From Design to Production Control Through the Integration of Engineering Data Management and Workflow Management Systems

At a time when many companies are under pressure to reduce "times-to-market" the management of product information from the early stages of design through assembly to manufacture and production has become increasingly important. Similarly in the construction of high energy physics devices the collection of (often evolving) engineering data is central to the subsequent physics analysis. Traditionally in industry design engineers have employed Engineering Data Management Systems (also called Product Data Management Systems) to coordinate and control access to documented versions of product designs. However, these systems provide control only at the collaborative design level and are seldom used beyond design. Workflow management systems, on the other hand, are employed in industry to coordinate and support the more complex and repeatable work processes of the production environment. Commercial workflow products cannot support the highly dynamic activities found both in the design stages of product development and in rapidly evolving workflow definitions. The integration of Product Data Management with Workflow Management can provide support for product development from initial CAD/CAM collaborative design through to the support and optimisation of production workflow activities. This paper investigates this integration and proposes a philosophy for the support of product data throughout the full development and production lifecycle and demonstrates its usefulness in the construction of CMS detectors.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figure

Building the future: integrating building information management and environmental assessment methodologies

The demand for sustainable buildings is increasing driven in part by legislation, rising energy costs and growing environmental concerns amongst consumers. As a result clients and developers are increasingly seeking to incorporate environmental attributes into buildings and demonstrate these sustainability credentials by certifying a development using an environmental assessment methodology such as BREEAM or LEED. One of the major issues in delivering sustainable buildings is ensuring that measures incorporated into a building at design stage are translated into action during building construction. This disconnect between design and construction phases of a project often results in the need to undertake costly remedial measures to achieve a targeted sustainability rating, or the building failing the assessment. This paper suggests that by integrating BIM with Environmental Assessment Methodologies decisions made with regard to sustainability attributes at the design stage can be clearly communicated and understood by all involved in the buildings specification and construction. It introduces a conceptual framework that seeks to define the relationship between BIM and EAMs

ERIGrid Holistic Test Description for Validating Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

Smart energy solutions aim to modify and optimise the operation of existing energy infrastructure. Such cyber-physical technology must be mature before deployment to the actual infrastructure, and competitive solutions will have to be compliant to standards still under development. Achieving this technology readiness and harmonisation requires reproducible experiments and appropriately realistic testing environments. Such testbeds for multi-domain cyber-physical experiments are complex in and of themselves. This work addresses a method for the scoping and design of experiments where both testbed and solution each require detailed expertise. This empirical work first revisited present test description approaches, developed a newdescription method for cyber-physical energy systems testing, and matured it by means of user involvement. The new Holistic Test Description (HTD) method facilitates the conception, deconstruction and reproduction of complex experimental designs in the domains of cyber-physical energy systems. This work develops the background and motivation, offers a guideline and examples to the proposed approach, and summarises experience from three years of its application.This work received funding in the European Community’s Horizon 2020 Program (H2020/2014–2020) under project “ERIGrid” (Grant Agreement No. 654113)

Study of Tools Interoperability

Interoperability of tools usually refers to a combination of methods and techniques that address the problem of making a collection of tools to work together. In this study we survey different notions that are used in this context: interoperability, interaction and integration. We point out relation between these notions, and how it maps to the interoperability problem. We narrow the problem area to the tools development in academia. Tools developed in such environment have a small basis for development, documentation and maintenance. We scrutinise some of the problems and potential solutions related with tools interoperability in such environment. Moreover, we look at two tools developed in the Formal Methods and Tools group1, and analyse the use of different integration techniques

Pattern Reification as the Basis for Description-Driven Systems

One of the main factors driving object-oriented software development for information systems is the requirement for systems to be tolerant to change. To address this issue in designing systems, this paper proposes a pattern-based, object-oriented, description-driven system (DDS) architecture as an extension to the standard UML four-layer meta-model. A DDS architecture is proposed in which aspects of both static and dynamic systems behavior can be captured via descriptive models and meta-models. The proposed architecture embodies four main elements - firstly, the adoption of a multi-layered meta-modeling architecture and reflective meta-level architecture, secondly the identification of four data modeling relationships that can be made explicit such that they can be modified dynamically, thirdly the identification of five design patterns which have emerged from practice and have proved essential in providing reusable building blocks for data management, and fourthly the encoding of the structural properties of the five design patterns by means of one fundamental pattern, the Graph pattern. A practical example of this philosophy, the CRISTAL project, is used to demonstrate the use of description-driven data objects to handle system evolution.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figure

Composing Aspects at Shared Join Points

Aspect-oriented languages provide means to superimpose aspectual behavior on a given set of join points. It is possible that not just a single, but several units of aspectual behavior need to be superimposed on the same join point. Aspects that specify the superimposition of these units are said to "share" the same join point. Such shared join points may give rise to issues such as\ud determining the exact execution order and the dependencies among the aspects. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the problem, and identify a set of requirements upon mechanisms for composing aspects at shared join points. To address the identified issues, we propose a general and declarative model for defining constraints upon the possible compositions of aspects at a shared join point. Finally, by using an extended notion of join points, we show how concrete aspectoriented programming languages, particularly AspectJ and Compose*, can adopt the proposed model

Incorporating Agile with MDA Case Study: Online Polling System

Nowadays agile software development is used in greater extend but for small organizations only, whereas MDA is suitable for large organizations but yet not standardized. In this paper the pros and cons of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Extreme programming have been discussed. As both of them have some limitations and cannot be used in both large scale and small scale organizations a new architecture has been proposed. In this model it is tried to opt the advantages and important values to overcome the limitations of both the software development procedures. In support to the proposed architecture the implementation of it on Online Polling System has been discussed and all the phases of software development have been explained.Comment: 14 pages,1 Figure,1 Tabl

Pattern-based software architecture for service-oriented software systems

Service-oriented architecture is a recent conceptual framework for service-oriented software platforms. Architectures are of great importance for the evolution of software systems. We present a modelling and transformation technique for service-centric distributed software systems. Architectural configurations, expressed through hierarchical architectural patterns, form the core of a specification and transformation technique. Patterns on different levels of abstraction form transformation invariants that structure and constrain the transformation process. We explore the role that patterns can play in architecture transformations in terms of functional properties, but also non-functional quality aspects

A BASILar Approach for Building Web APIs on top of SPARQL Endpoints

The heterogeneity of methods and technologies to publish open data is still an issue to develop distributed systems on the Web. On the one hand, Web APIs, the most popular approach to offer data services, implement REST principles, which focus on addressing loose coupling and interoperability issues. On the other hand, Linked Data, available through SPARQL endpoints, focus on data integration between distributed data sources. The paper proposes BASIL, an approach to build Web APIs on top of SPARQL endpoints, in order to benefit of the advantages from both Web APIs and Linked Data approaches. Compared to similar solution, BASIL aims on minimising the learning curve for users to promote its adoption. The main feature of BASIL is a simple API that does not introduce new specifications, formalisms and technologies for users that belong to both Web APIs and Linked Data communities