A Novel Submarine Design Method - Based on technical, economical and operational factors of influence

The thesis work, with the openly published journal and conference papers, is motivated by the ambition to interact over time with the scientific community in the development of a novel coherent submarine design method to regain momentum in Swedish submarine computer aided Simulation Based Design (SBD). The work was initially stimulated by an early observation in our submarine engineering community, that the existing knowledge of naval architecture and systems theory including cost prediction and operational analysis was not coherently utilised for the design of Naval Integrated Complex System (NICS), hence the need for a coherent approach. The work is based on the idea that a coherent method works better by generating reliable information for the decision makers early in a project. The problem was to develop a user-oriented method that fully utilises existing knowledge in the submarine engineering community and reaches acceptance by submarine design engineers and the customers and recognition from the scientific community. There are four main contributions to the coherent method in this thesis. Firstly, there is an integrated domain driven design approach for a technical description of the design object, the related system cost and system effect. Secondly, the uses of a generic design object to stimulate the operational analysis simulation and from there extract tactically driven system functions and requirements. Thirdly, the use of a synthesised operational environment, i.e. a war gaming event based Monte Carlo operational analysis simulation model including tactical and behavioural rules in establishing design objects system effectiveness under diverse conditions. Fourthly, the utilisation of the combined set of tools in the coherent method provides the designer with the possibility to generate, explore and analyse and evaluate a large number of competing feasible Play-Cards and concepts in search of the best satisfying designs. The work has resulted in a parametric and concept exploration model for submarine design including a model for cost calculation. A simulation model with an event based and Monte Carlo operational analysis is supporting the systems analysis for evaluation of a complete submarine system. The coherent method with its models and methods provides an integrated computation and analysis environment for efficient work in the early phases and to develop the design objects from needs to a complete concept for further development during the preliminary design phase. The coherent method makes it possible to search for best satisfying designs in the identified design room within the design space by working with models in the functional domain, based on identified needs and deduced and designed requirements aggregated in a representation of a submarine, the Play-Card with its system functions and functional volumes. In a broader aspect, the same methodology can be adapted to handle integrated complex systems in general e.g. ships and airplanes. The methods used in the coherent method have been verified in several steps. First by the FMV/FOI development team based on control calculations of the methods based on accepted theories, the model tests and acceptance and full scale test reports. The methods have also been examined and validated by design teams at industry and research institutions. In all cases, this has led to successful results with a high compliance to verifiable values and the coherent model has been proven useful for its purpose in the early phases

Component-Based Model-Driven Software Development

Model-driven software development (MDSD) and component-based software development are both paradigms for reducing complexity and for increasing abstraction and reuse in software development. In this thesis, we aim at combining the advantages of each by introducing methods from component-based development into MDSD. In MDSD, all artefacts that describe a software system are regarded as models of the system and are treated as the central development artefacts. To obtain a system implementation from such models, they are transformed and integrated until implementation code can be generated from them. Models in MDSD can have very different forms: they can be documents, diagrams, or textual specifications defined in different modelling languages. Integrating these models of different formats and abstraction in a consistent way is a central challenge in MDSD. We propose to tackle this challenge by explicitly separating the tasks of defining model components and composing model components, which is also known as distinguishing programming-in-the-small and programming-in-the-large. That is, we promote a separation of models into models for modelling-in-the-small (models that are components) and models for modelling-in-the-large (models that describe compositions of model components). To perform such component-based modelling, we introduce two architectural styles for developing systems with component-based MDSD (CB-MDSD). For CB-MDSD, we require a universal composition technique that can handle models defined in arbitrary modelling languages. A technique that can handle arbitrary textual languages is universal invasive software composition for code fragment composition. We extend this technique to universal invasive software composition for graph fragments (U-ISC/Graph) which can handle arbitrary models, including graphical and textual ones, as components. Such components are called graph fragments, because we treat each model as a typed graph and support reuse of partial models. To put the composition technique into practice, we developed the tool Reuseware that implements U-ISC/Graph. The tool is based on the Eclipse Modelling Framework and can therefore be integrated into existing MDSD development environments based on the framework. To evaluate the applicability of CB-MDSD, we realised for each of our two architectural styles a model-driven architecture with Reuseware. The first style, which we name ModelSoC, is based on the component-based development paradigm of multi-dimensional separation of concerns. The architecture we realised with that style shows how a system that involves multiple modelling languages can be developed with CB-MDSD. The second style, which we name ModelHiC, is based on hierarchical composition. With this style, we developed abstraction and reuse support for a large modelling language for telecommunication networks that implements the Common Information Model industry standard