Environments to support collaborative software engineering

With increasing globalisation of software production, widespread use of software components, and the need to maintain software systems over long periods of time, there has been a recognition that better support for collaborative working is needed by software engineers. In this paper, two approaches to developing improved system support for collaborative software engineering are described: GENESIS and OPHELIA. As both projects are moving towards industrial trials and eventual publicreleases of their systems, this exercise of comparing and contrasting our approaches has provided the basis for future collaboration between our projects particularly in carrying out comparative studies of our approaches in practical use

Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective

This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective

Towards a method for rigorous development of generic requirements patterns

We present work in progress on a method for the engineering, validation and verification of generic requirements using domain engineering and formal methods. The need to develop a generic requirement set for subsequent system instantiation is complicated by the addition of the high levels of verification demanded by safety-critical domains such as avionics. Our chosen application domain is the failure detection and management function for engine control systems: here generic requirements drive a software product line of target systems. A pilot formal specification and design exercise is undertaken on a small (twosensor) system element. This exercise has a number of aims: to support the domain analysis, to gain a view of appropriate design abstractions, for a B novice to gain experience in the B method and tools, and to evaluate the usability and utility of that method.We also present a prototype method for the production and verification of a generic requirement set in our UML-based formal notation, UML-B, and tooling developed in support. The formal verification both of the structural generic requirement set, and of a particular application, is achieved via translation to the formal specification language, B, using our U2B and ProB tools

Virtue integrated platform : holistic support for distributed ship hydrodynamic design

Ship hydrodynamic design today is often still done in a sequential approach. Tools used for the different aspects of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulation (e.g. wave resistance, cavitation, seakeeping, and manoeuvring), and even for the different levels of detail within a single aspect, are often poorly integrated. VIRTUE (the VIRtual Tank Utility in Europe) project has the objective to develop a platform that will enable various distributed CFD and design applications to be integrated so that they may operate in a unified and holistic manner. This paper presents an overview of the VIRTUE Integrated Platform (VIP), e.g. research background, objectives, current work, user requirements, system architecture, its implementation, evaluation, and current development and future work

Operational design co-ordination : an agent based approach

Operational design co-ordination has been identified as the basis for an approach to engineering design management that is more comprehensive than those that currently exist. As such, an integrated and holistic approach to operational design co-ordination has been developed that enables design to be managed in a coherent, appropriate and timely manner. Furthermore, the approach has been implemented within an agent-based software system, called the Design Co-ordination System, which has been applied to an industrial case study involving the computational design analysis of turbine blades. This application demonstrates that managing and adjusting in real-time in an operationally co-ordinated manner enables reductions in the time taken to complete the turbine blade design process to be achieved

Strange Bedfellows in the Personal Computer Industry: Technology Alliances between IBM and Apple

Until recently technological development in the personal computer industry could be characterized by the competition between two basic designs. The current dominant design in this industry is associated with the IBM and Microsoft personal computing architecture. The other version of personal computing originated in the Macintosh computer from Apple Computer Company. In recent years we also see an increasing number of alliances between IBM and Apple. Joint technological development appears to be a major and somewhat surprising objective of these alliances. This paper analyzes the technology alliances between these companies in the context of recent technological changes, focusing on the timing and the objectives of these alliances. Technology partnering between these proponents of competing basic designs are found to only materialize several years after the DOS-based design of IBM and Microsoft had become dominant. This study is of a qualitative and exploratory nature, using both a small data set and two case studies.management and organization theory ;

Data intensive scientific analysis with grid computing

At the end of September 2009, a new Italian GPS receiver for radio occultation was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Center (Sriharikota, India) on the Indian Remote Sensing OCEANSAT-2 satellite. The Italian Space Agency has established a set of Italian universities and research centers to implement the overall processing radio occultation chain. After a brief description of the adopted algorithms, which can be used to characterize the temperature, pressure and humidity, the contribution will focus on a method for automatic processing these data, based on the use of a distributed architecture. This paper aims at being a possible application of grid computing for scientific research

Current Results of the EC-sponsored Catchment Modelling (CatchMod) Cluster

To support the Water Framework Directive implementation, much research has been commissioned at both national and European levels. CatchMod is a cluster of these projects, which is focusing on the development of computational catchment models and related tools. This paper presents an overview of the results of the CatchMod cluster to dat

A generic template for FSSIM

Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use,