Enhancing Workflow with a Semantic Description of Scientific Intent

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A NASA-wide approach toward cost-effective, high-quality software through reuse

NASA Langley Research Center sponsored the second Workshop on NASA Research in Software Reuse on May 5-6, 1992 at the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The workshop was hosted by the Research Triangle Institute. Participants came from the three NASA centers, four NASA contractor companies, two research institutes and the Air Force's Rome Laboratory. The purpose of the workshop was to exchange information on software reuse tool development, particularly with respect to tool needs, requirements, and effectiveness. The participants presented the software reuse activities and tools being developed and used by their individual centers and programs. These programs address a wide range of reuse issues. The group also developed a mission and goals for software reuse within NASA. This publication summarizes the presentations and the issues discussed during the workshop

Integrating life cycle assessment in model-based systems engineering

The emergence of smart products has led to the development of an increasing number of multidisciplinary systems. For the successful development of such systems, a holistic approach is necessary, such as model-based systems engineering (MBSE). It is argued that certain product development activities could be integrated and improved with MBSE, one such activity being the assessment of environmental impacts. This article presents a case study on the usage of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) on a MBSE system model. In the study a technical system is modelled with views according to the MagicGRID approach. The scope and goal of the LCA are defined by using SysML diagrams and elements. Additionally, different system variants are modelled to explore the capability of comparing LCA studies. At the end of the case study, the benefits, limitations, and shortcomings of the integration are discussed

Model Based System Engineering for the development of System on Chip

Abstract. Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) has been utilized in auto manufacturing industries, airplane manufacturing and maintenance, and factory process automation industries. These are some of the complex fields. As SoC design is a complex process and requires years of work, MBSE can reduce time, complexity, reuse, and maintenance costs. It seems a fruitful idea/decision to take MBSE into use in SoC design depending on the previously mentioned elements. System on Chip (SoC) is obtaining the interest of many big companies. Therefore, MBSE will represent a huge competitive advantage once it is taken fully into the systems engineering roles of SoC. The existence of geographically dispersed teams, complexity of systems, interdisciplinarity, personalized system description, and their integration can be enabled by MBSE. As an emerging paradigm for the systems of the 21st century, MBSE paved the way for creating successful systems (for the companies) that are end to end connected. This research focuses on making use of MBSE in SoC. The thesis will show how SoC processes can be implemented in one complete model with top to bottom approach. Firstly, the traditional systems engineering approach has been explained with its tools and examples. Secondly, the need for taking up MBSE by the systems engineers is expressed. This contains the applications, use in modern systems, and benefits of MBSE. Moreover, MBSE methodology tools, languages, and their use in SoC is illustrated with examples. As SoC development is a huge and complex process; therefore, a small component of the chip has been taken in consideration for the purpose of understanding and making of the thesis. MBSE is a model-based approach hence a language needs to be present to produce these models and that language is SysML and OPD/OPL. SysML language and MagicDraw tool is used for expressing the architecture of the system. MagicDraw supports several external evaluators for evaluation of expressions and MATLAB is one of them. With MagicDraw we can do simulations, input parameters, and analyze data by processing on it using algorithms developed in MATLAB

Provenance Map Orbiter: Interactive Exploration of Large Provenance Graphs

Provenance systems can produce enormous provenance graphs that can be used for a variety of tasks from determining the inputs to a particular process to debugging entire workflow executions or tracking difficult-to-find dependencies. Visualization can be a useful tool to sup- port such tasks, but graphs of such scale (thousands to millions of nodes) are notoriously difficult to visualize. This paper presents the Provenance Map Orbiter, a tool for interactively exploring large provenance graphs using graph summarization and semantic zoom. It presents its users with a high-level abstracted view of the graph and the ability to incrementally drill down to the details.Engineering and Applied Science

Search-based system architecture development using a holistic modeling approach

This dissertation presents an innovative approach to system architecting where search algorithms are used to explore design trade space for good architecture alternatives. Such an approach is achieved by integrating certain model construction, alternative generation, simulation, and assessment processes into a coherent and automated framework. This framework is facilitated by a holistic modeling approach that combines the capabilities of Object Process Methodology (OPM), Colored Petri Net (CPN), and feature model. The resultant holistic model can not only capture the structural, behavioral, and dynamic aspects of a system, allowing simulation and strong analysis methods to be applied, it can also specify the architectural design space. Both object-oriented analysis and design (OOA/D) and domain engineering were exploited to capture design variables and their domains and define architecture generation operations. A fully realized framework (with genetic algorithms as the search algorithm) was developed. Both the proposed framework and its suggested implementation, including the proposed holistic modeling approach and architecture alternative generation operations, are generic. They are targeted at systems that can be specified using object-oriented or process-oriented paradigm. The broad applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated on two examples. One is the configuration of reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs) under multi-objective optimization and the other is the architecture design of a manned lunar landing system for the Apollo program. The test results show that the proposed approach can cover a huge number of architecture alternatives and support the assessment of several performance measures. A set of quality results was obtained after running the optimization algorithm following the proposed framework --Abstract, page iii

Provenance-Aware CXXR

A provenance-aware computer system is one that records information about the operations it performs on data to enable it to provide an account of the process that led to a particular item of data. These systems allow users to ask questions of data, such as “What was the sequence of steps involved in its creation?”, “What other items of data were used to create it?”, or “What items of data used it during their creation?”. This work will present a study of how, and the extent to which the CXXR statistical programming software can be made aware of the provenance of the data on which it operates. CXXR is a variant of the R programming language and environment, which is an open source implementation of S. Interestingly S is notable for becoming an early pioneer of provenance-aware computing in 1988. Examples of adapting software such as CXXR for provenance-awareness are few and far between, and the idiosyncrasies of an interpreter such as CXXR—moreover the R language itself—present interesting challenges to provenance-awareness: such as receiving input from a variety of sources and complex evaluation mechanisms. Herein presented are designs for capturing and querying provenance information in such an environment, along with serialisation facilities to preserve data together with its provenance so that they may be distributed and/or subsequently restored to a CXXR session. Also presented is a method for enabling this serialised provenance information to be interoperable with other provenance-aware software. This work also looks at the movement towards making research reproducible, and considers that provenance-aware systems, and provenance-aware CXXR in particular, are well positioned to further the goal of making computational research reproducible