Industrialising Software Development in Systems Integration

Compared to other disciplines, software engineering as of today is still dependent on craftsmanship of highly-skilled workers. However, with constantly increasing complexity and efforts, existing software engineering approaches appear more and more inefficient. A paradigm shift towards industrial production methods seems inevitable. Recent advances in academia and practice have lead to the availability of industrial key principles in software development as well. Specialization is represented in software product lines, standardization and systematic reuse are available with component-based development, and automation has become accessible through model-driven engineering. While each of the above is well researched in theory, only few cases of successful implementation in the industry are known. This becomes even more evident in specialized areas of software engineering such as systems integration. Today’s IT systems need to quickly adapt to new business requirements due to mergers and acquisitions and cooperations between enterprises. This certainly leads to integration efforts, i.e. joining different subsystems into a cohesive whole in order to provide new functionality. In such an environment. the application of industrial methods for software development seems even more important. Unfortunately, software development in this field is a highly complex and heterogeneous undertaking, as IT environments differ from customer to customer. In such settings, existing industrialization concepts would never break even due to one-time projects and thus insufficient economies of scale and scope. This present thesis, therefore, describes a novel approach for a more efficient implementation of prior key principles while considering the characteristics of software development for systems integration. After identifying the characteristics of the field and their affects on currently-known industrialization concepts, an organizational model for industrialized systems integration has thus been developed. It takes software product lines and adapts them in a way feasible for a systems integrator active in several business domains. The result is a three-tiered model consolidating recurring activities and reducing the efforts for individual product lines. For the implementation of component-based development, the present thesis assesses current component approaches and applies an integration metamodel to the most suitable one. This ensures a common understanding of systems integration across different product lines and thus alleviates component reuse, even across product line boundaries. The approach is furthermore aligned with the organizational model to depict in which way component-based development may be applied in industrialized systems integration. Automating software development in systems integration with model-driven engineering was found to be insufficient in its current state. The reason herefore lies in insufficient tool chains and a lack of modelling standards. As an alternative, an XML-based configuration of products within a software product line has been developed. It models a product line and its products with the help of a domain-specific language and utilizes stylesheet transformations to generate compliable artefacts. The approach has been tested for its feasibility within an exemplarily implementation following a real-world scenario. As not all aspects of industrialized systems integration could be simulated in a laboratory environment, the concept was furthermore validated during several expert interviews with industry representatives. Here, it was also possible to assess cultural and economic aspects. The thesis concludes with a detailed summary of the contributions to the field and suggests further areas of research in the context of industrialized systems integration

Gramatička evolucija tehničkih procesa

Teorija tehničkih sustava objašnjava tehničku evoluciju, konstruiranje i razvoj proizvoda kao odgovor na potrebe društva koje se mogu ostvariti tehničkim procesima. Takvo teleološko shvaćanje nalaže kao početni korak u razvoju koncepta novog proizvoda utvrđivanje tehničkog procesa kao procesa unutar kojega se sudjelovanjem tehničkoga proizvoda ostvaruju efekti potrebni za svrhovitu transformaciju operanada sukladno radnim principima na kojima se tehnički proces temelji. Cilj istraživanja u okviru izrade doktorskog rada jest kreiranje računalne podrške upravo za taj početni korak konceptualne faze razvoja proizvoda. Generiranje varijanti transformacije operanada računalnom mogu stvoriti osnovu koja će poslužiti za temeljitije razmatranje mogućnosti za realizaciju tehničkoga proizvoda. Sukladno znanstveno-istraživačkoj metodologiji prisutnoj unutar područja znanosti o konstruiranju, istraživanje u okviru ovoga rada provedeno je unutar dvije faze: teoretska faza koja obuhvaća definiranje metode za generiranje varijanti transformacije operanda temeljem poznatih radnih principa, i praktična faza koja obuhvaća razvitak računalnog alata na osnovu definirane metode do razine koja će omogućiti potvrđivanje rezultata istraživanja. Teoretska faza istraživanja zaključena je sa glavnim znanstvenim doprinosima ove disertacije: (1) definiran je formalni model tehničkog procesa, (2) definiran je formalni model sinteze tehničkih procesa temeljen na graf-gramatikama, (3) uvedena je mogućnost pretraživanja varijanti transformacije koristeći se algoritmom gramatičke evolucije [3]. Praktična faza ovoga istraživanja rezultirala je računalnom implementacijom definirane metode za generiranje varijanti transformacije operanada u okruženju za tu svrhu osmišljenog i razvijenoga računalnoga alata. Tijekom istraživanja utvrđeno je da generalizirano i sistematizirano znanje o tehničkim procesima i radnim principima unutar područja još uvijek nije dostupno u obliku dovoljno detaljne taksonomije ili ontologije za razinu koju zahtijeva definirana metoda. Iz tog razloga predložene su smjernice za graf-gramatičku formalizaciju znanja o tehničkim procesima i radnim principima (4)

Designing product-service systems for sustainability : a methodological exploration

Tese de mestrado. Engenharia de Serviços e Gestão. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Reusability in manufacturing, supported by value net and patterns approaches

The concept of manufacturing and the need or desire to create artefacts or products is very, very old, yet it is still an essential component of all modem economies. Indeed, manufacturing is one of the few ways that wealth is created. The creation or identification of good quality, sustainable product designs is fundamental to the success of any manufacturing enterprise. Increasingly, there is also a requirement for the manufacturing system which will be used to manufacture the product, to be designed (or redesigned) in parallel with the product design. Many different types of manufacturing knowledge and information will contribute to these designs. A key question therefore for manufacturing companies to address is how to make the very best use of their existing, valuable, knowledge resources. […] The research reported in this thesis examines ways of reusing existing manufacturing knowledge of many types, particularly in the area of manufacturing systems design. The successes and failures of reported reuse programmes are examined, and lessons learnt from their experiences. This research is therefore focused on identifying solutions that address both technical and non-technical requirements simultaneously, to determine ways to facilitate and increase the reuse of manufacturing knowledge in manufacturing system design. [Continues.

A framework to improve the architecture quality of software intensive systems

Over the past decade, the amount and complexity of software for almost any business sector has increased substantially. Unfortunately, the increased complexity of software in the systems to be built has often lead to a significant mismatch between the planned and the implemented products. One common problem is that system-wide quality attributes such as safety, reliability, performance, and modifiability are not sufficiently considered in software architecture design. Typically, they are addressed in an ad-hoc and unstructured fashion. Since rationales for architectural decisions are frequently missing, risks associated with those decisions can be neither identified, nor mitigated in a systematic way. Consequently, there is a high probability that the resulting software architecture fails to meet business goals and does not allow the building of an adequate system. This work presents QUADRAD, a framework for Quality-Driven Architecture Development. QUADRAD is capable of improving architecture quality for software-intensive systems in a systematic way. It supports the development of architectures that are optimized according to their essential quality requirements. Such architectures permit the building of systems that are better aligned to the principal market needs and business goals. QUADRAD is complemented by the Architecture Exploration Tool (AET), which supports architecture evaluations and helps in documenting the fundamental design decisions of an architecture. QUADRAD has been validated in three industrial projects. For each of these projects the architecture quality could be significantly increased. The results confirm the hypothesis of this work and demonstrate how critical problems in the transition from requirements to architecture design can be mitigated

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Industrial Applications: New Solutions for the New Era

This book reprints articles from the Special Issue "Industrial Applications: New Solutions for the New Age" published online in the open-access journal Machines (ISSN 2075-1702). This book consists of twelve published articles. This special edition belongs to the "Mechatronic and Intelligent Machines" section