Digital Twin: towards the integration between System Design and RAMS assessment through the Model–Based Systems Engineering

The design of a safety-critical system requires an effective prediction of its reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS). Anticipating the RAMS analysis at the concept design helps the designer in the trade-off of the system architecture and technologies, reduces cost of product development and the time to market. This action is rather difficult, because the RAMS analysis deals with the hazard assessment of system components, whose abstraction at concept level is never simple. Therefore, to integrate the system design and RAMS assessment, a clear path to follow is required. The paper investigates how the Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) supports this task and drives the system reliability allocation, through the functional and dysfunctional analyses. The implementation of the proposed approach needs to set up the tool chain. In the industrial context it must be compatible with practices, standards and tools currently used in product development. Defining a suitable process of integration of tools used for the System Design and the Safety Engineering is a need of industry. Therefore, this task is also discussed, in this paper, dealing with some examples of industrial test case

A lightweight BPMN extension for business process-oriented requirements engineering

Process-oriented requirements engineering approaches are often required to deal with the effective adaptation of existing processes in order to easily introduce new or updated requirements. Such approaches are based on the adoption of widely used notations, such as the one introduced by the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. However, BPMN models do not convey enough information on the involved entities and how they interact with process activities, thus leading to ambiguities, as well as to incomplete and inconsistent requirements definitions. This paper proposes an approach that allows stakeholders and software analysts to easily merge and integrate behavioral and data properties in a BPMN model, so as to fully exploit the potential of BPMN without incurring into the aforementioned limitation. The proposed approach introduces a lightweight BPMN extension that specifically addresses the annotation of data properties in terms of constraints, i.e., pre- and post-conditions that the different process activities must satisfy. The visual representation of the annotated model conveys all the information required both by stakeholders, to understand and validate requirements, and by software analysts and developers, to easily map these updates to the corresponding software implementation. The presented approach is illustrated by use of two running examples, which have also been used to carry out a preliminary validation activity

Business Process Management for optimizing clinical processes: A systematic literature review

Business Process Management is a new strategy for process management that is having a major impact today. Mainly, its use is focused on the industrial, services, and business sector. However, in recent years, it has begun to apply for optimizing clinical processes. So far, no studies that evaluate its true impact on the healthcare sector have been found. This systematic review aims to assess the results of the application of Business Process Management methodology on clinical processes, analyzing whether it can become a useful tool to improve the effectiveness and quality of processes. We conducted a systematic literature review using ScienceDirect, Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, and Springer databases. After the electronic search process in different databases, 18 articles met the pre-established requirements. The findings support the use of Business Process Management as an effective methodology to optimize clinical processes. Business Process Management has proven to be a feasible and useful methodology to design and optimize clinical processes, as well as to automate tasks. However, a more comprehensive follow-up of this methodology, better technological support, and greater involvement of all the clinical staff are factors that play a key role for the development of its true potential.This work was supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government (ref. TIN2014-53067-C3-1-R) and co-financed by FEDER

Design methodologies for space systems in a System of Systems (SoS) architecture

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Dynamics of Long-Life Assets: From Technology Adaptation to Upgrading the Business Model

Knowledge management; Business information system

Spatio-temporal variability analysis of territorial resistance and resilience to risk assessment

Natural materials, such as soils, are influenced by many factors acting during their formative and evolutionary process: atmospheric agents, erosion and transport phenomena, sedimentation conditions that give soil properties a non-reducible randomness by using sophisticated survey techniques and technologies. This character is reflected not only in the spatial variability of soil properties which differ punctually, but also in their multivariate correlation as function of reciprocal distance. Cognitive enrichment, offered by the response of soils associated with their spatial variability, implies an increase in the evaluative capacity of contributing causes and potential effects in the field of failure phenomena. Stability analysis of natural slopes is well suited to stochastic treatment of the uncertainty which characterized landslide risk. In particular, the research activity has been carried out in back-analysis to a slope located in Southern Italy that was subject to repeated phenomena of hydrogeological instability - extended for several kilometers and recently reactivated - applying spatial analysis to the controlling factors and quantifying the hydrogeological susceptibility through unbiased estimators and indicators. A natural phenomenon, defined as geo-stochastic process, is indeed characterized by interacting variables leading to identifying the most critical areas affected by instability. Through a sensitivity analysis of the local variability as well as a reliability assessment of the time-based scenarios, an improvement of the forecasting content has been obtained. Moreover, the phenomenological characterization will allow to optimize the attribution of the levels of risk to the wide territory involved, supporting decision-making process for intervention priorities as well as the effective allocation of the available resources in social, environmental and economic contexts

