unambiguous understanding of ISO standards' clauses. The development of QIPF involves a methodology based on on-site experience. Thus, IST requirements defined into a formal structure are taken as the starting point for developing the implementation process. An example based on the analysis established in the present document is used to show how an IST implementation can be develope

Quality management of drainage system monitoring process: design perspective

The Drainage Services branch of the City of Edmonton is responsible for planning, building, operating and maintaining over $8.1 billion of the drainage infrastructure. The environmental monitoring group within the Drainage Services branch has the responsibility of understanding the hydraulic performance of the sewerage and drainage facilities, and assessing how that performance measures up to the goals and objectives of Drainage Services. The Monitoring Group provides monitoring data and reports to the clients. The overall product quality consists of data quality and service quality, which relies on the performance of three major components: staff, device and program. Achieving data retrieval proficiency from monitoring sites and providing an acceptable level of service are of critical importance for the success of the Environmental Monitoring group in Drainage Services Branch. The objective of this thesis is to develop a framework for the environmental monitoring group of the City of Edmonton to establish a Total Quality Management System. It is hoped that, with the implementation of this TQM system, the monitoring group can improve the quality of services, especially in the data integrity, correctness, and completeness. The development of the framework for TQM of the drainage monitoring system is accomplished by applying the methodology of environment-based design (EBD). EBD is the theoretical background for the whole project. It helps to present Recursive Object Model (ROM) diagram and elicit the complete requirements of ideal monitoring system, and then design the quality management system based on the product requirements. In this thesis, the current monitoring process and practices are analyzed, including detailed discussion of the business processes, functional activities, and Operating processes of the Environmental Monitoring Group. Then the ideal process requirement analysis is performed by applying the Environmental Based Design (EBD) model in general and discusses the advantage of this method, presents ROM and the completed requirements. Next, the quality evaluation system is accomplished by setting up the quality standard or performance requirement for each segment of the management of the monitoring process, which helps to evaluate the group performance. Furthermore, the gap analysis is conducted, which presents the gap between the as-is and the to-be status of the monitoring group's quality management performance. Finally, the improvement recommendation is made and the future studies are proposed at the end of the present thesis

Environment-Based Design (EBD) Approach to Formalize Product-Service Systems (PSS) Design Process

In the past decade, Product-Service Systems (PSS) have been adopted by companies as a business model that can fulfill customers’ needs better, enhance market competitiveness and achieve sustainability. PSS integrates tangible product and intangible service in different ratio, which makes its design process complicated. However, in the design discipline, there has not been enough discussion for the methodological implications of PSS design, even though design components play a critical role in the development of PSS. In this thesis, a systematic approach — Environment Based Design (EBD) methodology is applied to formalize the PSS design process, focuses on analyzing the environment components and their relationships. The comparison between EBD and the conventional PSS design methodologies are conducted. A PSS life cycle model generated according to the EBD analysis is proposed in order to help designers respond quickly to changes from the environment along the whole life cycle. The benefits resulted from EBD based PSS design process are discovered. A case study of elevator PSS design reveals the effectiveness, efficiency and the benefits of EBD methodology

A Systematic Approach to Constructing Incremental Topology Control Algorithms Using Graph Transformation

Communication networks form the backbone of our society. Topology control algorithms optimize the topology of such communication networks. Due to the importance of communication networks, a topology control algorithm should guarantee certain required consistency properties (e.g., connectivity of the topology), while achieving desired optimization properties (e.g., a bounded number of neighbors). Real-world topologies are dynamic (e.g., because nodes join, leave, or move within the network), which requires topology control algorithms to operate in an incremental way, i.e., based on the recently introduced modifications of a topology. Visual programming and specification languages are a proven means for specifying the structure as well as consistency and optimization properties of topologies. In this paper, we present a novel methodology, based on a visual graph transformation and graph constraint language, for developing incremental topology control algorithms that are guaranteed to fulfill a set of specified consistency and optimization constraints. More specifically, we model the possible modifications of a topology control algorithm and the environment using graph transformation rules, and we describe consistency and optimization properties using graph constraints. On this basis, we apply and extend a well-known constructive approach to derive refined graph transformation rules that preserve these graph constraints. We apply our methodology to re-engineer an established topology control algorithm, kTC, and evaluate it in a network simulation study to show the practical applicability of our approachComment: This document corresponds to the accepted manuscript of the referenced journal articl

Developing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for a Department Utilizing Environment Based Design (EBD) Methodology

The research on KPIs has undergone substantial developments for the past few decades. Different users of KPIs often define the KPIs from different perspectives. Generally speaking, KPIs are quantifiable variables that indicate the efficiency and effectiveness of the performances of a product, a system, or personnel. Managers may use them to evaluate the performance of their team members in order to keep them on the right track; employees can use them to monitor his/her own performances and adjust accordingly; customers can use them to select their ideal products. This thesis focuses on developing KPIs for a department. Currently, the methodologies of developing KPIs for a department are very limited. The dominate methodologies in both the research and practical world are Business Scorecards and Six Sigma. Both of them define the performance measurements from a high business level instead of providing much technical know-hows. Also, neither of them has addressed on how to prioritize the performance measurements. This thesis work proposes a new framework to systematically develop KPIs for a department utilizing Environment-Based-Design (EBD) methodology by treating “Designing KPIs for a department” as a design problem. A case study of applying the proposed framework on an engineering department of an Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) project in the oil and gas industry is also included in this thesis

