An integrated product and process information modelling system for on-site construction

The inadequate infrastructure that exists for seamless project team communications has its roots in the problems arising from fragmentation, and the lack of effective co-ordination between stages of the construction process. The use of disparate computer-aided engineering (CAE) systems by most disciplines is one of the enduring legacies of this problem and makes information exchange between construction team members difficult and, in some cases, impossible. The importance of integrating modelling techniques with a view to creating an integrated product and process model that is applicable to all stages of a construction project's life cycle, is being recognised by the Construction Industry. However, improved methods are still needed to assist the developer in the definition of information model structures, and current modelling methods and standards are only able to provide limited assistance at various stages of the information modelling process. This research investigates the role of system integration by reviewing product and process information models, current modelling practices and modelling standards in the construction industry, and draws conclusions with similar practices from other industries, both in terms of product and process representation, and model content. It further reviews various application development tools and information system requirements to support a suitable integrated information structure, for developing an integrated product and process model for design and construction, based on concurrent engineering principles. The functional and information perspectives of the integrated model, which were represented using IDEFO and the unified modelling language (UML), provided the basis for developing a prototype hyper-integrated product and process information modelling system (HIPPY). Details of the integrated conceptual model's implementation, practical application of the prototype system, using house-building as an example, and evaluation by industry practitioners are also presented. It is concluded that the effective integration of product and process information models is a key component of the implementation of concurrent engineering in construction, and is a vital step towards providing richer information representation, better efficiency, and the flexibility to support life cycle information management during the construction stage of small to medium sized-building projects

Data Mining with Newton\u27s Method.

Capable and well-organized data mining algorithms are essential and fundamental to helpful, useful, and successful knowledge discovery in databases. We discuss several data mining algorithms including genetic algorithms (GAs). In addition, we propose a modified multivariate Newton\u27s method (NM) approach to data mining of technical data. Several strategies are employed to stabilize Newton\u27s method to pathological function behavior. NM is compared to GAs and to the simplex evolutionary operation algorithm (EVOP). We find that GAs, NM, and EVOP all perform efficiently for well-behaved global optimization functions with NM providing an exponential improvement in convergence rate. For local optimization problems, we find that GAs and EVOP do not provide the desired convergence rate, accuracy, or precision compared to NM for technical data. We find that GAs are favored for their simplicity while NM would be favored for its performance

Web Engineering for Workflow-based Applications: Models, Systems and Methodologies

This dissertation presents novel solutions for the construction of Workflow-based Web applications: The Web Engineering DSL Framework, a stakeholder-oriented Web Engineering methodology based on Domain-Specific Languages; the Workflow DSL for the efficient engineering of Web-based Workflows with strong stakeholder involvement; the Dialog DSL for the usability-oriented development of advanced Web-based dialogs; the Web Engineering Reuse Sphere enabling holistic, stakeholder-oriented reuse

Generating and auto-tuning parallel stencil codes

In this thesis, we present a software framework, Patus, which generates high performance stencil codes for different types of hardware platforms, including current multicore CPU and graphics processing unit architectures. The ultimate goals of the framework are productivity, portability (of both the code and performance), and achieving a high performance on the target platform. A stencil computation updates every grid point in a structured grid based on the values of its neighboring points. This class of computations occurs frequently in scientific and general purpose computing (e.g., in partial differential equation solvers or in image processing), justifying the focus on this kind of computation. The proposed key ingredients to achieve the goals of productivity, portability, and performance are domain specific languages (DSLs) and the auto-tuning methodology. The Patus stencil specification DSL allows the programmer to express a stencil computation in a concise way independently of hardware architecture-specific details. Thus, it increases the programmer productivity by disburdening her or him of low level programming model issues and of manually applying hardware platform-specific code optimization techniques. The use of domain specific languages also implies code reusability: once implemented, the same stencil specification can be reused on different hardware platforms, i.e., the specification code is portable across hardware architectures. Constructing the language to be geared towards a special purpose makes it amenable to more aggressive optimizations and therefore to potentially higher performance. Auto-tuning provides performance and performance portability by automated adaptation of implementation-specific parameters to the characteristics of the hardware on which the code will run. By automating the process of parameter tuning — which essentially amounts to solving an integer programming problem in which the objective function is the number representing the code's performance as a function of the parameter configuration, — the system can also be used more productively than if the programmer had to fine-tune the code manually. We show performance results for a variety of stencils, for which Patus was used to generate the corresponding implementations. The selection includes stencils taken from two real-world applications: a simulation of the temperature within the human body during hyperthermia cancer treatment and a seismic application. These examples demonstrate the framework's flexibility and ability to produce high performance code

The NASA computer science research program plan

A taxonomy of computer science is included, one state of the art of each of the major computer science categories is summarized. A functional breakdown of NASA programs under Aeronautics R and D, space R and T, and institutional support is also included. These areas were assessed against the computer science categories. Concurrent processing, highly reliable computing, and information management are identified

Temporal meta-model framework for Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) development

This thesis has developed a Temporal Meta-Model Framework for semi-automated Enterprise System Development, which can help drastically reduce the time and cost to develop, deploy and maintain Enterprise Information Systems throughout their lifecycle. It proposes that the analysis and requirements gathering can also perform the bulk of the design phase, stored and available in a suitable model which would then be capable of automated execution with the availability of a set of specific runtime components

SAGA: A project to automate the management of software production systems

The SAGA system is a software environment that is designed to support most of the software development activities that occur in a software lifecycle. The system can be configured to support specific software development applications using given programming languages, tools, and methodologies. Meta-tools are provided to ease configuration. The SAGA system consists of a small number of software components that are adapted by the meta-tools into specific tools for use in the software development application. The modules are design so that the meta-tools can construct an environment which is both integrated and flexible. The SAGA project is documented in several papers which are presented