Dynamics of Long-Life Assets: From Technology Adaptation to Upgrading the Business Model

The editors present essential methods and tools to support a holistic approach to the challenge of system upgrades and innovation in the context of high-value products and services. The approach presented here is based on three main pillars: an adaptation mechanism based on a broad understanding of system dependencies; efficient use of system knowledge through involvement of actors throughout the process; and technological solutions to enable efficient actor communication and information handling.The book provides readers with a better understanding of the factors that influence decisions, and put forward solutions to facilitate the rapid adaptation to changes in the business environment and customer needs through intelligent upgrade interventions. Further, it examines a number of sample cases from various contexts including car manufacturing, utilities, shipping and the furniture industry. The book offers a valuable resource for both academics and practitioners interested in the upgrading of capital-intensive products and services

Comparative analysis of new configurations of aircraft aimed at competitiveness, environmental compatibility and safety

This Ph.D. Thesis aims at suggesting a proper integrated and multidisciplinary design methodology to improve the current conceptual and preliminary design phases of breakthrough innovative aerospace products. The methodology, based on a Systems Engineering approach, is presented together with an envisaged toolchain, consisting of both commercial and ad-hoc developed software, integrated in a Model-Based Systems Engineering perspective. In addition, for the sake of clarity and for validation purposes, a specific case study has been selected and developed all along the document. The reference case-study is inspired to a real pre-feasibility study in which the research group of Politecnico di Torino, which the author of this Thesis belongs to, has been involved. The project aims at developing a suborbital vehicle able to perform parabolic flights for both scientific and touristic purposes. This kind of initiatives paves the way for the future hypersonic vehicles, because it allows to crucial enabling technologies to be tested and validated in relevant environment but with lower performances’ requirements. The Thesis is articulated in seven Chapters with an introduction and conclusion sections and in each Chapter a balanced mix between theoretical investigation, mathematical model development, tool selection or development and application to the selected case study is guaranteed. This document starts reporting the major reasons why an innovative design methodology should be envisaged to deal with the increasing level of complexity in the aerospace domain. In particular, in the first Chapter, a brief overview of existing or underdevelopment initiatives related to hypersonic is reported, together with the description of the different types of mission in which the new hypersonic vehicles will be exploited. Moreover, the major issues related to the infrastructures required to operate these transportation systems are summarized. As far as operations are concerned, a short section makes the readers aware of the current under-development regulatory framework. Then, the integrated multidisciplinary design methodology is presented starting from the very high level analyses up to the sizing of the different components of the transportation system. All along the document, crucial role is played by requirements, whose management can allow a complete traceability of the different design characteristics during the overall product life-cycle. Furthermore, proper algorithms allowing to move from purely qualitative to quantitative trade-offs, are presented, with a noticeable advantage in terms of traceability and reproducibility. Eventually, further improvements of both the tool-chain and the reference case studies are envisaged for future developments

Resilience The 2nd International Workshop on Modelling of Physical Economic and Social Systems for Resilience Assessment

JRC Directorate E – Space, Security and Migration has organized the 2nd international workshop on Modelling of Physical, Economic and Social Systems for Resilience Assessment in Ispra that will consist in more than ten sessions for three days of full immersion into this topic. Interest in resilience has been rising rapidly during the last twenty years, both among policy makers and academia, as a response to increasing concern about the potential effect of shocks to individuals, civil infrastructure, regions, countries and social, economic and political institutions. The objective of the workshop is to bring together the scientific community and policy makers towards developing better policies and practices incorporating the element of resilience in various fields. This workshop has been organized in close collaboration with NIST and Colorado State University who organized in Washington on 19-21 October 2016 the 1st International workshop on the same subject. This is a follow-up of several similar events in this field. The JRC already organized a higher level event, the JRC-EPSC annual conference "Building a Resilient Europe in a Globalised World" in September 2015. These workshops aimed at identifying more strategic needs and provide an outlook of future actions. In addition, the JRC organized the first plenary session during the IDRC Davos 2016 conference entitled “Implementing resilience in a world of interconnectedness and emerging challenges” in which the JRC, NIST, Rotterdam city, the Dutch authorities and researchers from Japan presented their views and best practices on resilience implementation. Such an event constitutes an excellent opportunity for positioning JRC among the top institutions in resilience modelling with the capability to influence and steer the work of this community in close collaboration with recognized institutions around the globe.JRC.E.2-Technology Innovation in Securit