The P3 platform: an approach and software system for developing diagrammatic model-based methods in design research

Many issues in design and design management have been explored by building models which capture the relationships between different aspects of the problem at hand. These models require computer support to construct and analyse. However, appropriate modelling tools can be time-consuming to develop in a research environment. Reflecting upon five design research projects, this paper proposes that such projects can be facilitated by recognising the iterative and tightly-coupled nature of research and tool development, and by attempting to minimise the effort of solution prototyping within this process. Our approach is enabled by a software platform which can be rapidly configured to implement many conceivable modelling approaches. This configurability is complemented by an emerging library of modelling and analysis approaches tailored to explore design process systems. The platform-based approach enables any mix of modelling concepts to be easily created. We propose it could thus help researchers to explore a wide range of questions without being constrained to existing conventions for modelling – or for model integration

Teaching photonic integrated circuits with Jupyter notebooks : design, simulation, fabrication

At Ghent University, we have built a course curriculum on integrated photonics, and in particular silicon photonics, based on interactive Jupyter Notebooks. This has been used in short workshops, specialization courses at PhD level, as well as the M.Sc. Photonics Engineering program at Ghent University and the Free University of Brussels. The course material teaches the concepts of on-chip waveguides, basic building blocks, circuits, the design process, fabrication and measurements. The Jupyter notebook environment provides an interface where static didactic content (text, figures, movies, formulas) is mixed with Python code that the user can modify and execute, and interactive plots and widgets to explore the effect of changes in circuits or components. The Python environment supplies a host of scientific and engineering libraries, while the photonic capabilities are based on IPKISS, a commercial design framework for photonic integrated circuits by Luceda Photonics. The IPKISS framework allows scripting of layout and simulation directly from the Jupyter notebooks, so the teaching modules contain live circuit simulation, as well as integration with electromagnetic solvers. Because this is a complete design framework, students can also use it to tape out a small chip design which is fabricated through a rapid prototyping service and then measured, allowing the students to validate the actual performance of their design against the original simulation. The scripting in Jupyter notebooks also provides a self-documenting design flow, and the use of an established design tool guarantees that the acquired skills can be transferred to larger, real-world design projects

FV-RAD : a practical framework for rapid application development

Estágio realizado na OPT-Optimização e Planeamento de Transportes, S.ATese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Adaptive development and maintenance of user-centric software systems

A software system cannot be developed without considering the various facets of its environment. Stakeholders – including the users that play a central role – have their needs, expectations, and perceptions of a system. Organisational and technical aspects of the environment are constantly changing. The ability to adapt a software system and its requirements to its environment throughout its full lifecycle is of paramount importance in a constantly changing environment. The continuous involvement of users is as important as the constant evaluation of the system and the observation of evolving environments. We present a methodology for adaptive software systems development and maintenance. We draw upon a diverse range of accepted methods including participatory design, software architecture, and evolutionary design. Our focus is on user-centred software systems

Enabling High-Level Application Development for the Internet of Things

Application development in the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging because it involves dealing with a wide range of related issues such as lack of separation of concerns, and lack of high-level of abstractions to address both the large scale and heterogeneity. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the application development have to address issues that can be attributed to different life-cycles phases. when developing applications. First, the application logic has to be analyzed and then separated into a set of distributed tasks for an underlying network. Then, the tasks have to be implemented for the specific hardware. Apart from handling these issues, they have to deal with other aspects of life-cycle such as changes in application requirements and deployed devices. Several approaches have been proposed in the closely related fields of wireless sensor network, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and software engineering in general to address the above challenges. However, existing approaches only cover limited subsets of the above mentioned challenges when applied to the IoT. This paper proposes an integrated approach for addressing the above mentioned challenges. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a development methodology that separates IoT application development into different concerns and provides a conceptual framework to develop an application, (2) a development framework that implements the development methodology to support actions of stakeholders. The development framework provides a set of modeling languages to specify each development concern and abstracts the scale and heterogeneity related complexity. It integrates code generation, task-mapping, and linking techniques to provide automation. Code generation supports the application development phase by producing a programming framework that allows stakeholders to focus on the application logic, while our mapping and linking techniques together support the deployment phase by producing device-specific code to result in a distributed system collaboratively hosted by individual devices. Our evaluation based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our approach improves the productivity of stakeholders involved in the application development

The architecture of discovery net : towards grid-based discovery services

Imperial Users onl