Environment-Based Design of Software: an Agile Software Design Method

The Environment-Based Design of Software (EBD-S) is a design method, representing the application of the Environment-Based Design (EBD) to agile software development. It compliments contemporary agile software development methods – Scrum and Feature-Driven Development (FDD) – by providing a light-weight and flexible framework for the architecture and design documentation, formalized design concept generation and effective system evolution control. Under the EBD-S umbrella, software requirements are categorized as functional, leading to the design of the system, and quality requirements, reflected in software architecture. EBD-S uses the component-bus-system-property approach for conflict identification and capturing the proto-architecture of the system in a graph structure. The design concept generation stage relies on a two-phase matrix-based problem decomposition approach, adjusted for non-binary dependency analysis, and using the heuristic partitioning analysis to find better design solutions. The change control mechanism of EBD-S permits effective monitoring and control of the software architecture evolution through the agile development cycle. The integration of EBD-S to the real-world Scrum development processes is demonstrated on the example of Telecom Expense Management software development. EBD-S application resulted in 25% project time saving due to more accurate estimations, higher code quality and lower error rate

A Requirement Ontology To Guide The Analysis Of System Life Cycle Processes

Economies prosper by designing, manufacturing, and servicing a variety of innovative products, for example airplanes, healthcare services, infrastructure development, and information technologies. Having the right competency (aka information processing skills) for designing, manufacturing, and servicing these products is necessary for economies to exploit new opportunities. These products have become more complex to design, manufacture and serve involving people with different education, language, and possibly globally distributed. In order to create these products, information processing skills have been put to the limits causing competitiveness problems. Detailed analysis has associated these problems to requirements. Requirements involve to process different kinds of information (e.g., texts, presentations, sketches, graphs, tables, drawings, engineering analysis, and managerial analysis) during system life cycle processes (i.e., from idea generation to retirement of a product); where at each stage, information has different content (e.g., aspect, medium, and format). Therefore, a root cause associated to requirements can be attributed to a lack of a common vocabulary to communicate this variety of information in the context of system life cycle processes. Theories and models have been employed as solution to solve this communication problem; however, current practice results suggest that a more effective solution is needed. As a result, this thesis employs an ontology as a means to solve the problem which is also an alternative and complement to theories and models. In general, a requirement ontology for system life cycle processes defines the core concepts and their relationships which combined define a common vocabulary in the context of requirements for system life cycle processes. A common vocabulary enables better communication and understanding among people as a core tool to support information processing skills. Hence, an ontology as a common vocabulary is the foundation to increase competitiveness to design, manufacture, and serve a variety of innovative products; which may lead to economies prosperity. More specifically, this thesis proposes a requirement ontology for system life cycle processes as a tool to be used to guide the analysis of these processes. Based on the fact that the ontology refers to the knowledge domain of design, guidance from a design theory (i.e., Environment-Based Design) was adopted to create the proposed ontology. Four related ontologies were created based on frequency analysis in this thesis, but the proposed core ontology contains a vocabulary of 50+2 concepts and 24 types of relationships. The proposed core ontology has been validated from different perspectives: 1) design theory (i.e., Environment-Based Design) compliance, 2) creation and evaluation from international standards (ISO 15288:2015 and ISO 29148:2011) and three European research efforts, and 3) retrospection from three case studies: a) Total Quality Management System Guideline Development Using Environment-Based Design for Area Development Planning, b) Designing the Right Framework for Healthcare Decision Support, and c) Integrating learning through design methodologies in aircraft design. This type of validation enables to speculate that the ontology can be generalized to the scope of requirements for different engineering endeavours. At the current stage of research, the proposed ontology is an information technology product that contributes to the actual knowledge base two major aspects: 1) a common vocabulary in the context of requirements for system lifecycle processes, and 2) a replicable ontology design process that can be extended to other domains of knowledge. The current stage of the proposed ontology shall be moved forward as future research. Two major venues for future research can be considered. First, expose the proposed ontology to potential users to improve the current stage of development of the ontology. Second, use the ontology as a tool to guide the analysis of system life cycle processes (e.g., ilities or specialty engineering). The current stage of the proposed ontology and future research venues shall improve communication and understanding among people as a core tool to support information processing skills for designing, manufacturing, and servicing a variety of innovative products

Quality Function Deployment Integration with Design Methodologies

Under the background of the economic globalization, customer requirements play an increasingly important role today in almost every industry. Achieving customer satisfaction becomes the key way for a company to win market shares in the intensive global competitions. In this thesis, a four phase QFD-oriented product design framework is proposed by integrating Quality Function Deployment (QFD) with 3 different design methodologies (Environment-Based Design, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Axiomatic Design), to systematically guide product design from the planning phase to the detail design phase, and to build the link between design variables in different phases, so that it is known how customer requirements are met during each development phase, and till the end, customer requirements and product characteristics are clearly linked together. Apart from the theoretical side, a web application design case study is presented to illustrate how this framework is applied. In the case study, customer requirements are successfully captured and mapped down to the detail design level

Investigation of Assessment Methods for Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Design Learning

Deep learning approach in educational context is focused on analyzing ideas, and creating a strong connection between the ideas and prior knowledge. A Problem-Based Learning (PBL), considered as students' deep learning approach, is a widely-adopted educational strategy designed to teach students to use their engineering knowledge to solve the real-life engineering problems. The goal of this thesis is to investigate of assessment methods for measuring the effectiveness of students' learning under a flying house design session which is a PBL teaching method. To do so, the Environment Based Design (EBD) approach is used to determine assessment criteria. Two assessment methods (i.e., Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ), Logos Comparison Task (LCT)) have been applied to two groups of students with and without EBD knowledge. Through the investigation and analysis, the results indicate a significant effect of EBD knowledge and skills on the LCT grades. However, no major effect of students' learning approach (SLA) and interaction between EBD and SLA has been detected. Similarly, no linear relationship between students' deep learning approach and higher LCT grades has been found