Human Activity Modelling in the Specification of Operational Requirements: Work in Progress

This paper describes our experience of integrating HCI concepts and techniques into a concurrent requirements engineering process called RESCUE. We focus on the use of a model of current human activity to inform specification of a future system. We show how human activity descriptions, written using a specially designed template, can facilitate the authoring of use case descriptions to be used in the elicitation of requirements for complex socio-technical systems. We describe our experience of using descriptions of human activity, written using the template, to support specification of operational requirements for DMAN, a system to support air traffic controllers in managing the departure of aircraft from airports. We end with a discussion of lessons learnt from our experience and present some ideas for future development of work in this area

High level rule modeling language for airline crew pairing

The crew pairing problem is an airline optimization problem where a set of least costly pairings (consecutive flights to be flown by a single crew) that covers every flight in a given flight network is sought. A pairing is defined by using a very complex set of feasibility rules imposed by international and national regulatory agencies, and also by the airline itself. The cost of a pairing is also defined by using complicated rules. When an optimization engine generates a sequence of flights from a given flight network, it has to check all these feasibility rules to ensure whether the sequence forms a valid pairing. Likewise, the engine needs to calculate the cost of the pairing by using certain rules. However, the rules used for checking the feasibility and calculating the costs are usually not static. Furthermore, the airline companies carry out what-if-type analyses through testing several alternate scenarios in each planning period. Therefore, embedding the implementation of feasibility checking and cost calculation rules into the source code of the optimization engine is not a practical approach. In this work, a high level language called ARUS is introduced for describing the feasibility and cost calculation rules. A compiler for ARUS is also implemented in this work to generate a dynamic link library to be used by crew pairing optimization engines

Vision 2020: The Role and Scope of Operations Research Models

In this theme article, we summarize the broad characteristics of Vision 2020 (a document which outlines the transformation process related to evolution of India as a developed nation by 2020) as envisaged by Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. We discuss the enabling role of our discipline related to this critical national (social) transformation process. This theme article is organized in three segments. The first segment, which is drawn heavily based on the published work by Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam introduces the salient features of Vision 2020 and a road map related to realizing this national dream. The second segment sketches the evolution of operations research as a scientific discipline in the international and Indian context. The third and final segment of the article relate OR tools and techniques that can facilitate the planning and implementation of several projects / activities / policies in the overall context of Vision 2020.