Designing Malleable Cyberinfastructure to Breach the Golden Barrier

Design research perspectives may have a great deal of insights to offer emergency response researchers. We consider man-made and natural disasters as events that often require rapid change to existing institutionalized technical, social, and cultural support structure—a fundamental problem for static systems. Built infrastructure such as electric power and telecommunications or emergency response systems such as fire, police, and National Guard all have static information systems that are tailored to their specific needs. These specialized systems are typical of those developed as a result of applying traditional information systems design theory. They are designed to control domain specific variables and mitigate a specific class of constraints derived from a wellarticulated environment with firm application boundaries. Therefore, typical mission-critical Information and Communication Infrastructure (ICTI) technologies empower knowledge workers with the ability to change current environmental events to ensure safety and security. Disasters create situations that are challenging for typical designs because a disaster erodes control and raises unexpected constraints during an emerging set of circumstances. The unpredictable circumstances of disasters demonstrate that current emergency response ICTI systems are ill equipped to rapidly evolve in concert to address the full scale and scope of such complex problems. A phenomenon found in the treatment of trauma victims, the Golden Trauma Time Interval, is generalized in this paper to all emergencies in order to inform designers of the next generation ICTI. This future ICTI or “Cyberinfrastructure” can provide the essential foundation necessary to dynamically adapt conventional ICTI into a configuration suitable for use during disasters. However, Cyberinfrastructure will suffice only if it can be sufficiently evolved as an Integrated Information Infrastructure (I3 ) that addresses the common sociotechnical factors in these domains. This paper describes fundamental design concepts derived from interdisciplinary theoretical constructs used to inform the creation of a framework to model “complex adaptive systems” (CAS) of which emergency response infrastructural systems and I3 are instances. In previous work, CAS was synthesized with software architecture concepts to arrive at a design approach for the electric power grid’s I3. We will present some of the foundational concepts of CAS that are useful for the future design and development of a Cyberinfrastructure. The ICTI may exist today in a raw form to accomplish the task, but further ICTI design research is required to pinpoint critical inhibitors to its evolution. Also, social, organizational, and institutional issues pertaining to this research will be highlighted as emergency response system design factors needing further consideration. For example, this discussion infers a resolution to the basic tradeoff between personal privacy rights and public safety

INDEMICS: An Interactive High-Performance Computing Framework for Data Intensive Epidemic Modeling

We describe the design and prototype implementation of Indemics (_Interactive; Epi_demic; _Simulation;)—a modeling environment utilizing high-performance computing technologies for supporting complex epidemic simulations. Indemics can support policy analysts and epidemiologists interested in planning and control of pandemics. Indemics goes beyond traditional epidemic simulations by providing a simple and powerful way to represent and analyze policy-based as well as individual-based adaptive interventions. Users can also stop the simulation at any point, assess the state of the simulated system, and add additional interventions. Indemics is available to end-users via a web-based interface. Detailed performance analysis shows that Indemics greatly enhances the capability and productivity of simulating complex intervention strategies with a marginal decrease in performance. We also demonstrate how Indemics was applied in some real case studies where complex interventions were implemented

User-centered visual analysis using a hybrid reasoning architecture for intensive care units

One problem pertaining to Intensive Care Unit information systems is that, in some cases, a very dense display of data can result. To ensure the overview and readability of the increasing volumes of data, some special features are required (e.g., data prioritization, clustering, and selection mechanisms) with the application of analytical methods (e.g., temporal data abstraction, principal component analysis, and detection of events). This paper addresses the problem of improving the integration of the visual and analytical methods applied to medical monitoring systems. We present a knowledge- and machine learning-based approach to support the knowledge discovery process with appropriate analytical and visual methods. Its potential benefit to the development of user interfaces for intelligent monitors that can assist with the detection and explanation of new, potentially threatening medical events. The proposed hybrid reasoning architecture provides an interactive graphical user interface to adjust the parameters of the analytical methods based on the users' task at hand. The action sequences performed on the graphical user interface by the user are consolidated in a dynamic knowledge base with specific hybrid reasoning that integrates symbolic and connectionist approaches. These sequences of expert knowledge acquisition can be very efficient for making easier knowledge emergence during a similar experience and positively impact the monitoring of critical situations. The provided graphical user interface incorporating a user-centered visual analysis is exploited to facilitate the natural and effective representation of clinical information for patient care

