Precedent-Oriented Experimenting in Designing of Software Intensive Systems

The paper presents a precedent-oriented approach to experimenting with programmable units of developer’sactivity in conceptual designing of Software Intensive Systems (SIS). The reuse of any such a unit is being implemented as atypical work of a designer in accordance with the definite technique which is previously programmed. The offered approachis coordinated with simplifying the complexity on the base of interactions of designers with the accessible experience thekernel of which consists of models of assets included into Experience Base. The simplifying is being achieved by the use ofthe specialized pseudo-code language in programming of assets for their reuse by designers.Keywords/Index Terms— conceptual designing, pseudo-code language, programming, precedent-oriented approach,software intensive systems

Army-NASA aircrew/aircraft integration program. Phase 5: A3I Man-Machine Integration Design and Analysis System (MIDAS) software concept document

This is the Software Concept Document for the Man-machine Integration Design and Analysis System (MIDAS) being developed as part of Phase V of the Army-NASA Aircrew/Aircraft Integration (A3I) Progam. The approach taken in this program since its inception in 1984 is that of incremental development with clearly defined phases. Phase 1 began in 1984 and subsequent phases have progressed at approximately 10-16 month intervals. Each phase of development consists of planning, setting requirements, preliminary design, detailed design, implementation, testing, demonstration and documentation. Phase 5 began with an off-site planning meeting in November, 1990. It is expected that Phase 5 development will be complete and ready for demonstration to invited visitors from industry, government and academia in May, 1992. This document, produced during the preliminary design period of Phase 5, is intended to record the top level design concept for MIDAS as it is currently conceived. This document has two main objectives: (1) to inform interested readers of the goals of the MIDAS Phase 5 development period, and (2) to serve as the initial version of the MIDAS design document which will be continuously updated as the design evolves. Since this document is written fairly early in the design period, many design issues still remain unresolved. Some of the unresolved issues are mentioned later in this document in the sections on specific components. Readers are cautioned that this is not a final design document and that, as the design of MIDAS matures, some of the design ideas recorded in this document will change. The final design will be documented in a detailed design document published after the demonstrations

Intelligent Support for a Computer Aided Design Optimisation Cycle

It is becoming more and more evident that  adding intelligence  to existing computer aids, such as computer aided design systems, can lead to significant improvements in the effective and reliable performance of various engineering tasks, including design optimisation. This paper presents three different intelligent modules to be applied within a computer aided design optimisation cycle to enable more intelligent and less experience-dependent design performance.

Spacelab software development and integration concepts study report, volume 1

The proposed software guidelines to be followed by the European Space Research Organization in the development of software for the Spacelab being developed for use as a payload for the space shuttle are documented. Concepts, techniques, and tools needed to assure the success of a programming project are defined as they relate to operation of the data management subsystem, support of experiments and space applications, use with ground support equipment, and for integration testing

Function-Based Computer Aided Conceptual Design Support Tool

Conceptual design is considered as the most critical and important phase of design process. It is the stage where product’s fundamental features are determined, large proportion of the lifecycle cost of the product is committed, and other major decisions are made, which have significant impact on the downstream design and related manufacturing processes. It is a knowledge intensive process where diverse knowledge and several years of experience are put together to design quality and cost effective products. Unfortunately, computer support systems for this phase are lagging behind compared to the currently available commercial computer aided design (CAD) tools for the later stage of design to reduce the designers workload and product development time. The overall goal of this research is to provide designers with computational tool that support conceptual design process. To achieve this goal a methodology that integrates systematic design approach with knowledge-based system is proposed in this thesis. Accordingly, a framework of computer based computational tool known as conceptual design support tool (CDST) is developed using the proposed methodology. The tool assists designers in performing functional modeling by providing standard vocabularies of functions in the form of function library, generate concepts stored in the database from previous designs, display the generated concepts on the morphology chart, combine the concepts and evaluate the concepts variants. Concepts from subsea processing equipment design have been collected and saved in the database. The tool also accepts new concepts from the designer through its knowledge acquisition system to be saved in the database for future use. In doing so, it is possible to integrate human creativity with data handling capabilities of computers to perform conceptual design more efficiently than solely manual design. The tool can also be used as a knowledge management system to preserve expert’s knowledge and train novice designers. The applicability of the proposed methodology and developed tool is illustrated and validated by using a case study and validation test conducted by independent evaluators

On Designing Multicore-aware Simulators for Biological Systems

The stochastic simulation of biological systems is an increasingly popular technique in bioinformatics. It often is an enlightening technique, which may however result in being computational expensive. We discuss the main opportunities to speed it up on multi-core platforms, which pose new challenges for parallelisation techniques. These opportunities are developed in two general families of solutions involving both the single simulation and a bulk of independent simulations (either replicas of derived from parameter sweep). Proposed solutions are tested on the parallelisation of the CWC simulator (Calculus of Wrapped Compartments) that is carried out according to proposed solutions by way of the FastFlow programming framework making possible fast development and efficient execution on multi-cores.Comment: 19 pages + cover pag

The Mirroring Hypothesis: Theory, Evidence and Exceptions

The mirroring hypothesis predicts that the organizational patterns of a development project (e.g. communication links, geographic collocation, team and firm co-membership) will correspond to the technical patterns of dependency in the system under development. Scholars in a range of disciplines have argued that mirroring is either necessary or a highly desirable feature of development projects, but evidence pertaining to the hypothesis is widely scattered across fields, research sites, and methodologies. In this paper, we formally define the mirroring hypothesis and review 102 empirical studies spanning three levels of organization: within a single firm, across firms, and in open community-based development projects. The hypothesis was supported in 69% of the cases. Support for the hypothesis was strongest in the within-firm sample, less strong in the across-firm sample, and relatively weak in the open collaborative sample. Based on a detailed analysis of the cases in which the mirroring hypothesis was not supported, we introduce the concept of actionable transparency as a means of achieving coordination without mirroring. We present examples from practice and describe the more complex organizational patterns that emerge when actionable transparency allows designers to 'break the mirror.'Modularity, innovation, product and process development, organization design, design structure, organizational structure, organizational ties

When Systems Engineering Meets Software Language Engineering

International audienceThe engineering of systems involves many different stakeholders, each with their own domain of expertise. Hence more and more organizations are adopting Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to allow domain experts to express solutions directly in terms of relevant domain concepts. This new trend raises new challenges about designing DSLs, evolving a set of DSLs and coordinating the use of multiple DSLs for both DSL designers and DSL users. This paper explores various dimensions of these challenges, and outlines a possible research roadmap for addressing them. The message of this paper is also to claim that if language engineering techniques to design any single (disposable) language are mature, the language engineering community needs to fundamentally change its view on software language design. We need to take the next step and adopt the perspective that a software language is, fundamentally, software too and thus the result of a composition of design decisions. These design decisions should be represented as first-class entities in the software languages workbench and it should be possible, during the language lifecycle, to add, remove and change language design decisions with limited effort to go from continuous design to continuous meta-design

Development of a Prototype Automation Simulation Scenario Generator for Air Traffic Management Software Simulations

A technique for automated development of scenarios for use in the Multi-Center Traffic Management Advisor (McTMA) software simulations is described. The resulting software is designed and implemented to automate the generation of simulation scenarios with the intent of reducing the time it currently takes using an observational approach. The software program is effective in achieving this goal. The scenarios created for use in the McTMA simulations are based on data taken from data files from the McTMA system, and were manually edited before incorporation into the simulations to ensure accuracy. Despite the software s overall favorable performance, several key software issues are identified. Proposed solutions to these issues are discussed. Future enhancements to the scenario generator software may address the limitations identified in this paper