A Product Line Systems Engineering Process for Variability Identification and Reduction

Software Product Line Engineering has attracted attention in the last two decades due to its promising capabilities to reduce costs and time to market through reuse of requirements and components. In practice, developing system level product lines in a large-scale company is not an easy task as there may be thousands of variants and multiple disciplines involved. The manual reuse of legacy system models at domain engineering to build reusable system libraries and configurations of variants to derive target products can be infeasible. To tackle this challenge, a Product Line Systems Engineering process is proposed. Specifically, the process extends research in the System Orthogonal Variability Model to support hierarchical variability modeling with formal definitions; utilizes Systems Engineering concepts and legacy system models to build the hierarchy for the variability model and to identify essential relations between variants; and finally, analyzes the identified relations to reduce the number of variation points. The process, which is automated by computational algorithms, is demonstrated through an illustrative example on generalized Rolls-Royce aircraft engine control systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of the process in the reduction of variation points, it is further applied to case studies in different engineering domains at different levels of complexity. Subject to system model availability, reduction of 14% to 40% in the number of variation points are demonstrated in the case studies.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables; submitted to the IEEE Systems Journal on 3rd June 201

Emergence of thermodynamic behavior within composite quantum systems

Entanglement within a given device provides a potential resource for quantum information processing. Entanglement between system and environment leads to decoherence (thus suppressing non-classical features within the system) but also opens up a route to robust and universal control. The latter is related to thermodynamic equilibrium, a generic behavior of bi-partite quantum systems. Fingerprints of this equilibrium behavior (including relaxation and stability) show up already far from the thermodynamic limit, where a complete solution of the underlying Schroedinger dynamics of the total system is still feasible.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in Physica

The Limitation of Intellectual Property in the Name of Competition

Intellectual property (“IP”) is often credited with providing an incentive for inventors to develop their creativity. Through IP protection, inventors can recoup their investment and make a profit. That idea, which has inspired legislators worldwide, is currently challenged in the European case law on competition. In the last twenty years, five cases have limited, in the name of competition, the possibility for firms to use IP rights acquired in conformity with applicable laws. These cases are examined in this article. I analyze the scope of the emerging jurisprudence and investigate the arguments articulated, in support of their position, by the European instances involved

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Multivariate KPI for energy management of cooling system in food industry

Within EU, the food industry is currently ranked among the energy-intensive sectors, mainly as a consequence of the cooling system shareover the total energy demand. As such, the definition of appropriate key performance indicators (KPI) for ammonia chillers can play a strategic role for the efficient monitoring of the energy performance of the cooling systems. The goal of this paper is to develop an appropriate management approach, to account for energy inefficiency of the single compressors, and to identify the specific variables driving the performance outliers. To this end, a new KPI is proposed which correlates the energy consumption and the different process variables. The construction of the new indicator was carried out by means of multivariate statistical analysis, in particular using Kernel Partial Least Square (KPLS).This method is able to evaluate the maximum correlation between dataset and energy consumption employing nonlinear regression techniques. The validity of the new KPI is discussed on a case study relevant to the cooling system of a frozen ready meals industry. The assessment of the proposed metric is one against Specific Energy Consumption (SEC) like indicator, typically used in the context of the Energy Management Systems

Context for goal-level product line derivation

Product line engineering aims at developing a family of products and facilitating the derivation of product variants from it. Context can be a main factor in determining what products to derive. Yet, there is gap in incorporating context with variability models. We advocate that, in the first place, variability originates from human intentions and choices even before software systems are constructed, and context influences variability at this intentional level before the functional one. Thus, we propose to analyze variability at an early phase of analysis adopting the intentional ontology of goal models, and studying how context can influence such variability. Below we present a classification of variation points on goal models, analyze their relation with context, and show the process of constructing and maintaining the models. Our approach is illustrated with an example of a smarthome for people with dementia problems. 1