A Catalog of Reusable Design Decisions for Developing UML/MOF-based Domain-specific Modeling Languages

In model-driven development (MDD), domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) act as a communication vehicle for aligning the requirements of domain experts with the needs of software engineers. With the rise of the UML as a de facto standard, UML/MOF-based DSMLs are now widely used for MDD. This paper documents design decisions collected from 90 UML/MOF-based DSML projects. These recurring design decisions were gained, on the one hand, by performing a systematic literature review (SLR) on the development of UML/MOF-based DSMLs. Via the SLR, we retrieved 80 related DSML projects for review. On the other hand, we collected decisions from developing ten DSML projects by ourselves. The design decisions are presented in the form of reusable decision records, with each decision record corresponding to a decision point in DSML development processes. Furthermore, we also report on frequently observed (combinations of) decision options as well as on associations between options which may occur within a single decision point or between two decision points. This collection of decision-record documents targets decision makers in DSML development (e.g., DSML engineers, software architects, domain experts).Series: Technical Reports / Institute for Information Systems and New Medi

Relationship analysis : improving the systems analysis process

A significant aspect of systems analysis involves discovering and representing entities and their inter-relationships. Guidelines exist to identify entities but do not provide a rigorous and comprehensive process to explicitly capture the relationship structure of the problem domain. Whereas, other analysis techniques lightly address the relationship discovery process, Relationship Analysis is the only systematic, domain-independent analysis technique focusing exclusively on a domain\u27s relationship structure. The quality of design artifacts, such as class diagrams, and development time necessary to generate these artifacts can be improved by first representing the complete relationship structure of the problem domain. The Relationship Analysis Model is the first theory-based taxonomy to classify relationships. A rigorous evaluation was conducted, including a formal experiment comparing novice and experienced analysts with and without Relationship Analysis. It was shown that the Relationship Analysis Process based on the model does provide a fuller and richer systems analysis, resulting in improved quality of and reduced time in generating class diagrams. It also was shown that Relationship Analysis enables analysts of varying experience levels to achieve a similar level of quality of class diagrams. Relationship Analysis significantly enhances the systems analyst\u27s effectiveness, especially in the area of relationship discovery and documentation resulting in improved analysis and design artifacts

Ontology-based methodology for error detection in software design

Improving the quality of a software design with the goal of producing a high quality software product continues to grow in importance due to the costs that result from poorly designed software. It is commonly accepted that multiple design views are required in order to clearly specify the required functionality of software. There is universal agreement as to the importance of identifying inconsistencies early in the software design process, but the challenge is how to reconcile the representations of the diverse views to ensure consistency. To address the problem of inconsistencies that occur across multiple design views, this research introduces the Methodology for Objects to Agents (MOA). MOA utilizes a new ontology, the Ontology for Software Specification and Design (OSSD), as a common information model to integrate specification knowledge and design knowledge in order to facilitate the interoperability of formal requirements modeling tools and design tools, with the end goal of detecting inconsistency errors in a design. The methodology, which transforms designs represented using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) into representations written in formal agent-oriented modeling languages, integrates object-oriented concepts and agent-oriented concepts in order to take advantage of the benefits that both approaches can provide. The OSSD model is a hierarchical decomposition of software development concepts, including ontological constructs of objects, attributes, behavior, relations, states, transitions, goals, constraints, and plans. The methodology includes a consistency checking process that defines a consistency framework and an Inter-View Inconsistency Detection technique. MOA enhances software design quality by integrating multiple software design views, integrating object-oriented and agent-oriented concepts, and defining an error detection method that associates rules with ontological properties

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